- Southern U.S. have seen increased plantation heritage tourism
- touring former slave plantations on which the genesis of race-based slavery took place
- plantation heritage promoters have sought to reconstitute, homogenize, and legitimize the nation's legacy of plantation slavery of an idealized version of the past
- Hampton, constructed symbol of national heritage
- symbiotic relationship between myth, ideology, identity, and nationalism is addressed
- idealized and romanticized version of portrayed plantation
- this rewriting of the nation, vis-à-vis heritage, has profound implications for understanding the (re)construction of America, its identity, and its identity, and its relationship with its internal Others
Spatial Dialectics of The Contemporary Plantation
- Lush, deep green vegetation with numerous tall pine trees adorns the entrance
- the space is a cemetery with numerous graves, many of which are unmarked and, thus, face the constant possibility of being trampled
- why is the cemetery not formally identified?
- Hampton Plantation slave quarters were once situated in and around this clearing
- ole massa mansion with regal portico (porch)
- tax-maintained mansion
- huge window at the back of the mansion to watch the slaves
- tourists bask in the glory of the architectural grandeur and the stories of the elite families, shelter themselves from their contentious history of slavery
- prosperous golden rice age
- slavery as a system is overtly trivialized and at time annihilated from the grand narrative that endorses legitimate knowledge of the nation's plantation past
- mansion, centerpiece of the park and a monument to South Carolina's glorious age of rice
- There is certainly a need for concern because these taken-for-granted grand narratives of the "other" that characterize modern-day imperialism and neocolonialism are precisely what postcolonial scholars have aimed to dismantle
- These discourses, much like the state-endorsed frame of the plantation past, not only mediate power relations but are illustrative of the nation's continual struggle with its contentious past of slavery, a past that cannot be erased and one that is part and parcel of America's identity
- There is indeed need for concern when such sites of national historical turmoil are rearticulated through harmonious, pure, romanticized narratives and are elevated to symbols of national heritage through the awarding of federal endorsed accreditations
- It is also designated a National Historic Landmark by the Secretary of the Interior, owing to (a) its possession of "exceptional value in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States," as well as (b) its "importance to all Americans"
- Plantation tourism is not an erratic incident but rather an increasingly trendy pastime for middle-aged, middle-income, well-educated, Caucasian heritage admirers
- Heritage tourism sites, such as the Hampton Plantation, are rife with images of unproblematic and uncontaminated pasts, and as products of cultural politics, these sites exhibit power dynamics and the consequences of hegemonic dominion
- Heritage sites are powerful public places that lend certain historical events an air of legitimacy and intransience
- Utilizing myth, symbol, legend, landscape, and commemoration, the nation's past is effectively fused to the present to create an imaginary sense of homogeneity and to reify a symbolic national community and national identity
- The affective elements of heritage aim to conjure sentiments through pure images of self-congratulatory depictions of nation
- Illustrative of this are the Hampton's iterative accounts of the enslaver's economic prosperity and creativity during the "golden age" of rice through the dissemination of statements such as "due to the great success of rice cultivation... South Carolina soon became extremely wealthy"
- Accordingly, contentious elements of a nation's past are obliterated in order to produce embraceable national legacies that are packaged for popular public consumption
- Heritage is, thus, les about an accurate past than a useful past, often created through conscious omission, distortion, invention and conjured through a set of faiths "nutritive not despite but owing to their flaws"
- These flaws or myths utilized to construct national legacies of contentious national pasts represent what Homi Bhabha refers to as the "writing of the nation"
- The use of myth in the writing of the nation and the construction of heritage sites, particularly those with contentious pasts, is an increasingly common way in which fundamental beliefs endorsed their alleged contribution to national unity and identity are communicated
- According to Roland Barthes, myth, as a system of communication in which a message is communicated, has a naturalizing effect that allows it to be accepted as truth; "it creates and reinforces archetypes so taken for granted, so seemingly axiomatic, that they go unchallenged"
- The manner in which social beings produce and use myth awards it a "historical reality," which over time is portrayed as the natural image of reality
- But by the same token, "myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made for
- For instance, the mythical discursive frameworks characteristic of the Hampton have annihilated the inherent connection to the system of slavery from which the American plantation emerged
- That which appears to be natural within myth is constructed and controlled by those in power; through myth, the values and opinions of those historically in power are emphasized and conveyed as universal truths
- Consequently, what is portrayed as natural is in effect an illusion of reality that is intentionally created to mask societal power structures and social tensions and to encourage society to conform to the values and opinions of those in power
- For instance, the Hampton's mythological discursive frameworks, which center on the enslavers' unproblematic economic prosperity and the virtually nonexistent or peripheral role of the enslaved, provide a "natural" interpretation concurrently escaping the contentious nature of the nation's slavery past
- This conscious annihilation, characteristics of myths, in which "human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world" are obliterated, is referred to as the depoliticization, sociopolitical societal problems are not refuted by myth but rather they are engaged in a dialog that "purifies them... makes them innocent" and awards them "a natural and eternal justification"
- For instance, the evanescent discussions of slaves at the Hampton do not negate the existence of slavery but rather acknowledge it, albeit in a manner that portrays it as a munificent system that spurred the economic apogee of the glorious rice age
- According to Barthes the depolitization process enables myth to convey complex sociopolitical problems with "blissful clarity ... clarity which is not that of an explanation but of a statement of fact
- This strategy is evident at the Hampton, whereby eminent facts entail statements that allude to the mansion as the symbol of the glorious rice age; however, little to no explanation is provided regarding the immoral means through which this wealth was attained
- It proceeds by abolishing the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident
- Central to our understanding of myth, its naturalization and depoliticization processes, is the notion of ideology as discussed by Len Masterman, who argues that myth is a "mechanism through which ideological representations come to be accepted as common-sensed"
- The ideological underpinnings of myth is not one that is imposed upon subordinate groups but one that appears "to be acceptable and even to speak to the interests of the subordinate classes"
- For instance, in the case of the Hampton, the site was represented in a manner that spoke to "the general interest" in order to "mobilize a great deal of general support"
- The overall message, thus, appeared to be suitable and inclusive of marginalized groups through its speaking of the nation as a whole as well as through its evanescent insertion of terms such as slave(s) within its metanarrative
- In light of this, myth can be viewed as a social construction of reality with ideological undercurrents that obscure societal power dynamics and obliterate social tensions owing to their potential political threat
- It is a harmonious display of essences through signs that sustain taken-for-granted societal power structures
- Hence, an examination of mythological discursive frameworks inherent in the construction and representation of national heritage sites is in effect a revelation of societal power structures and historical tensions
- In light of this, it can be argued that the prominence of accounts of the Hampton's architectural design and its exalted white inhabitants not only reveals dominant American values and beliefs but also discloses the ongoing struggle with issues of slavery and race in America
- The use of myth to assert values that privilege histories of the enslavers within public spaces is not unique to the contemporary rearticulation of the Hampton but rather can be traced back to the history of the region and to some of the first historical monuments erected in South Carolina
- South Carolina was a rice colony that symbolized the capital of southern slavery and the instigator to the confederacy. The institution of slavery in South Carolina was a blueprint of a prototype that earlier English plantation elites had established in Barbados; in fact, a number of the earliest families to partake in slave-based agriculture immigrated to Carolina from Barbados
- It is commonly acknowledged that South Carolina's economy was based on the free labor of enslaved blacks; enslaved blacks sustained an augmenting enslaver elite who gained great pleasure from their high social status, immense political power, and incredible slave-induced wealth
- The dissemination of myths that idealized the plantation past and asserted the benevolence of slavery did not manifest only in the form of public cenotaphs and monumental grounds but also in numerous other cultural arenas, particularly through popular literature
- The plantation myth further manifested within public spaces when the region turned to heritage tourism as a panacea to its economic recession
- At the Hampton, the portrayed romanticized past relies on myths to carry its nostalgic vision of essential American heritage from the annals of the golden rice age years into the present
- The establishment of an effective unity discourse is prevalent amongst heritage sites and can be attributed to the increasingly fractured nature of traditionally centered national and cultural relations within society
- The desire for unity, cohesion, and continuity characteristic of heritage sites is commonly viewed as part of the ideological undertone typical of nationalistic discourses because, like nation, heritage contains a set of shared values such as home, identity, and history
- The era of globalization might indicate that nations and national identities are irrelevant to contemporary society given the progressively borderless global flow of information, products, and social beings
- But according to David Hooson the ideological reality of nation has hardly been vanquished and, in fact, its fervor might be more present than ever
- The contemporary plantation is illustrative of efforts, in the age of globalization, to bring to light local knowledge, values, and identities that aid hosts to locate their shared meanings and experiences and the tourists to understand the portrayal of the nation
- We can surmise to this point that in the era of globalization, heritage has emerged not only as an extremely persuasive logic of nation but also as a cultural commodity that mediates the terrain of identity politics
- The commodification of the heritage tourism industry might have informed novel ways of representing history to suit the tastes of tourists and marketers, but it has also instigated the elevation of pleasant recollections and the diminution of unpleasant ones
- In framing a given part of history and elevating it to national status, heritage commodities always propose a certain preferred reading. The preferred reading at the Hampton can be interpreted as the unproblematic construction of "home" and its selected traditions invoked as an affective response describing feelings of common experiences, unity, purity, identity, and comfort
- Local groups have organized efforts to counter the dominant representations characteristic of numerous plantations in the region
- a newspaper column appropriately titled "Pulling the Cotton over Our Eyes" by Erica Widdup captures the essence of this perspective
- Through the promotion of "the plantation legend," or tradition, plantation tourism in the region has grown exponentially and has become a prevailing decoy for tourists
- The overall argument is that the representation of the contemporary plantation renders the institution of slavery and those that were enslaved under it a peripheral role
- Some may rightfully claim that such reproductions are not authentic and in face there have been numerous oppositions to the manner in which slavery has been incorporated with historic narratives
- The issue at hand as presented in this essay is much broader than what has been captured. For instance, the elementary educational system and its reluctance to incorporate slavery is one of the key factors underpinning the representation of slavery
- There are therefore a few efforts by social groups to combat the unresolved ideological tensions characteristic of slavery-related leisure spaces and the educational system
- Utilizing the Hampton as an example, this essay highlights the ways in which heritage sites are rooted in a specific dominant discursive and taxonomic regime of history
- Within heritage sites, exhibition, collection, and dissemination of information are all shaped by desires to systematize, document, and control knowledge, as well as the wish to annihilate all litigious knowledges of the portrayed past
- There are certainly tensions enmeshed in the construction and representation of the plantation as national heritage tensions that are similar to those described by Stuart Hall
- This conflation of the present and past, characteristic of the heritage tourism industry, resonates well with what Homi Bhabba has called the double session of nation that depends on an impossible logic of two simultaneous trajectories of time--one that suggests that the nature is progressive, futuristic, and developing, and one that proposes that the nation has never changed
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