Perry L. Carter

Coloured Places and Pigmented Holidays: Racialized Leisure Travel

Abstract This paper deals with race, space and leisure travel. It enquires into the differences between African-American and White travel behaviour while challenging existing theoretical explanations for these differences. This work aims to extend previous research on racialized leisure through utilizing a multi-method, multiple data sources approach to illustrate and then elucidate racial differences in behaviour. The findings of the study suggest that racialization of space is the primary factor influencing African-American travel behaviour.

Imagining Plantations: Slavery, Dominant Narratives, and the Foreign Born

This article examines the responses of over 1000 tourists to an exit survey at Laura Plantation, a tourist museum site located outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. Using Critical Race Theory, we evaluate visitor interest in slavery at the plantation compared to other, more dominant narratives commonly associated with promoting plantation history throughout the U.S. South. By separating the respondents on the basis of race and country of origin, we examined the relative importance of different narratives between these various socio-demographic groups. Findings from some white visitors were not surprising; they out-ranked other visitors groups in their interest in dominant narratives other than slaves. However, the responses from sub-groups of black and foreign born visitors were surprising in that the foreign born group was most interested in slavery at the plantation, even over that of some blacks.

Commemorative Surrogation and the American South's Changing Heritage Landscape

Abstract The past two decades have witnessed momentous changes on the American Souths heritage landscape. First, and most dramatically, ascendant civil rights museums have established themselves as bona fide heritage attractions. Second, and more subtly, a nascent movement on the part of plantation house museums is afoot to engage with the lives and labour of enslaved African Americans. The two trends are interrelated and the result is a regional heritage landscape that is more attuned to the dynamics of racial oppression than at any time in the past. Geographers and other tourism researchers have begun to document and analyse these changes, seeking to better understand the motives and implications that are reworking the regions heritage scene. The task remains, however, to develop a more nuanced understanding of audience reactions to the evolving content of southern heritage tourism. Drawn from two extent surveys of visitors to civil rights museums and a plantation museum, this article uses the concept of commemorative surrogation to interpret audience evaluations in order to better understand visitors’ assessment of the changing landscape of southern heritage tourism. Results of the analysis suggest that whereas concerns over deficient surrogation are held by visitors at both civil rights and plantation museums, charges of excessive surrogation are limited to civil rights museums. The implication for the cultural landscape is a potentially revived, searching assessment of the regions past.

The House That Story Built: The Place of Slavery in Plantation Museum Narratives

This article examines the characteristics and opinions of tourists visiting Laura Plantation Museum in southern Louisiana, paying close attention to their interest in slavery relative to other narrative themes presented at the site. Laura is noted for its “big house” as well as its remaining slave quarters, but museums are built as much around narratives as they are around artifacts. Museums tell a story that they hope audiences will want to consume. Envisioned as an audience study, this research examines data gathered from surveys and interviews conducted at Laura and uses the conceptual framework of “narrativized worlds” to gain an understanding of how visitors, especially African Americans, interpret and react to the representation of antebellum life offered by the museums managers and docents.

Geography, Race, and Quantification

This article reviews how race, quantification, and raced quantification have been used and written about in geography. Its two primary arguments are that race should be more central in the discipline and that a reluctance to address ontological and epistemological issues has left quantitative geography methodologically impoverished. These two issues merge in an examination of two cases where race is employed as a variable in quantitative models. The critique of these cases is not meant as a condemnation of quantitative geography but as an instructive example on which to construct a critical quantitative geography. The article ends by stressing the importance of quantification in geography and by presenting exemplars of race-critical quantification.

The Entwined Spaces of ‘Race’, Sex and Gender

The following papers explore how the racial and the sexual are often experienced spatially. While geographers can be said to occupy themselves thoughtfully in consideration of places in space, the praxis of such understanding are too often circumscribed by the strictures of an organic tree of knowledge metaphor, whose branches of inquiry are fixed in contraposition to one another. The most egregious problematic arising from this praxis of understanding is that academic exploration is perpetually routed along single lineages of intellectual inquiry— i.e. what do ‘race’, sex and place have to do with each other? Inchoate conversations are alternative modes of inquiry which allow multiple points of ingress into a field of study which often lead to novel engagements with the subject matter. This special collection means to highlight the inherent value of inchoate discussions by tightly braiding racial, sexual and spatial branches of the metaphorical tree so as to draw them into dialogue in ways not otherwise figuratively possible. The energy liberated by destabilizing the categorical logic of ‘race’, sex and space can be harnessed to draw place(s) and our understandings of their particularities into relief. For instance, when one acknowledges that woman, a type of embodiment, is antecedent to a conceptualization and delineation of the category ‘woman’, then the possibility emerges for a discussion of how ‘woman’ materializes through the spontaneous bodily performances of racialized identities at points of geographic specificity on the ground. In this instance, layers of meaning over-determine the categorical label ‘woman’, effectively limiting discussion about identity: how one becomes a body in space, coded as one discrete sex or another, one discrete ‘race’ or another. The use of discourse proposed here as an analytical starting point allows a re-reading of ‘woman’ as the trace of conglomerated mimetic acts within contingencies that stabilize places as particular by codifying boundaries between raced and emplaced identities. Places are stabilized through repetitions of these mimetic acts, by the work of bodies acting in space. ‘Races’, then, can be assumed to be sexed and gendered bodies who literally take place(s) on the surface of the earth at any point in time. The papers by Margath Walker, Meredith Raimondo, Jamie Winders, John Paul Jones III and Michael Higgins and Catherine Nash in this issue of Gender, Place, and Culture exfoliate the imbricated layers of racialized sexual/sexualized racial discourses about spaces and in the process denaturalize our understanding of

Urban landscape as mirror of ethnicity: trees of the South Plains

The literatures on urban forestry, environmental justice, and Marxist urban political ecology are considered through empirical attention to the localized racial and ethnic politics which spatially differentiate urban socio-natural landscapes. In the American Southwest, urban landscapes reflect a history in which Anglo Whites were able to distance themselves from spaces of production while gaining access to superior residences and environmental amenities in spaces of reproduction; ethnoracially marginalized Others were treated as necessary yet disfavored populations, thus constituting a segregated mode of production. In this study, we investigate the association between tree canopy cover and the location of urban ethnic minority populations with a focus on the arid Southern High Plains city of Lubbock, Texas. Using data from color infrared aerial photography and block-group demographic indicators from the 2010 US Census, we analyze the city’s arboreal landscape with a mix of methods—hierarchical regression, archival research, and field observation. Results confirm that a lack of tree cover in minority neighborhoods is a symptom of broader environmental inequalities in which contemporary segregation patterns reflect a history of residential and land-use zoning with the socio-natural relations of planting and sustaining urban trees.

Social Representational Communities and the Imagined Antebellum South

ABSTRACT Tourists come to museums with varied expectations and leave appreciating different aspects of their presentations. Thus, tourists/audiences are primed to see, hear, and experience certain representations and narratives when they enter museums. This is particularly so with plantation museums. Most Americans possess at the very least a vague sense of the antebellum South. They have a vague sense of a time and of a place populated by wealthy and esteemed plantation owners and their Black enslaved labor. We use, as our raw material, visitors’ responses to the question: “What is your level of interest in ...,” ten topics related to plantations’ presentations. This question was asked of visitors returning from tours at three plantation museums. Specifically, all three differ in their presentation of enslavement and as so, have been selected to represent the spectrum of plantation museums in regards to presentation of slavery and enslaved labor. It is expected that the differences in presentations at the three sites reflect differences in plantation audiences. To this effect, plantation audiences are mapped and viewed through the framework of social representation theory in an attempt to discern social representation communities using visitors’ levels of interest in topics/items presented on plantation tours at sites. Disregarding incidental cultural tourists, we found there to be basically two social representations that visitors to these three plantation museums hold: a nostalgic social representation and a Janus social representation.

Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives

ABSTRACT Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.