Stephen P. Hanna

Representations and identities in tourism map spaces

Tourism maps remain underexamined in geography. Despite recent trends in critical cartography and tourism studies that redefine the relationship between space and representation, these geographic texts are rarely explored for their intertextual relationships with the spaces they claim to represent. In this article, we argue that tourism maps and other representations play an important role in the production of tourism spaces. We begin with an examination of the parallel trends in critical cartography and tourism studies and then push these intial theoretics further by integrating theories of identity, space and representation. We define tourism maps, spaces and identities as inter-related processes rather than final products. The creation of maps as processes inevitably includes the ambiguities introduced in the production of spaces and the formation of identities by changing social contexts. These ambiguities are readable in maps and they permit us, and potentially other map readers, to understand the spaces and identities of tourism in ways not fully circumscribed by a maps immediate production context and purpose. To explore this theoretical argument further we read one tourism map for the inter-related, ambiguous and therefore contested processes reproducing, but never fully fixing, tourism spaces and identities.

Methodological frameworks for the geography of organizations

Abstract In this paper, we present three methodological frameworks for the geographic study of organizations. These are situated within three meta-theoretical perspectives in human geography: spatial science, critical realism, and post-structuralism. Each framework offers a different theorization of organizations, and each prompts different research questions that can be used to guide their geographic study. The research questions we offer are general, and are pertinent to all types of organizations. To supplement the methodological contributions of this paper, we suggest how each of these frameworks might inform empirical investigations of Appalshop, a media arts organization located in Whitesburg, Kentucky.

A Slavery Museum?: Race, Memory, and Landscape in Fredericksburg, Virginia

In spring 2001, former governor Douglas Wilder announced that he might locate the United States National Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Despite some recent changes, Fredericksburgs heritage tourism landscape, as it is built and performed, reproduces a white American nationalism extolling the virtues of individualism, valor, and free enterprise. The mere potential of adding the Museum to Fredericksburgs landscape engendered intense debates about the ways the Citys cherished Colonial and Civil War pasts are remembered. In this article, I use recent literature on landscape, memory, and race to explore changes in how African-American histories are represented in and through the landscape. Then, I examine one venue for these debates—the letters to the-editor, op-ed pieces, and online reader responses published by Fredericksburgs newspaper of record, The Free Lance Star. In these texts, Museum opponents and supporters selectively deploy constructions of race, versions of Fredericksburgs past, and visions for the Citys future to support their arguments. I conclude by noting how debates over the Slavery Museum continue to inform more recent proposals to change Fredericksburgs landscape.

Memory, slavery, and plantation museums: the River Road Project

ABSTRACT Heritage tourism plays an increasingly important yet controversial role in interpreting the emotionally and politically charged memories and legacies of African enslavement. Antebellum plantation museums in the southeastern USA remain relatively underanalyzed by researchers, despite their tradition of ignoring and minimizing the contributions and struggles of the slave community. Yet, this neglect is being challenged somewhat by a growing number of plantations and counter-narrative sites that incorporate slavery into docent-led tours, promotional materials, exhibits, and preserved structures. Responding to a need for scholarship that can ferret out the nuances, complexities, and conflicts of producing and consuming heritage at these tourist sites, this special issue presents the results of a study of four plantations (Laura, Oak Alley, Houmas House, San Francisco) along Louisianas River Road. The issues editors and contributing authors address a central question: what factors, social actors, and interactions (social and spatial in nature) shape, facilitate, or even constrain the remembering of slavery at southern plantation museums, including those sites making seemingly significant progress in recovering the enslaved? River Road is a microcosm of the larger politics of reshaping southern and American heritage tourism and demonstrates the value of industry-engaged, multi-method examinations of different plantation landscapes within the same region.

Placing the enslaved at Oak Alley Plantation: narratives, spatial contexts, and the limits of surrogation

ABSTRACT As iconic landscapes of the American South and significant heritage tourism destinations, Southern plantation museums have traditionally erased slavery and the enslaved from their narratives of the antebellum past. Recently, some plantation museums, such as Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, are commemorating the enslaved within their landscapes and narratives, although often in limited and insufficient ways. In this paper, I draw on theories of symbolic excavation and commemorative surrogation to understand both the difficult memory work necessary to include the history of slavery at plantation museums and the fact that such museums or memorials act as surrogates for the lives of enslaved women and men that have been lost from our social memory. Using photographic documentation, content analysis, and textual analysis, I then examine the Slavery at Oak Alley exhibit to argue that fully assessing the efficacy of such commemorative surrogates requires that they be placed within the spatial narratives of both the plantation museum and the history of slavery more broadly.

Reading the signs: using a qualitative Geographic Information System to examine the commemoration of slavery and emancipation on historical markers in Fredericksburg, Virginia

Until recently, narratives of slavery and emancipation have been absent from, or at best marginalized within, landscapes designed to commemorate colonial, antebellum, and Civil War history in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and most other places within the United States. As many scholars, journalists, and activists argue, the erasure of slavery, Jim Crow era segregation, and other race-based discrimination from national understandings of United States’ history continues to have a large and negative impact on efforts to understand and redress racial inequality. In this article, we argue that historical markers and monuments, as both elements within and interpretations of Fredericksburg’s commemorative landscape can be used to assess the extent to which slavery and emancipation have been integrated into the town’s collective memory. Since the locations as well as the content of these markers determine which past narratives are central and which are marginal, we use a qualitative Geographic Information System to perform content and discourse analyses on markers selected by their topics and locations. This approach enables us to critically examine both the presences and absences of slavery and emancipation in Fredericksburg’s commemorative landscape.

From Celebratory Landscapes to Dark Tourism Sites? Exploring the Design of Southern Plantation Museums

Situated just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, Middleton Place Plantations and Gardens must surely rank among the most beautiful places in the Southeastern United States. These “oldest formal gardens in North America,” feature structural elements found at Versailles as well as a terraced lawn sloping down to the Ashley River. During peak season in early April, almost 1500 people come each day to gaze at the plethora of azaleas reflected in the still waters of the mill pond, or to photograph the amazing variety of wildlife that make the gardens their home.

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.

Searching for the Enslaved in the "Cradle of Democracy": Virginia's James River Plantation Websites and the Reproduction of Local Histories

The websites of plantation museums along Virginia’s James River promise visitors unique experiences based on their place within this region’s history. Previous studies of plantation websites note that the enslaved are marginalized in promotional materials featuring romanticized stories of plantation owners or the mansion’s architectural significance. Such research, however, seldom places plantation websites in the context of specific local histories. As sites of local learning, these museums assert particular ways of knowing the past that reinforce exclusionary local and regional identities. Writing enslaved African Americans out of materials promoting these commemorative landscapes makes it possible for consumers of these sites to conclude that Black lives do not belong in the James River region’s past or present. To more fully assess how the enslaved are present or absent in promotional historical narratives, we perform content and discourse analyses of twenty-seven James River plantation websites. In so doing, we determine how these plantations deploy local histories to distinguish themselves and whether, in their selective appropriation of the region’s past, they detach themselves from local histories of the enslaved.

Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument

Seth C. Bruggeman Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008, xi+260 pp., US