Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture

4. Slave Tourism and Rememory

4. Slave Tourism and Rememory If the past is a foreign country, nostalgia has made it “the foreign country with the healthiest tourist trade of all.” —David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country Each generation [of blacks] inherits an anxiety about slavery, but the more problematic the present, the higher the anxiety and the more urgent their need to attend to the past. —Fred D’Aguiar, “The Last Essay about Slavery” Since the mid-1990s, tourism theorists have identified a new trend in recreational travel. Instead of engaging the “innocent” amusements of a Disney theme park or observing the natural splendor of a mountain range or reenacting frontier life by taking a cattle-drive trip, many travelers are opting for what some scholars have identified as the “dark” side. Visitors to Dallas can retrace John F. Kennedy’s last journey, in a car identical to the one in which he was assassinated, complete with “a recorded soundtrack of clapping and cheering until, outside the school book depository, shots ring out and the car speeds to the hospital” (Barton, “Travel” 2). In Paris, tourists can take the “Princess Diana trip,” which follows her final route “through the streets of the city in a black S class Mercedez [sic] Benz, identical to that in which she died” (Simpson, “Tourism Is Taking” 4). According to tourism theorists, these visits to “black spots” (Rojek, Ways of Escape) are a form of “dark tourism” (Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism) that is steadily growing. The popularity of sites of mass destruction and atrocity (such as increased visits to concentration camps), battlefields (the Vietcong tunnel system has recently been widened to accommodate tourists), and markers of celebrity death, murder, or suicide (James Dean’s grave, Anna Nicole Smith’s residence, the club and sidewalk where River Phoenix died of a drug overdose) represents a fascination with death and destruction. The transformation of these “black spots” into “dark” tourist attractions is, for Chris Rojek, “a powerful example of the relabelling of signs to convey a more ‘leisurely’ significance and the redeployment of land use for the purposes of recreation” (Ways of Escape 170). Slave Tourism and Rememory 99 In this chapter, I consider slave tourism, an explicitly (for many blacks) nonleisurely form of travel and spectatorship that might well fit under the rubric of “dark tourism” to a “black spot.” That the words black and dark are used in these theories to invoke the sinister meanings of death and disaster with little attention to the racial (and racist) implications of such language suggests potency of the black-white dialectic in both figurative and literal terms. My critique of the “black spot” or “dark tourism” concept directly relates to the general inattention to slavery; as historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, for many, slavery possesses “neither a literal meaning nor consequence; it serves only as a potent, negative metaphor” (“Soul Murder and Slavery” 130). To promote the literal or embodied element of slavery, slave tourism references slavery as a real and meaningful anchor for African American identity. Revisiting Haile Gerima’s 1993 film Sankofa to more closely consider its tourist impulse, I also read several museum representations that use urgently referential strategies to present slavery as a literal, embodied event. I contemplate the risks and rewards of a realist approach to reveal the ways in which those different modes of representing and referencing slavery appeal to different segments of the black audience. In their representation of the slave past as insoluble, these venues provide an alternative to the predominant mode of trauma theory that defines trauma as elusive and unknowable. And, in some cases, through the cathexis of the image, these locations and Gerima’s film engender a therapeutic process for some black spectators. TheslavecastlesatElminaandCapeCoastinGhana,Gerima’sfilm Sankofa, Baltimore’s National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, and Colonial Williamsburg ’s 1994 slave auction reenactment provide spaces in which to consider the ways tourism can be used to reference the traumatic past. These sites are also opportunities to explore the implications of different modes of representing slavery, especially as it relates to addressing slavery on a therapeutic level. These locations attempt to express traumatic knowledge through a mode of representation that relies on what Toni Morrison describes in Beloved as “rememory.” As Sethe explains to her daughter, “If you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for...