Epilogue

In 2002, a blazing fire engulfed the Tezcuco plantation house on the outskirts of Burnside, Louisiana. Built in 1855, Tezcuco was one of South Louisiana's many sugarcane plantations in the "River Road" area. Although lacking the grandeur of Oak Alley and Nottaway, or the unique cultural history of the Laura plantation, Tezcuco was equally implicated in antebellum slavery. After undergoing significant refurbishment in the 1980s, Tezcuco joined other River Road plantations (and antebellum plantations in general) in the business of providing guided tours, bed and breakfast accommodations, and wedding functions for the burgeoning plantation tourism market. In the early 1990s, Tezcuco set itself apart from other plantations when area native, Kathe Hambricke, opened the River Road African American Museum in an empty room in one of Tezcuco's outbuildings. Despite her resolve never to return to the South, she came back in 1991 to help run her family's business.

Upon her return Hambricke began touring local plantations. She quickly discovered that the history of African Americans was not presented. Hambricke began to lament the absence of slavery in dominant plantation narratives, and the ways that African Americans viewed plantations as terra non grata. To remedy the perceived shortcoming of those tours, Hambricke decided to address the issue herself. With Tezcuco's permission, Hambricke created a one-room museum and filled it with artifacts associated with the daily lives of slaves, including tools, musical instruments, and shackles. While providing information about the daily lives of the enslaved, the museum's major accomplishment was to provide a spatial-historical context for the cultural institutions and traditions of the African-American communities that grew out of slavery. Hambricke's museum, and those like it, provided an alternative narrative to the hegemonic, white-centric representations of plantation history that, in various ways, downplay or omit the harsh realities of enslavement that typified Louisiana sugar plantations.

The development of grassroots museums that critique traditional representations of plantation life, like the River Road African American Museum, parallel academic efforts in the social sciences and humanities to analyze, theoretically and empirically, the historical and contemporary representations of race, memory, and identity. The increasing importance of culture and heritage as a leisure activity and source of economic development in the 1990s raised the level of scholarly awareness about plantation tourism and the industry's failure to address the role of slavery in plantation life. This growing interest resulted in an outpouring of scholarship ranging from books and articles, many of which are cited by the authors contributing to this special issue, to entire conferences and symposia. Indeed, the papers in this issue are the result of sessions organized by Derek Alderman and Arnold Modlin for the 2007 meeting of the Association for the Study of African American History and Life in Charlotte, North Carolina.

As a group, the papers in this issue broadly develop several themes concerning the way in which slavery is presently depicted and remembered. The first of these themes concerns the historical reasons for why the contemporary remembering of antebellum life so often excludes meaningful discussions of slavery. It is generally accepted that as the "authors" of post-bellum identity, white southerners, particularly those sympathetic to Confederate ideology, strategically excluded accounts critical of slavery. How has that conception of the South, decades in the making, interfered with the implementation of more accurate and diverse narratives? Another important theme involves interrogating the ways that slavery is made present. In other words, how is slavery transformed from historical fact (aggregate numbers, economic value, or material output) into a narrative designed to inform, educate (or mis-educate) a tourist. Finally, the contributors to this special issue considered the sites where the remembering or commemoration of slavery takes place. Whether antebellum plantations or newly constructed, decontexualized museums, a host of issues are at play in the remembering of slavery. For example, how do the contemporary sites deal with issues of authenticity of architecture and artifacts given incomplete records of daily life on particular plantations? In addition, how do these sites deal with outside demands for more inclusive narratives? Also, what is the relationship between the site itself and the larger...