Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum by Amy E. Potter et al (review)

Authors Amy Potter, Stephen Hanna, Derek Alderman, Perry Carter, Candace Forbes Bright, David Butler, and their research team, have long been the leaders in plantation tourism research. Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum, representing the culmination of the team’s multi-year, multi-site research project, provides readers with an in-depth look at three plantation museum clusters in the southeastern United States as well as a holistic perspective on what the authors term the “plantation museum assemblage.”

In the introduction, the authors establish the rationale for their focus on southern plantation museums. “If slavery is, as Ira Berlin (2004, 1258) argues ‘ground zero for race relations,’ then plantation museums are ground zero for understanding how we have come to remember or forget the history of enslavement” (4). The authors acknowledge critical contributions to the plantation museum literature from the last two decades but cite the “piecemeal approach” of these past works that will ultimately lead to partial and incomplete changes in the plantation museum experience. The first chapter expounds upon the assertion that more meaningful changes will be based on an understanding of plantation museums as an assemblage that is comprised of various components. This framework considers not only the material spaces of diverse actors on a single plantation museum but also southern plantation museums within the historical political economy of slavery and the contemporary heritage tourism industry. The authors employ this framework throughout their discussion of fifteen plantation museums in Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

This discussion begins with the cluster located along Virginia’s James River. The authors offer a comprehensive review of their findings on individual components before considering the wider plantation assemblage and what the authors term the “visitor emergent plantation museum experience.” The authors note that plantation museums in this cluster are not that different from those examined in the literature in the early 2000s. Thus, for student readers and those new to the topic, this chapter provides a vital baseline for understanding key patterns that have been — and continue to be — seen in visitor demographics and expectations, managerial priorities and constraints, tour guide perspectives, and guided tour topics. For those readers who are well-acquainted with the literature, this chapter provides an all-too-familiar story.

The chapter on the second cluster, located in Charleston, South Carolina, clearly illustrates the barriers to meaningful engagements with the enslaved through its focus on the plantation edutainment complex. According to the authors, “site owners and managers of…three plantations — Boone Hall, Magnolia, and Middleton — designed and invested in family-friendly landscapes, material objects, narratives, and performances that appealed to a broad range of visitors and enabled them to host events, such as weddings and festivals, that may have had little to do with the history the museums purport to preserve and narrate” (126). This section highlights economic motivations that encourage visitors to engage with beautiful sites while forgetting the violent histories of slavery at those sites. Although the plantation museums in this cluster include enslavement in exhibits or on tours, the authors’ visitor data on tour participation paints a stark picture of the extent to which this information is segregated. In the case of the fourth Charleston plantation, Drayton Hall, the authors found that 89.5 percent of surveyed visitors participated in a guided house tour, while only 8.9 percent these visitors participated in the site’s African American history program.

The authors have a long history of research at sites within the final cluster along Louisiana’s River Road. While topics in this chapter have been discussed elsewhere in the literature (Butler et al. 2008, Hanna 2016), these topics are worth revisiting in the present work to understand their role in the plantation museum assemblage. Both the Charleston and River...