Local Color
The Southern Plantation in Popular Culture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12130611 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jessica Adams (corresponding author), Jessica L Adams (0000-0002-4872-9218, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Issue | 42 |
| Pages | 163-163 |
| Publication date | 1999-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cultural Critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0882-4371 • E-ISSN: 1460-2458 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1354595 |
| OpenAlex | W2330095513 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
In gift shop at San Francisco plantation, outside small town of Reserve, Louisiana, one finds usual selection of pralines, postcards, and trinkets bearing images of Confederate flag. In addition, on counter immediately next to cash register, like candy and tabloids at supermarket, is a display of small plastic figures labeled Black People. Like plantation owners of days, tourists can purchase blacks to take home; these are easily transportable, and suitable for display in curio cabinets. Choices include a little boy eating a watermelon, and a woman wearing a headrag apparently engaged in animated conversation. These objects are among rare images of African-Americans that tourist is likely to encounter at San Francisco, which, like many other plantations along Mississippi River, has been transformed from site of an economy based on slave labor to a popular tourist site from which issues of slavery, if not racism, have been largely excised. Some discussion of socioeconomic functions of pre-Civil War plantations, which one might expect given fact that these attractions ground their appeal in claims of historical significance, is absent; instead, a vision of plantation as an antebellum home, an elegant reminder of the way things were, is substituted. The plantation is compelling as tourist attraction not so much because of what it actually was, an institution crucial to nation's agricultural production powered by slavery, or what it represents, impetus for a rebellion that threatened to put an end to United States. Rather, plantation is compelling today because, as a site of spectacular failure, it has
Art · Geography · Local color · Visual arts · American Environmental and Regional History · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Forestry
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Counter-narratives of slavery in the Deep South
She goes into character as the lady of the house
Labor History Bibliography, 1999
Who are they? Visitors to Louisiana's River Road plantations
Memory, slavery, and plantation museums
Placing the enslaved at Oak Alley Plantation
| Citations per year | 0.27 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2000 - 2020 (21) |
| Highly cited | No |