Slavery and Plantation Tourism in Louisiana: Deconstructing the Romanticized Narrative of the Plantation Tours

Abstract

Former slave plantations that are now converted into tourist attractions constitute places of memory inherently associated with the memorialization of slavery in the United States. These plantation-museums are a central element of tourism in the South, as exemplified by the numerous tour-operators organizing visits of these historical sites. Louisiana offers a prime choice for anyone willing to embark on a plantation tour. “River Road,” the region following the course of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is now the hotspot for plantation tourism in Louisiana, attracting busloads of visitors. However, tourism plantations have long constructed their tours around a fantasized vision of the slave South, and many, to this day, still offer an idealized representation of that period. In recent years, others have chosen instead to focus on a more accurate interpretation of slavery that therefore deconstructs the romanticized narrative of plantation tours. In this article, I examine curatorial practices in several plantations to analyze the deconstruction of the main narrative and the more or less defined inclusion of the history of the enslaved.

Keywords

• plantation-museums
• Louisiana
• slavery
• memorialization
• tourism