Home is a central and contested emotional, imagined and physical location that is meaningful for every person. Using personal narratives and scholarly essays, this special issue works through the negotiations of history and belonging with topics from sexuality, immigrant status, ethnicity, and religion to class. The volume features personal reflections by Évelyne Trouillot, Lisa Outar, and Isis Semaj-Hall and critical essays by April Shemak, Lyneise Williams, Belinda Deneen Wallace, and Tanya L. Shields. Each contributor considers the implications of complicated homes, identities, and geographies—particularly the Caribbean and US South—and provides new shadings on this always relevant issue by juxtaposing the personal and the academic.

This article draws on the author's 2009 tour of South Carolina's Magnolia Plantation as a primary text to examine how nostalgia for the 19th-century plantation and the Lost Cause Confederacy continues to limit entangled understandings of the past. Plantation tourism reveals how participants negotiate the layers of the past and the present-bringing in new and tense forms of engagement with a dismissal of the past (and present), of consuming it, and of rewriting one's heritage. These tours' audience ranges from those haunted by the past to those who want to celebrate the ubiquitous idea of "the gallant South." The erasure and containment of the site's horror indicate how tour operators profit from redeployments of the South. The plantation's architecture, particularly the Big House, reverberates as a site of symbolic, political, and familial power. These aspects of tourism, nostalgia, and memory illuminate the palimpsestic presence of the plantation in daily life.

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