Magnolia Longing: The Plantation Tour as Palimpsest

Abstract

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.

The Spatial Dimensions of White Supremacy: Reinventing the Lowcountry Plantation in the Gullah/Geechee Nation

“…And while people should be free to patronize the tourism venues of their choosing, most are unaware of the subconscious messages of their continued participation in a lie with such obviously lasting consequences. More recently, plantation tours have begun to incorporate varied aspects of the African American experience; however, the majority reference them as “workers” or “laborer,” and refer to slave quarters as “servant’s quarters” or “cottages” (Shields 2017)—glossing over the complex realities of plantation life. And none is willing to address the elephant in the room—that neither the plantation nor the Lowcountry would exist without Gullah/Geechees and their African ancestors.…”