On the political utterances of plantation tourists: vocalizing the memory of slavery on River Road

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

“…The question implies an extensive study of visitors' typology and expectations when touring a plantation site. Some scholars have started to discuss this question, by trying to determine who the typical visitors are and how they may very well influence the content of the plantation tour itself (see Bright and Carter, 2016;Alderman and Modlin, 2016). Foreign tourists, especially Europeans, for example, tend to expect a significant discussion on slavery when they visit a plantation, but they also represent only a small portion of the patronage.…”

A more perfect union? The place of Black lives in presidential plantation sites

“…This inequality is not just about whether docents talk about the planter-class more than enslaved people, but also the unevenness in how tourists are encouraged to connect with these historical groups emotionally. (p. 15) Although plantation museum management and guides have tended to "transmit a message of southern White aristocratic privilege" (Bright et al, 2019: 4), visitors are active co-constructors of heritage destinations and the meanings assigned to the past at these sites (Alderman and Modlin, 2016). As stated above, visitors bring cognitive frameworks formed within narrativized worlds that they use to interpret and internalize what they hear and feel on tours.…”

“…In addition to the work of Eichstedt and Small (2002) that drew attention to museum practices erasing or marginalizing enslavement, other scholarship details the different aspects and actors that impede or enhance how the lives of those once enslaved on these plantations are made present. These include research on the roles of guides (Nelson, 2020; Potter, 2016), visitors (Alderman and Modlin, 2016; Bright and Carter, 2018; Buzinde and Santos, 2009), exhibits and landscapes (Hanna, 2016), management (Bright et al, 2019), and local Black and descendant communities (Jackson, 2012; National Summit on Teaching Slavery, 2018).…”

Lasting Impressions: Ethnic Food Tour Guides and Body Work in Southwestern Sydney

“…In this next section, we shift from the guides' smiling mouth and the eating tourist mouth towards a different form of orality: the guides' voice (Blackman, ). We call the section the tourist's ear as a counterpoint to the highly influential concept of the tourist gaze, first coined by John Urry () to explain power relations in sight‐seeing, to examine tourism as an ‘aural encounter’ (Alderman and Arnold Modlin Jr., ). Researchers on tour guiding see storytelling and information‐giving (Cohen, ) as core activities but despite a turn to performance in tourism studies (Edensor, ), the bodily and vocal performance of guides have been neglected.…”

“…For example, Kiran Mirchandani () shows how Indian call centre workers use their voices to transmit a sense of the ‘bodily disposition’ of the ideal deferent service worker, westernised and empathetic, against a backdrop of racism. Derek Alderman and E. Arnold Modlin Jr. () highlight how the race politics of voices affects tourists' ability to listen to anti‐racist history in slave planation museums. This research does not, however, attend to the sonic materiality of voice.…”