Defetishizing the Plantation: African Americans in the Memorialized South

Abstract

Plantationmuseumswould appear to be natural sites in which to learn about the lives of enslaved Africans and African-Americans in the United States. Yet, at the numerous restored plantations that dot the states of the former Confederacy, places with regal sounding names such as Woodlawn, Magnolia, Stratford, Oak Alley, Berkeley, Monmouth, and Belle Grove, the word “slave” is rarely, if ever, uttered. If the enslaved are mentioned they are often referred to as “servants.” Most of the narratives presented at these Taraesque (as in Gone with the Wind) sites are not stories of the enslaved laborers that made the plantation economy possible but rather they are “big house” stories, stories of the white master’s home, wealth, possessions, and worldview. This racial erasure has been well documented by many scholars in the humanities and social sciences, including geographers.2 Marx describes a commodity fetish as occurring when the link between labor and the product of labor has been broken—when humanwrought objects appear to come from nowhere.3 Just as we seldom give thought as to how the things we consume come to us today, the products of the American plantation—sugar, cotton, indigo, etc.—were consumed outside of the South with little thought as to how they were produced. They seemly appeared in markets and shops ex nihilo.4 This disconnect is highlighted by the campaign of 18th century abolitionists to make the link between sugar and those who toiled to produce it explicit. By 1792 as many as 400,000 Britons had discontinued purchasing sugar and rum imported from slave plantations in the Caribbean.5 Plantationmuseums are a peculiar type of fetish commodity. They are sites that capitalize the plantation by using it as a stage for the selling