Slavery Heritage Representations, Cultural Citizenship, and Judicial Politics in America

Abstract

Former slave plantations that are currently heritage sites or plantation museumsinAmericahavebeencriticizedfortheirfrequentuseofnon inclusive representational strategies. Such strategies usually annihilate, trivialize, or marginalize the contributions of African Americans to these heritage sites and rarely include them in their master narratives. This paperarguesthatthedominantracialsentimentsoftheslavepaststillhave lingering effects on how plantation museums perceive minority groups today and that the notions of citizenship they portray are implicated in the cultural resonances emanating from that past. Using some key judicial rulingsonthestatusofAfricanAmericansinthenineteenthandtwentiethcenturies, this paper critiques the cultural contestations of citizenship evident in the visual and semiotic packaging of plantation tourism. Cultural citizenshipstudiesofferstoolstohelpusunderstandthelinkbetweenplantation museum narratives and judicial legacies of race inAmerica. This paper utilizes cultural citizenship debates to argue that American plantation heritage narratives today are rooted in the iconic m emories of race that were largely legitimized by the judicial rulings in a number of key Supreme Court cases. Discourses on cultural citizenship h elp us frame our understanding of the past; and race-based judicial cases provide an explanatory model for the dominant society’s resistance to the political rights of marginalized groups. Since such legal cases are a metonymicrepresentationofthewillofthemajority,they,inaway,expose the mind of the dominant society. Also the link between the patterns of representation evident within many slave-related heritage sites and the d iscursive impact of judicial rulings highlight the importance of cultural citizenship studies to any discussion of the racial politics of plantation museums.