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COPYRIGHT 2005 Caddo Gap Press
Introduction
In honor of Labor Day 2002, Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Blanco made an announcement that was carried by local media throughout the state publicizing the ongoing archeological research at the slave quarters site at Rosedown State Historic Site, a one-time antebellum cotton plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. Lt. Governor Blanco's announcement was her way of recognizing the labor of historical enslaved African Americans that helped found and build Louisiana's economy, marking a renewed place for historical enslaved African Americans. The Lt. Governor's announcement was an indication that Louisiana recognizes African American history as central to the state's identity and central to the history of Louisiana's plantation heritage. In this study, I will show how this proclamation is an indication of a significant postmodern transition unfolding in south Louisiana.
A remarkable pattern of slave life representation has emerged in south Louisiana. As of this writing, I have counted 25 historical sites that interpret slave life, 13 of which exhibit slave dwellings. Most of these opened with interpreted tours for visitors after 1990. (1) The significance of the relatively recent appearance of historical slave life interpretation in south Louisiana is more than a trend led by the region's tourism industry. Silenced African American slavery history is re-surfacing, along with the unearthed slave dwelling artifacts at Rosedown and the emerging slave cabin exhibits, bringing to light more stories about who we presently are as Louisianans and Americans.
In this paper, I analyze four south Louisiana historical sites and show how the appearances of the slave life exhibits at these sites are symptomatic of the region's changing identity from an exclusive melancholic European American identity to a mournful racially integrated regional identity. Slave cabin exhibits are indicative of white grief working through mourning the losses of economic and social control. The appearance of slave life exhibits at European American history museums in south Louisiana suggests that these 21st century museum workers are part of that generation able to begin letting go of their ancestors' losses and move into a mournful process of reckoning.
My research spanned from 1999 to 2003. I have been a visitor, worker, and researcher at four historical plantations in the Baton Rouge metropolitan area that have added slave dwelling structures to their landscapes. My methods included giving tours to visitors; going on tours as a visitor; walking independently among the slave dwellings; reading the tour training manuals from these sites; and interviewing the directors and docents to discuss their thoughts about slavery representation at their respective museums. (2)
Methodologically ethnographic, my field work revealed present day grieving patterns within slave life representations. These signs of grief were evident in museum workers' conversations and tour narratives that oscillated between lofty testimonies to white patriarchal plantation achievement and reverent commemorations to enslaved African Americans. I used a psychoanalytic framework, in the spirit of Britzman (1998), Eppert (2000), and Morris (2001), to analyze my field work data to identify representations of melancholia and mourning in south Louisiana.
The next section briefly examines two preconditions for the relatively recent appearance of slave dwelling exhibits: the rise of social history in American academia and the increase of historical site museums and African American history museums in the nation. The third section describes the four publicly owned historical plantations used in this study: Magnolia Mound Plantation (MMP), LSU Rural Life Museum (Rural Life), Oakley Plantation at Audubon State Historic Site (Oakley), and West Baton Rouge Museum (WBR Museum). The fourth section, Inaugurating Mourning, analyzes how the slave dwelling exhibits at the four sites represent a major paradigm shift that works to signify an emerging racially-integrated regional identity. These south Louisiana museums are cultural markers that are gradually re-arranging their long-held melancholic views of the region's European American identity in order to recognize African American identity as integral, yet distinctive, to the region's past and present social composition. The fifth section, Commemorations to Oppression or Achievement, is an analysis of the wavering meanings the slave cabin exhibits presently signify. In conclusion, I remark on the work of mourning that museum workers in south Louisiana have initiated through the emerging slave life exhibits as an evolving museum genre that affects the region's iconography and allusions.
Social Conditions for Reckoning and Reclaiming History of American Slavery
My interest in slave life representation heightened in 1996 while I was working as curator of education at the East Tennessee Historical Society (ETHS) in Knoxville, Tennessee. Two traveling exhibits came to Knoxville: "Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South" created by the Museum of the Confederacy in Virginia and the University Press of Virginia, and "Back of the Big House" created by the Library of Congress and the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I wondered how museum visitors were learning about slave life from museum exhibits. Teachers who brought their classes to ETHS to see "Before Freedom Came" explained that county schools required classes to take a field trip in honor of African American History Month. After arriving at MMP in 1999, I was impressed with the increasing numbers of Louisiana's teachers who requested exhibits and programs about slave life. I was participating in a pedagogical phenomenon unfolding at traditionally European American museums that were integrating their interpretations in order to meet the demands of current historical scholarship and rising public interest.
In this section, I briefly examine two historical circumstances that help situate the influx of slave life exhibits into south Louisiana around the turn-of-the-21st century. The first circumstance considered is the expansion of the European American historical cannon to include African American history. The second condition is the development of American history museums, especially historical sites and African American history museums.
American History Scholarship
When I spoke with the park manager at Oakley in 2002, he credited the emergence of "new social history" for increasing public interest in representations of historical enslaved African Americans at his site. He explained that bringing marginalized historical persons into interpretive focus elevates the "common man's history," and broadens interpretations of historical plantations to include slavery history.
It is this effort of repositioning marginalized enslaved residents in the interpretation of plantation history, which occurred at all four museums in this study, that signals the museums' entrance into the postmodern era. Museum workers and visitors have a new way of addressing historical plantation interpretation. This new interpretation is in accordance with Jameson's (1988) notion of postmodern phenomena, in the context of art and literature, of bringing marginalized elements into center focus and displacing dominant elements to a secondary status. The addition of slave dwellings to these landscapes restructures the physical plantations and unsettles the museums' long-standing interpretative focus on a dominant planter family and a marginalized enslaved community.
The postmodern concern, Linda Hutcheon (1989) points out, is to question entities that are accepted as natural and recognize that they are politically grounded as mere cultural constructions (p. 2). The introduction of slave dwellings at these sites sets in motion such a critical challenge to the dominant white patriarchal narratives. The addition of slave dwellings to these sites increasingly encourages the disruption of the seamless narratives of European American planters' achievements, which are subsequently made vulnerable to fracturing into conflicting and demoralizing histories about how life was lived there.
Postmodernism is creeping onto historical plantation landscapes, thereby rearranging the interpretation of a European American center and African American periphery, and revealing overlooked opportunities for African...
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