Journal of Heritage Tourism ISSN: 1743-873X (Print) 1747-6631 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjht20 On the political utterances of plantation tourists: vocalizing the memory of slavery on River Road Derek H. Alderman & E. Arnold Modlin Jr. To cite this article: Derek H. Alderman & E. Arnold Modlin Jr. (2015): On the political utterances of plantation tourists: vocalizing the memory of slavery on River Road, Journal of Heritage Tourism, DOI: 10.1080/1743873X.2015.1100623 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2015.1100623 Published online: 05 Nov 2015. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjht20 Download by: [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] Date: 06 November 2015, At: 11:14 JOURNAL OF HERITAGE TOURISM, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2015.1100623 On the political utterances of plantation tourists: vocalizing the memory of slavery on River Road Derek H. Aldermana and E. Arnold Modlin Jr.b Department of Geography, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA; bDepartment of History and Interdisciplinary Studies, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, VA, USA Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 a ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Within the study of southern plantation house museums, the cultural power that tourists exercise in interpreting, reacting to, and even shaping historical narratives has received limited attention. The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the agency of visitors at plantation museums, paying particular attention to their verbal expressions as they respond to the depiction of slavery on guided tours. Spoken words, questions, and conversations of plantation tourists are not unproblematic transmissions of information but represent “political utterances” that play a crucial role in the constitution and mediation of the process of remembering (or forgetting) the enslaved. We consider the importance of tourist voice and outline two analytical settings for studying the political utterances of plantation visitors – the vocalizing of interpretative communities in post-tour or exit interviews and docent reaction to on-tour comments and questions posed by visitors. Drawing evidence from interviews with visitors and docents at four tourist plantation along the River Road District, we demonstrate the diversity and impact of the political utterances of tourists, and how these vocalizations of memory can possibly lead to greater changes in the way in which slavery is dealt with and remembered at southern plantation museums. Received 10 January 2015 Accepted 20 May 2015 KEYWORDS Docents; slavery; plantation; tourist agency; political utterance; social memory Introduction As a social memory process, remembering the past at southern plantation house museums involves both staff members and the touring public. For well over a decade, these museum sites and the staff members who work at them have received growing scholarly attention, with that research centering on how the traumatic history of slavery is made invisible or romanticized at these heritage sites by docents, marketers, and managers. The critical focus on museum staff is appropriate due to the authority they often have over shaping how we remember the history of the antebellum Southeast and race relations in the United States. However, this authority is not totalizing and tourists are not simply unquestioning, passive recipients in the process. In the words of Buzinde and Santos (2009, p. 440): The symbiotic relationship between slave heritage sites and tourists, much like most historical sites, is undoubtedly characterized by dialogism whereby, the former constructs a preferred reading of a site while the latter brings varying socio-cultural experiences to bear on the process of interpreting the preferred reading. Regardless of the narrative control wielded at southern plantation museums, each visitor has some degree of individual agency in how he or she will internalize the historical narrative communicated through the museum’s docent-led tours, artifact displays, and promotional materials such as CONTACT Derek H. Alderman © 2015 Taylor & Francis dalderma@utk.edu Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 2 D. H. ALDERMAN AND E. A. MODLIN JR. brochures and web sites. Yet, the cultural power that tourists exercise in interpreting, reacting to, and even shaping these historical narratives, especially those involving slavery, has received limited attention among scholars studying plantation museums. For most visitors, touring a museum is a choice and many tourists do so in active and engaging ways. Tourists talk while taking tours and talk even more about what they remembered or learned afterwards. While touring a museum, they ask questions, make comments, and converse with guides and other tourists. Even quiet tourists listen to the things said by others and read signs and exhibits with information, connecting what they learn to what they already know and believe about the past. Indeed, many tourists arrive at a museum with views of history that they actively carry onto the tour. What they see and hear might challenge them to adjust these viewpoints or reaffirm the ideas they already have. When visitors disagree or do not understand a specific point presented at a museum, they might ignore guided narrations, devise self-guided routes, or declare their dissatisfaction or alternative visions of the past to a docent (Schumann, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to advance, conceptually and empirically, our understanding of the cultural agency of visitors at southern plantation museums. We argue, along with a growing number of scholars in the tourism and public memory literatures, that tourists are active co-constructors of heritage destinations and the meanings assigned to the representation and performance of the past at these sites (Alderman, 2002; Buzinde, Manuel-Navarrete, Yoo, & Morais, 2010). Recently, Schumann (2015) has called on tourism scholars, especially those studying plantation museums, to view heritage landscapes in terms of “cooperative animation”, recognizing that the bringing to life of particular pasts is an open, relational process that involves not just tour guides but also tourists as well as restored landscapes and artifacts. While tourists can cooperate in the animation of plantation museums in many ways, we are especially sensitive to their verbal expressions, both during and after guided tours of the plantation mansion or “Big House”. From our perspective, comments, questions, and conversations from tourists are not unproblematic transmissions of information. Rather, the spoken words of tourists represent “political utterances” that play a crucial role in the cultural political constitution and mediation of the southern plantation museum as a place for coming to terms with the history of enslavement or continuing to allow the trauma of slavery to slip into obscurity. Paying closer attention to how tourists contribute to vocalization of memory at plantation museums opens up the possibility of understanding how the public remembers and connects to the history of slavery, while also exposing potential ways to develop more complete and socially just practices for remembering the enslaved. Two analytical settings are explored in this paper. First, we consider how tourists express their feelings in exit interviews conducted after guided plantation tours, recognizing that the interview is more than a means of collecting data on visitor characteristics, satisfaction, and market segmentation. In the words of Denzin (2001), the interview represents a “dialogic conversation”, an active site “where meaning is created and performed”. In participating in interviews, tourists vocalize their membership in a range of “interpretive communities” that reveal the diversity of political perspectives that they have about the portrayal of slavery and their vision of the plantation. Second, we consider the reactions of docents to questions and comments made by tourists during tours and the dialogical capacity of these utterances to influence – positive and negative – docents and their decisions to incorporate the enslaved within the narration of plantation history. In studying the politics of tourists’ voices, evidence is drawn from interviews with docents and visitors collected at four plantations along Louisiana’s famous River Road Plantation District – Laura, San Francisco, Oak Alley, and Houmas House. The introductory essay in this special issue by Alderman, Butler, and Hanna provides a full description of the scope and methods employed by the River Road research team, but a number of methodological details specific to this project are worth noting. Each of the four plantations offers a docent-led tour of a plantation mansion or “Big House”, although the tour at Laura concludes by allow tourists to visit two slave cabins. The amount and manner to which slavery is discussed on these tours varies from plantation to plantation, Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 JOURNAL OF HERITAGE TOURISM 3 docent to docent, even tour to tour. It is difficult to generalize, but the remembering of the enslaved by docents appears to occur most often at Laura and Oak Alley Plantations and less so at San Francisco and Houmas House. To gain insight into the diversity of tourist utterances about slavery, we analyzed 250 exit interviews conducted with visitors to River Road plantations in March of 2013. Tourists were asked to describe their opinion of the plantation tour, what they remembered, what they liked (disliked), their feelings about the treatment of slavery, and what general images they associate with the word “plantation”. Interviews were designed to take only 5–10 minutes, which limited our ability to probe the theme of slavery as deeply as one might like. Nonetheless, tourists’ interpretations of their experiences at plantations were often critical and opinionated. To gain insight into how the verbal questions and comments of tourists can alter the narrative and political arc of guided tours, we analyzed interviews with 28 docents held at the River Road plantations in June of 2013. Docents were specifically asked about the types of questions they receive from visitors, particularly those that deal with slavery, and how they handle these verbal expressions and incorporate them into their own vocalizations of memory on tours. Transcribed interviews with tourists and docents were searched by keyword to identify narrative themes and tensions in the way the memory of slavery is vocalized. Keywords included “slavery”, “slave”, “enslaved”, “black”, “African”, “African-American”, and “servant” (often a euphemistic synonym for slaves). Before presenting results from River Road, we review key points in the published literature about the power of words and verbal expression within plantation museums. Vocalizing memory at plantations museums A textual approach to heritage, with its emphasis on the critical reading and writing of symbolic messages about the past, has long been popular in the tourism literature, as it has been within the broader fields of cultural geography and social memory studies (Alderman, 2010; Dwyer & Alderman, 2008; Hannam & Knox, 2005). The textual metaphor runs the risk of privileging the visual aspects of the landscape over its aural and other dimensions. Yet, narratives can be spoken and heard as well as written and read. Speech acts are cultural performances that work to constitute and claim landscapes as well as narrate the identity and heritage of oneself and others (Kearns & Berg, 2002). From this perspective, the voice is more than “a conduit for the transfer of information” but an “active process of creating worlds and meaning” (Kanngieser, 2012, p. 337). The marginalization of the memory of slavery at southern plantation museums is socially constructed and contested through many representations and practices, but none more obvious than in the spoken words of tour guides and docents. Previous work on southern plantation heritage tourism has stressed the meaning-making capacity of the verbal expressions of museum staff. In their seminal work, Eichstedt and Small (2002) paid close attention to how a slave past was “symbolically annihilated” or silenced on docent-led tours of the plantation. They documented the exact number of times that docents mentioned the enslaved on their tours as well as the discursive frames these guides employed in representing the slave–master relationship (e.g. the faithful slave, the benevolent master). Eichstedt and Small (2002) found that plantation museum staff have traditionally been reluctant to even utter the words “slave” or “slavery” on tours and have used euphemisms (e.g. servants) to describe the enslaved if they are mentioned at all. The attention Eichstedt and Small (2002) brought to the speaking of cultural memory by docents remains important well over a decade later if we hope to have more responsible representations of African-Americans at southern plantations. Indeed, as subsequent studies have documented, museum staff continue to narrate tours in ways that provide limited acknowledgement of and information about enslaved people, although there are some indications of improvement. In a comprehensive analysis of North Carolina plantation museums, Modlin (2008) conducted a content analysis of the frequency of hearing references to slavery on docent-led tours, both in absolute terms and relative to other themes. Eichstedt and Small (2002) found 25% of their examined Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 4 D. H. ALDERMAN AND E. A. MODLIN JR. plantation sites (in Virginia, Georgia, and Louisiana) made no mention at all of slavery on guided tours. Modlin (2008) found a lower percentage (19%) of North Carolina plantation museums that had docents failing to speak about enslavement, but he noted an additional 44.2% of sites hosting tours where visitors would hear slavery mentioned only one to three times. Like Eichstedt and Small (2002), Modlin (2008) found that the enslaved were verbally remembered far less often on tours than the plantation’s furnishings, architecture, and original owners. Importantly, Modlin (2008) moved the analysis of the vocalization of memory at plantations beyond simple counting references to slavery and focused on the representational strategies tour guides employed in characterizing and explaining enslavement to tourists. Later, Modlin, Alderman, and Gentry (2011) explored the empathy-producing power of docents’ spoken words, focusing not only on what museum staff say or do not say about the enslaved versus the planter/master class but also how they discuss the lives of these historical actors in ways that facilitate or deny emotional investment by tourists. While docents at some plantation museums include more verbal references to slavery on tours than in the past, these references rarely move beyond factual accounts and they are markedly less emotionally evocative than narrations of the lives of the slaveholder’s family. As Modlin and his colleagues (2011) argued, the affective dimensions as well as the content of the docent speech acts, especially when those narratives are anchored in specific spaces and artifacts of the museum, are more than simply a matter of semantics. Rather, the voices of tour guides are complicit, even unknowingly, in perpetuating a racial inequality in the enactment of heritage and illustrate “the way in which we speak and listen is political and the way in which voice and geography … co-create one another” (Kanngieser, 2012, p. 336). The unequal attention – factually and emotionally – that the enslaved community has traditionally received from plantation docents has not gone unchallenged or unchanged, however. These changes are evident to varying degrees among other River Road Plantations, none more so than Destrehan. Working with the New Orleans African American History Museum and Tulane University (Bacon-Blood, 2011), Destrehan docents now present information about the 1811 River Road Slave Revolt, an uprising in which the plantation’s enslaved population participated (Rasmussen, 2011). While docents narrate the slave revolt in qualitatively different ways than they describe the plantation master, the new information about the slave revolt serves to maintain the topic of slavery in the conversation a little longer, possibly encouraging tourists to ask questions and discuss slavery more than they might otherwise have. Over the past several years, a small but engaged group of African-American tour guides have used historical research about slave life and their own evocative words and bodily performances to retell the history of slavery at plantation museums in empathetic ways. For example, at Historic Brattonsville in York County, South Carolina, retired kindergarten teacher turned volunteer docent Kitty Wilson-Evans spent over two decades portraying a slave woman named Kessie. Wilson-Evan’s verbal and bodily reenactment and interpretation of the slave experience have brought some visitors to tears while also attracting significant public recognition (Brackett, 2007). Wilson-Evans trained and mentored Nicole Moore, a Virginia-based public historian and former plantation docent who hosts a blog about the interpretation of slave life and who consults with historic sites on how best to discuss the emotional topic of slavery. Joining the day-to-day interpretive work of black docents such as Moore, Wilson-Evans, and others are dramatic productions. For example, Let Them be Heard is a production which travels across North Carolina plantations to perform adaptations of excerpts from the Work Progress Administration’s Slave Narrative Project, creating a powerful albeit temporary counter-vocalization of memory of the enslaved at museums (Benjamin, 2015). The agency of plantation tourists It is imperative to pay attention to the agency of docents and other authorized staff at plantation museums and how their verbal constructions of memory silence or give voice to the enslaved. But it is also important to see the heritage construction process as a dialogue and not simply a Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 JOURNAL OF HERITAGE TOURISM 5 monologue. From a dialogic perspective, museum narratives “can be seen as conversations and, therefore, we should not limit their study to the role of the narrator alone” (Chronis, 2008, p. 7). As Carter, Butler, and Alderman (2014) recently demonstrated, visitors do not come to plantation museums simply as blank slates but interpret what they hear on tours by drawing from the suite of stories they bring to the plantation as well as their larger “narrativized worlds” or cognitive frameworks for understanding how the world functions. Plantation tourists internalize docent-led tours in different and sometimes competing ways, especially African-American visitors who may not come to the site expecting or wanting to listen to romanticized accounts of slave life. Carter and his colleagues also point out that museum staff narrate tours, and sometimes even quickly adapt their verbal statements, to match the expectations and narrativized worlds of visitors. Because plantation tourism is about entertainment as well as education, museum operators articulate narratives around what they believe tourists want to hear based on the genre of memorial accounts that circulate within society about the antebellum plantation life. The lack of critical discussions of slavery on the part of docents and other staff is thus not simply an individual decision on their part or the site’s managers but one disciplined by a larger “narrative economy” of films, novels, and even history books that have traditionally privileged white-washed stories of slavery over those that commemorate the nation’s painful and violent racial past (Carter et al., 2014). To be sure, the study of tourists as agents in the narration of slavery is under-developed, but this is not to suggest that scholars have ignored the voices and verbal statements of plantation museum visitors. Past research has employed exit interviews conducted just after plantation house museum tours, strongly indicating that tourists do not fall into a single monolithic group in terms of their verbal reactions (Butler, Carter, & Dwyer, 2008; Buzinde & Santos, 2009; Dwyer, Butler, & Carter, 2013). Rather, the opinions of respondents can vary in terms of whether they feel the description of slavery by docents was deficient or excessive. Visitors also vocalize, sometimes passionately, how they feel the enslaved should be represented during plantation tours. Beyond academicians, some plantation museum operators are also interested in what visitors say about the representation of the past. Indeed, researchers have been able to access plantation sites and gain permission to interview and survey visitors precisely because a growing number of museum operators want to know public reaction to their sites and tours. The River Road Plantation Project addressed in this special journal issue is significant for many reasons, not the least of which because it has involved convincing the owners of four major plantation house museums of the importance of listening to the comments and concerns of visitors. Like the managers of almost any heritage site, these plantation tourism entrepreneurs are interested in the market demographics and general levels of satisfaction of tourists. But the River Road Team has gone a step farther by encouraging these plantation museum operators to realize the value of measuring and analyzing how visitors interpret and react to the representation of slavery on docent-led tours. Evidence from Laura Plantation, a major destination along River Road, points to the fact that an understanding of visitor interpretation and reaction has the potential to advance a more socially just re-telling of the slave narrative at plantation museums. A 2002 study at Laura, which actively measured visitors’ level of interest in slavery and (dis)satisfaction with the docent tour, was instrumental in leading the site’s operators to move toward a greater incorporation of the history of the enslaved into the plantation historical narrative (Carter et al., 2014). In order to advance the intellectual and political project of better understanding the agency of plantation tourists and their participation in the politics of remembering slavery at museums, it is necessary to develop and empirically explore a framework that places their voices in a critical context. We suggest that the verbal expressions of tourists, even those seemingly ordinary questions and comments on docent-led tours, transcend mere consumer preference or visitor profile. Rather, they represent “political utterances” that influence the cultural politics of remembering (or forgetting slavery) at plantations along with museum staff. 6 D. H. ALDERMAN AND E. A. MODLIN JR. Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 Toward a politics of tourist voice Drawing from performative theorists such as Austin (1962), Bakhtin (1986), and Butler (1997), geographers and scholars in other fields have come to understand that “language is used not only to represent the world, but also to change it by producing a new entity through linguistic performance” (Barnes, 2008, p. 1434). Tourism is certainly a visual experience and produced by/productive of a tourist gaze. Yet, tourism is also an aural encounter and constructed through and around spoken expressions that are unofficial and official in nature and which come from consumers and producers. The word utterance captures the everyday speech acts that structure meaning, social action and identity, and how we relate to one another (Kanngieser, 2012). The significance of these utterances or vocal enunciations is not limited to the individual person but part of the broader cultural and economic context of making public dialogic spaces, including, in our case, tourist destinations. Kanngieser (2012) has called for a study of the politics of voice that recognizes that verbal expression is embedded in the flows of power, including racial coding. Voices have political consequences in how they affect our capacities to speak and listen to one another. This is an especially important point with the respect to the way plantation museum staff members have traditionally vocalized a non-existent if not trivialized memory of slavery. Speaking of the enslaved in marginal terms has worked not only to dispossess African-Americans historically but also to make the southern plantation an unattractive destination for many contemporary black tourists. We use the word “political utterance” to recognize that even seemingly ordinary comments, questions, and conversations from plantation tourists shape the meaning of slavery in significant and highly charged ways at southern plantations. The language we speak (or do not speak) at plantations is political and has the potential to make, unmake, or remake these heritage spaces, even when tourists do not fully know or understand the racialized history of how words have been articulated and used at these sites. As with docents or tour guides, the verbal expressions of tourists can certainly operate dialogically to reaffirm and validate dominant narrations of plantation history that exclude or deflect attention from the enslaved, thus maintaining the plantation as a racialized landscape. However, these very same moments of visitor utterance can challenge the primacy of this marginalization of slavery and, in the words of Kanngieser (2012, p. 337): “open up spaces for different ways of being through dialogue”. Rose-Redwood (2008) has written, for example, that everyday spoken utterances of the public can be a force of resistance against official framings of place and history. Of course, the capacity of this resistant utterance to affect change lies in whether and how people listen to and respond to the vocalization of memory by tourists. There are at least two analytical settings within which tourism scholars and heritage site staff can explore the verbal enunciations and agency of visitors – the vocalization of interpretative communities in exit or post-tour interviews and docent reaction to on-tour comments and questions posed by visitors. Post-tour interviews and vocalizing alternative visions of the plantation For those scholars who have sought access to what tourists have to say about the plantation house museum and the way docents and other staff narrate its history, the exit or post-tour interview has proven to be the most common (e.g. Butler et al., 2008; Carter et al., 2014). When interviewing tourists at Hampton Plantation in McClellanville, South Carolina, Buzinde and Santos (2009) noted that tourists actively interpreted or decoded the historical narratives presented at the plantation museum. While Buzinde and Santos characterize the tourist experience as one of “reading” historical narratives, they use this word in a larger semiotic sense and they recognize that touring Hampton Plantation is a matter of hearing as well as seeing. Moreover, the exit interview process is more than simply a means of collecting data and tourists are engaging in more than a passive communication of opinion and information. The interview represents a conversation between tourist and researcher and an important moment for visitors to vocalize an ideological position about their interpretation of the plantation and slavery and their level of comfort and confidence in the official historical Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 JOURNAL OF HERITAGE TOURISM 7 narrative. Given the reluctance that many tourists show to be interviewed about slavery, for practical or political reasons, it is important to remember that participation in the interview is a choice for tourists to verbally declare their point of view, and thus these post-tour conversations are not free of bias or self-selection. The politics of voice invariably involves certain tourists speaking more loudly and being heard more often than others. Buzinde and Santos (2009) found that interviewed tourists fell into two broad “interpretive communities” based on shared cultural assumptions and ideological prepositions about slavery. The verbal expressions of one community indicated that they largely accepted or acquiesced to the “dominant hegemonic position” that the plantation was important because it was historic and that there was an altruistic relationship between enslavers and enslaved (Buzinde & Santos, 2009, p. 447). At the same time, some visitors’ vocalized membership in an “oppositional interpretive community” that viewed the plantation much more in terms of racial politics and represented Hampton as an unrealized place for using slavery as “a lesson for humanity” and coming to terms with the legacy of enslavement within contemporary American race relations (Buzinde & Santos, 2009, pp. 450–453). The plantation is open to co-construction by visitors and their vocal enunciations suggest that the power of historical interpretation and representation lay not just in the hands of the museum docent or manager. Paying attention to the political utterances of tourists and using them to identify the various discourses and interpretive communities circulating through the plantation is important for understanding the demands of the tourist market. This can assist the growing number of plantation owners, managers, and docents who seek to incorporate the enslaved into the representation of plantation social history. Also important, by listening to tourists, we further understand how race, racism, and the slave experience are difficult subjects, what Horton and Horton (2009) have aptly called, “the tough stuff of American memory”. Interviewed tourists visiting River Road plantations expressed widely varying interpretations of plantation life and judgments about the appropriate amount of the history of slavery that should be discussed on docent-led tours. While Buzinde and Santos (2009) identified just two major interpretive communities (acquiescence and opposition) among tourists visiting Hampton Plantation, our work along River Road identified four distinct interpretive communities based on the political utterances of interviewed visitors. The ideological dichotomy between acquiescence and opposition is still discernable in the verbal expressions of River Road tourists. Yet, visitors are also vocalizing important political gradients and negotiated variations within those positions, suggesting that docent-led tours can provoke and evoke a wide range of strong reactions from tourists about what they have heard on guided tours. Listening is not a passive practice but embedded in the politics of voice; what we hear about slavery is produced by and reproduces codings of race and power (Kanngieser, 2012). Among the verbal expressions of interviewed River Road tourists, we easily identified an interpretive community in which members did not want to listen to discussions of slavery on plantation tours. When asked if slavery was sufficiently covered on the tour of Oak Alley, a white female from Oregon declared: “I’m thinking that that’s best untouched, because there are too many people that have uninformed opinions”. It is uncertain what the visitor exactly meant in referencing “uninformed opinions”, but her other comments appeared to take issue with placing too much importance on the history of African enslavement: “It [slavery] was what it is. It was not a good thing. But we have slavery today”. When asked what was learned about slavery on the tour of Houmas House, a white male replied, “I don’t need to hear about slavery when I was looking at French furniture”. When a white male from Louisiana was asked what came to his mind when hearing the word “plantation”, he responded with “big white columns … big tall house … big bell dresses … [s]outhern ladies”. While one white female from Texas stated her surprise in learning about the lives of slaves on the Oak Alley tour, she indicating being more interested in knowing more about the role of planter class women in running the plantation and the hats they wore. This same tourist minimized the brutality of slavery saying that it was “not a racial thing” and made a disturbing and historically 8 D. H. ALDERMAN AND E. A. MODLIN JR. inaccurate equation of enslavement to indentured servitude. These remarks affirm and legitimize traditional plantation narratives that construct the museum as a dialogic place for discussing the privileged lifestyle of the planter/master family rather than the struggles and contributions of the enslaved. The second interpretive community captures more ambivalence among River Road tourists. These visitors did not avoid discussing slavery, but they did not feel strongly about hearing a deeper narration of slave life at the plantation. Many tourists in this community were curious about the artifacts used by the enslaved. For example, at Oak Alley, a male Hispanic tourist from New York asserted: Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 I would have liked to have seen more of their [slaves’] clothing on display … [and] their weapons. The gardening tools – that I would have liked to have seen, because I know that the slaves were doing this [agriculture] Similarly, when visiting Laura Plantation and viewing a number of tools displayed in buildings that once served as slave cabins, a white female from Texas remarked: “I just like looking at the history. I like looking at old buildings, and especially the tools that the slaves used”. The agricultural practices of a plantation, tools, clothing, even weapons (as much as slaves were allowed to have weapons) certainly involve a slavery narrative to some degree and should be a prime opportunity for engaging in a greater dialogue on enslavement. Yet for these tourists, the real focus was on the things associated or identified with slave life and not the lives of the slaves themselves. For a plantation museum operator, hearing this limited vocalization of memory might be an important lesson in how artifacts alone do not unlock or provoke stories of the enslaved. Some tourists recognized and reacted to the way in which artifacts were detached from a broader re-telling of slave life. A white female from Washington State vocalized a common refrain among many interviewees, white and black: “I would like to know more about the slaves … actually their living conditions”. The third interpretive community was characterized by River Road tourists who asserted a strong desire to hear more about slavery on plantation tours. These tourists were vocal in feeling the tour (at all four plantations) was lacking in the discussion of slavery. For example, an African-American female visiting Laura Plantation from Chicago took issue with the “dumbing-down” of the representation of slave life, reminding the interviewer that being a slave was “not a pleasant life” and the importance of not being afraid “to talk about the unpleasantness” if people are to “really understand slavery”. Similarly, when visiting Oak Alley, a white female from Pennsylvania: “it would be important to have the stories that connected us to the actual slaves … on this plantation, or surrounding plantations, and their real experiences, including the harsh realities”. According to her, the plantation tour “shouldn’t be a fluffy mint julep experience”, a reference to Oak Alley’s practice of selling mint juleps in its gift shop and restaurant area. Another Oak Alley tourist, visiting from Australia, complained, “they didn’t mention the slavery at all … Apart from the slave huts [cabins] that they’re rebuilding, but they called the people that worked for them servants. Which they weren’t. They were slaves. So I find that offensive”. The face that this comment and others similar to it came from international tourists is noteworthy. River Road plantations, because of close proximity to New Orleans, frequently receive visitors from abroad. According to past research, foreign born tourists are significantly more interested in learning about slavery on plantation tours than domestic tourists, even over some African-American visitors (Butler et al., 2008). Some tourists used the exit interview as an opportunity to voice a challenge to the speech acts and word choices traditionally (and still) used by docents to minimize and trivialize the trauma of the slave experience, thus destabilizing the legitimacy of representing the plantation without identifying slavery for what it was. In the case of the fourth interpretive community, tourists declared a desire not only to hear a stronger slave narrative but also for plantation staff to go further in discussing race relations. Those comprising this community vocalize an alternative vision of the plantation that addresses the racial, economic, and social legacies of slavery on African-Americans after the Emancipation JOURNAL OF HERITAGE TOURISM 9 Proclamation. For instance, after taking the docent-led tour at Oak Alley, a white male visitor from California asserted: Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 I want to know more about the slaves, the slave quarters, the relationships between the slaves and slave masters … what was the relationship between African-Americans [and whites] after the Civil War around the plantation? Were they [former slaves] still here? Laura Plantation docents speak somewhat to life after enslavement by taking tourists to a few surviving slave cabins on the property and pointing out that African-Americans continued to live in those structures as tenants until the late 1970s. This fact caught the attention of several black visitors, prompting a few of them to ask for more narration of the lives of those freed slave families, why they stayed on the plantation for so long, and what their lives after slavery were like. These interpretive communities reveal tourists to be critical participants in the co-construction of meaning and memory at plantation museums, and we have sought to use the exit or post-tour interview to bring the voices of tourists in juxtaposition to the speech practices and verbal authority of docents. While River Road tourists expressed varying opinions about the necessity and manner in which the enslaved should be remembered publicly, it is noteworthy that a significant number of white tourists vocalized a slave-centric vision of the plantation. This is significant since some plantation managers and docents assume, perhaps wrongly, that story of the enslaved does not resonate with white visitors. Although not carried out in this paper, there is a need to correlate the political utterances of tourists with their demographic characteristics as well as ideological disposition. While southern plantation museums continue to see a limited number of African-American visitors, the River Road project was able to conduct numerous interviews with black tourists. An African-American presence at plantations represents an important shift in the politics of voice since no people of color who we interviewed aligned themselves with the first interpretive community that feels there is no need to discuss slavery. Docent reactions to on-tour utterances of plantation visitors The political utterances of tourists, in general and specific to the southern plantation museum, are not limited to their interpretations and reactions after touring sites. We suggest that there is an important yet analytically neglected vocalization of memory that visitors enact when they ask questions and make comments while touring the plantation museum with the docent. This vocalization can be those verbal expressions and conversations that occur during the tour itself or immediately before or after the tour with the guide or fellow tourists. The political utterances of visitors on a tour, which can cover everything from banal facts to highly controversial issues, not only provide insight into their interpretive agency but also how they vocally influence the narrative meaning of the plantation for others. There is a collective dimension to these on-tour verbal expressions as other tourists in the group listen to them, potentially shaping their interpretation of the tour. Indeed, as Kanngieser (2012, p. 337) has argued, “listeners actively contribute to the spaces that utterances” create. Moreover, the questions and comments of touring visitors take on a “performative force” (Rose-Redwood, 2008) since the docent hears the comment and s/he is obligated in most cases to respond with an answer, creating a true dialogic public space for discussing slavery. The questions and comments that tourists make as they tour a plantation house museum are important at two social levels. First, these utterances indicate to the docent how the tour is going. Interviews with docents indicate that they pay close attention to the things that tourists say (e.g. see Potter’s paper in this special issue). Museum staff members recognize that what tourists say on-site might be indicative of what those tourists might say – positive or negative – to potential tourists in the future. Docents will often adjust what they typically say based on tourists comments and questions. If a docent gets a number of questions about something, they may reflect on whether that subject needs to be considered in greater detail on future tours or whether they are being clear enough with the things that they are already saying. Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 10 D. H. ALDERMAN AND E. A. MODLIN JR. Second, the questions and comments from visitors also have the potential to (re)make the meaning of memory and place within plantation museums. While docents lead tour groups through the museum, directing tourists’ attention toward certain artifacts, spaces, and themes, they rarely control the story completely. Tourists’ questions, comments and actions affect how a tour unfolds (Salazar, 2006). Indeed, while most docents try to maintain a degree of control over the tour narrative, few docents want to lead a silent group through the house (compare Dahles, 2002; MacDonald, 2006). Commonly, docents at plantations will ask if there are any questions at certain points during a tour, most notably right before leaving a room in the Big House or before leaving other distinct areas such as outdoor spaces. Not all tourists’ verbal expressions are equal in intent. Questions and vocal remarks by tourists fall into at least five categories, and the presence of each type of political utterance has the potential to change the historical content, emotional tone, and even spatial path of the tour because of the reaction it may elicit from docents. The first category refers to tourists’ questions that express a genuine inquiry without seeming to test or show up the docent. A docent’s response to such a question can alter the direction of a tour. The second category encompasses certain statements and questions that serve as notice to guides that a tourist is very knowledgeable in a topic related to the plantation. Some docents may respond by spending additional time on a certain stop or theme and perhaps even formally incorporate the expert tourist into the tour narrative. The third category covers verbal requests for the docent to reaffirm the tourists’ previous knowledge of what they have heard and learned elsewhere at another heritage destination. This could result in guides making connections with other heritage sites or stressing details that make their tour unique. The fourth category of utterance includes tourist comments that reflect astonishment, which can inspire docents to elaborate a bit more on a theme within the tour or even dramatize the historical narration for continued emotional effect. Fifth and finally, verbal expressions from tourists can be oppositional in nature in the sense that they challenge the docent’s perspective on the past and hence his/her authority over the narration of history. We seldom see this overtly political form of utterance, but it can and does happen when addressing controversial topics, such as slavery. We argue that the on-tour political utterances of visitors at plantations represent opportunities, whether consciously intended or not, for docents to alter the politics of their own voices and influence the level of discussion of slavery into official tours. As indicated in Potter’s article for this special issue many River Road plantation docents, while remaining on a standard script, make key improvisational judgments about the content and path of their tours based on the questions and the perceived mood of tourists. This prompts us to consider how tourists’ on-tour verbal expressions have the power to potentially affect the manner and extent to which the enslaved are remembered and whether the plantation museum either reinforces or contests racialized power hierarchies in heritage narration. While it would be ideal for researchers to accompany tour groups and document tourist utterances and docent reactions to those utterances, this was not feasible at River Road given the number of tours that would need to be shadowed over long periods of time at each plantation to collect a sufficient number of observations. There is value, however, in interviewing plantation docents to get a picture of how the on-tour political utterances of tourists are interpreted by the docent and thus influence their own vocalization of memory at the plantation. In contrast to Potter’s study of the complex performances of tour guides, our emphasis is not on the degree of control and adaptability that guides have over tours. Rather, we see these same tours as moments of tourist agency and visitor co-construction of the plantation along with the docent and other museum staff. Interviews with docents at the four River Road plantations provide considerable insight into the varying frequency in which they field questions from tourists about slavery. A tour guide at Laura Plantation stated that as many as 50% of the questions she receives from tourists focus on the enslaved, but most other docents report a less frequent but still regular occurrence of slavery-related inquiries from visitors. Docents at the same plantation can and do indicate different levels of engagement by tourists. While one San Francisco guide reported receiving visitor questions about slavery Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 JOURNAL OF HERITAGE TOURISM 11 “almost every tour”, her colleague at the same time suggested that these types of questions come up perhaps once or twice a week. Regardless of sheer temporal frequency of utterances, many of the interviewed docents listed questions about the plantation’s enslaved community as the top or most common subject of visitor questions. Of course, the remembering of the enslaved by tourists through the verbal expressions they make on tours depends, to some degree, on how much the docent discusses slavery to begin with and the extent to which conversational cues to discuss slavery are embedded within the tour’s narrative. Again, our interview evidence indicates that River Road docents vary significantly in their knowledge of and level of comfort in talking about slavery on tour. As River Road docents contend, the presence of a tour script does not preclude them from moving away from the standard narrative to talk more or less about slavery, either by their volition or in reaction to tourist questions. Also clearly discernable from the River Road docent interviews were instances in which the utterances of tourists reshaped the narrative and hence the cultural political arc of the guide’s own vocalization of memory. At Houmas House, where docents dress and conduct tours in nineteenth-century character, one docent stated: “If they (tourists) ask, keep asking me ‘Did you have slaves? How many did you have? Where did they live?’ [then] I’ll talk about it”. This docent’s account points to the possible insistence that some tourists might exert in hearing about slavery on guided tours. A docent working at Oak Alley, who appears to already talk significantly about slavery on tours, indicated that she added information about the enslaved into her modified tour script based on certain questions received in the past from tourists. This suggests the possibility that the impact of tourists’ utterances might not be limited to constructing an ephemeral memory of slavery, but could have longer-lasting effects beyond that one tour. As discussed earlier in this paper, one of the potentially powerful aspects of on-tour questions is how they might affect the interpretive agency of other visitors in the tour group. Another docent at Oak Alley pointed to the way in which a question about slavery can lead others tourists to pose questions during a tour and how that collective inquiry can de-stabilize the tour script: People will ask you those questions [about slavery] … [I] t’s kind of like one person asks a question, and then again they kind of go off on a tangent and everybody starts asking certain questions. And it just kind of throws you off. Importantly, what is being described here as a “tangent” is, from our perspective, much more than a disruption to the usual thematic order of the tour but a political utterance that is working, at least temporarily, to swing the balance of power of memory-making at the plantation from a monologic (primarily docent) to dialogic (docent and tourist). Consistent with our exit interviews, in which many tourists stated a desire to know about the living conditions of slaves, River Road docents consistently point to visitors asking about the treatment of the enslaved. While docents stated that they address this issue when asked, they do admit that the questions can push them to engage in a historical narrative that moves beyond their personal comfort level, prior knowledge, and the larger plantation tour script that has been provided or approved by management. A docent at Oak Alley, a site which has worked significantly to enhance its re-telling of the enslaved story through reconstructed slave cabins, described such a situation: They’ll (tourists) ask me … if they (masters) had mixed children with the slaves. And as far as that we don’t know … And they’ll (tourists) ask me … [whether]the slaves here [at Oak Alley] were not raped or beaten as harshly as other slaves … [A] lot of people ask me was he [the master] a good slave owner. And I have to go to the thing that there’s no such thing as a good slave owner. In this case, visitor questions are prompting the docent to take on some historical issues that managers would perhaps like avoided. Indeed, the Oak Alley docent referenced material in the employee break room that encourages guides to offer a much more benevolent interpretation of the plantation’s antebellum owners. In this respect, visitors are using their political utterances on the tour to push a docent to make moral judgments about the planter/master and discuss Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 12 D. H. ALDERMAN AND E. A. MODLIN JR. rape, beating, and miscegenation – issues strictly avoided in traditional romanticized portrayals of slavery. While tourists can use their voice to push for a more honest and critical narration of slavery on docent-led tours, the vocalization process can also work differently, such as when visitor questions and comments support or validate the tradition of plantations avoiding a discussion of slavery. For instance, River Road docents noted that many tourist inquiries revolve around the plantation landscape aesthetics – inside and outside the Big House. An interviewed docent at Oak Alley said that one of the most common questions he receives from tourists focuses on the house’s elaborate crown molding. According to this guide, tourists also often ask about how the Civil War affected the condition of plantation mansion, an interesting counterpoint to those tourists who expressed a desire in exit interviews to know how the War and resulting emancipation affected slave life. This inherent valuing of architecture over the enslaved captured in tourists questions exerts its own performative force on tours in terms of how it might discourage speech acts that counter the deflection of slavery as a tour topic. Of course, not all docents allow the power of tourist comments to romanticize or trivialize the slave condition to go unchallenged. A guide at Laura Plantation, which has arguably made the greatest long-term strides of the River Road plantations in representing the story of slavery, recounted a scene when she escorted a tour group to one of the surviving slave cabins behind the “Big House”. [S]ome people [tourists] say “well, this house is not that bad” when there sitting in the slave cabin. And I say [to the tourist] “you know something, I was brought up in a house just like this. Is it good? No. It was hot. There was[sic] mosquitos. It was hot as hell. You know you know in a environment that is hot … It was not comfortable. No. And they’re situation was worse because they had no freedom. They chose to stay here, not because they loved Emile [antebellum plantation owner] … But there was no choice in the matter. Left here, you got shot. No, not necessarily, but you know, it was a tough … time to be free with nothing”. The situation demonstrates that intense conversations and interpretive conflicts can occur between docent and visitors during the tour. In fact, some docents tell of tourists who react angrily to their descriptions of slavery and other aspects of the plantation museum. But in this respect, it was the docent reacting to what she perceived as a tourist utterance that trivialized the suffering of the enslaved, and that reaction from the guide then led to a more critical vocalization of the memory of slavery. It was a verbal remaking of memory that not only potentially altered the group’s understanding of the harshness of slave life but also explored the lack of opportunities facing the enslaved after emancipation. Concluding remarks As past researchers have noted in the context of plantation heritage, docents and museum staff play a powerful role in presenting and authorizing a version of the past through their choice of words and stories. This narration has had major consequences in shaping whether and how we remember (or forget) the history of the enslaved community at plantations. While the plantation tourism literature is paying more attention to audience reception and interpretation of history depicted through guided tours and exhibits (e.g. Buzinde & Santos, 2009; Dwyer et al., 2013), there is still significant room for exploring the role of tourists in influencing what and who is remembered at plantation museums and how they contribute to co-construction of memory and place. Plantations, like all heritage sites, are places of conversation and dialogue, and it is necessary to understand the role of the tourist voice in “animating” the heritage tourism landscape and shaping the “many possible ways in which the past might be constructed” (Schumann, 2015, p. 72). We have conceptualized the spoken words of tourists as a form of political utterance, a term meant to capture the important ethical consequences that verbal expressions can play in renegotiating and perhaps even reforming the plantation as a place for excluding and trivializing the enslaved experience. Political utterances at plantations are not just those statements of challenge or outrage by visitors, although these comments are made, but they refer to how even the most seemingly quotidian and Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 11:14 06 November 2015 JOURNAL OF HERITAGE TOURISM 13 apolitical of tourist expressions matter in places where museum staff have a legacy of tightly controlling whether and how we can talk about slavery and even the very words we use to name and identify the enslaved community. While our study is not an exhaustive or comprehensive study of tourist utterances at River Road plantations, post-tour interviews demonstrate a strong desire by many visitors not only to get history right, but to understand it (MacDonald, 2006; Christie & Mason, 2003). Tourists assert critical reactions to the docent narrative, using the exit interview to vocalize a vision of the plantation grounded in their own personal experiences, world views, and historical understandings as well as ongoing changes in how society comes to terms with the legacies of slavery. These utterances can potentially engage the plantation and its staff in discussions over not just what the museum was in the past or what it has become in the present, but also what the plantation should be in the future as a heritage site. Each tour through the same plantation house museum unfolds differently, yielding a unique, even ephemeral memory of the plantation and those who lived and worked there historically. We suggest that the questions and comments made by tourists on these tours have unrealized analytical potential for understanding how the plantation museum operates as a public dialogic space in which visitors are not merely consumers and passive recipients of the heritage experience but co-constructors of that experience. Visitor expressions – from statements of curiosity, expertise, and prior heritage experience to declarations of astonishment and even dissatisfaction – influence the development of the narrative of the docent (Salazar, 2006). Occasionally, tourists ask questions of docents that acknowledge difficult and traumatic pasts – including slavery. On-tour utterances can complicate but also enrich the vocalization of memory, giving them permission to change the political and narrative arc of the tour and the place that people of color have in that story. But, of course, this all happens within the rigorous constraints of time and profit that many tours have to follow. The agency of the tourist is never realized independent of and outside of the agency of the docent, and both of their voices are disciplined to some degree by the larger political economy of plantation tourism and the selling of the past as a commodity. Finally, it is necessary to recognize the potential discrepancies between what tourists say in their exit interviews, what they reportedly want to hear on plantation house museum tours, and what tourists actually ask for and talk about while on those same tours. While many tourists say they want to hear more about slavery in post-tour conversations, discussions with River Road docents and our own observations suggest that tourists do not always verbalize these wishes as frequently or as strongly on tours. There are perhaps many reasons for this mismatch. There is the discomfort felt by some visitors in calling forth the enslaved, or asking any question for that matter, among a group of strangers and a docent who may or may not welcome such utterances. Tourists can also be distracted by other things on the tour. One of these powerful distractions is the actual emotional journey that visitors take through the “Big House” as docents tell stories of the master’s possessions, achievements, and tragedies (Modlin et al., 2011). Additional research is needed to more thoroughly understand why more tourists do not ask about slavery, slave life and even individual enslaved people. When tourists say that the plantation staff members should say more about slavery but they fail to make more utterances during guided tours, visitors ignore their own capacity for activism and responsibility to the memory of the enslaved. We conclude by suggesting that a move toward a more socially responsible portrayal of slavery at plantation museums should develop ways to stimulate tourists to ask and talk about slavery while also reforming the manner and extent to which museum staff represent and perform this history. Ongoing changes along River Road are perhaps instructive. At Whitney Plantation, a new, slave-centric depiction of antebellum life that opened in December 2014, visitors are invited to write their feelings about the tour on notes displayed on a large bulletin board, which can be read by other visitors. While heritage destinations have long collected tourists’ comments on cards or log books, this is more public and emotionally evocative involvement of the tourist voice in the (re)narration and (re)interpretation of the history of slavery. 14 D. H. ALDERMAN AND E. A. MODLIN JR. Notes on contributors Derek H. Alderman is Professor and Head of the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee. 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