Performing a different narrative: museum theater and the memory-work of producing and managing slavery heritage at southern plantation museums

In the southeastern United States, operators of plantation museums have traditionally engaged in a selective and romanticised remembrance of the antebellum past that has regrettably silenced and marginalised the historical experiences and struggles of enslaved African people. More recently, some plantation managers have sought to engage in the ‘memory-work’ using artistic practices to reconstruct and interpret slavery heritage for visitors. Our study explores museum theatre as a form of memory-work and suggests that theatrical performances of the memories of enslavement are an increasingly important but not yet fully understood strategy for recovering, embodying, and representing a different and hopefully more just narrative about enslaved Africans. We visit three plantation museums where managers hosted a theatrical performance of enslaved oral histories and explore the motivations and experiences of managers and the director of the slave performance. Realising the power and efficacy of theatrical performance as memory-work practice requires understanding how the management of the interpretation process can be difficult. We delve into the emotion-laden challenges confronting slavery-related museum theatre development at the North Carolina plantations and discuss the creative response formulated at the sites to help visitors work through unexpected feelings and understandings about the past.     

美国内战前种植园奴隶主与黑人奴隶的关系

压迫与反抗无疑是奴隶制的重要特征。然而,美国黑人奴隶制之所以能够维系二百余年,其重要原因在于奴隶主和奴隶都在不断地调整彼此相处的策略。所以,美国内战前南部种植园中奴隶主与奴隶之间形成了一种既相互对立又相互妥协的关系。     

Rubber plantations and their implications on gender roles and relations in northern uplands Vietnam

Abstract

In recent years, rubber plantations have been strongly promoted in the northern uplands of Vietnam–especially in the northwest, where it is an ill agro-ecological fit–with an aim to improve ethnic minority livelihoods and to modernize peasants by transforming them into rubber workers. A large area of land has been taken away from farmers to make way for rubber plantations. This land acquisition and agrarian transformation have impacted local people and their livelihoods in various ways. Drawing on ethnographic research, in combination with interviews with authorities and studying related documents, this article focuses on the gendered consequences of rubber plantation in northern uplands Vietnam. It argues that the process of becoming a rubber worker and adapting to the new way of living has indeed added new roles and responsibilities for women. At the same time, it has undermined men’s values and reshaped gender relations both within and outside the home.     

French-Caribbean Refugees and Slavery in German Protestant Maryland

The late eighteenth century saw the immigration of thousands of French refugees from France and its Caribbean colonies to the United States. An examination of one family of these refugees, Jean Payen de Boisneuf and his relatives the Vincendières, reveals that the values that the refugees imported, such as plantation slavery and Catholicism, could be antagonistic to social norms in the regions they chose to settle.     

乡村旅游对农户农林业生产和外出务工影响研究——基于陕西22个旅游扶贫村农户调查数据

利用课题组2017年6-8月在陕西安康、商洛、汉中、宝鸡4市9县22个旅游扶贫村收集的841个农户调查数据，采用双重选择模型（DSM）等分析了农户参与旅游对家庭农林业劳动时间、外出务工时间的影响。研究发现，参与旅游有助于增加调查地的农户收入，旅游兼营型农户收入更高。在全样本中，参与旅游对农户农林业生产时间具有显著负向作用，但在参与了旅游的农户样本中，农户参与旅游一些特征或形式，如土特产销售，对农林业生产则有显著正向作用；在多个模型中，农户从事旅游对家庭外出务工活动具有显著的负向作用。提出了延长农业产业链、发展“旅游+农业”、促进农村一二三产业融合，提高景区带村作用、完善旅游扶贫政策等对策建议。     

On plantations,prisons, and a black sense of place

The complexities of black geographies—shaped by histories of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, contemporary practices of racism, and resistances to white supremacy—shed light on how slave and post-slave struggles in the Americas form a unique sense of place. Rather than simply identifying black suffering and naming racism (and opposition to it) as the sole conceptual schemas through which to ‘understand’ or ‘know’ blackness or race, it is emphasized that a black sense of place, black histories, and communities are not only integral to production of space, but also that the analytical interconnectedness of race, practices of domination, and geography undoubtedly put pressure on how we presently study and assess racial violence.     

Ideal Coconut Country: Commodified Coconuts and the Scientific Plantation in Pohnpei,Micronesia

ABSTRACT

Pohnpeians regard human beings, natural forces, and supernatural forces as equally important agents in the making of their island’s past. Pohnpei’s rapid transition from an island where families maintained only a small number of coconut plantings to one whose 20th century skyline was dominated by coconut palms should therefore draw our attention to the entanglement of human and nonhuman agents that facilitated the growth of the copra trade on Pohnpei at the end of the 19th century. This article focuses on the modern proliferation of coconut trees on Pohnpei, its link to a powerful scientific agricultural discourse, and the coconut’s attendant effects on Pohnpeian relationships and ecology. It argues that Pohnpeians and coconuts, commodified as copra, remade the land and one another as indigenous and foreign visions of the coconut collided.     

Melanesians and Music on the Move: South Sea Island Shipboard and Plantation Performance in Queensland, 1860s–1906

Taking a historical ethnomusicological approach, this article argues that shipboard and plantation music and dance practices cast new light on the ways South Sea Islanders (SSI) acted out agency and asserted new identities as they became tangled up in the dynamics of colonial encounters. Trading ships started to operate in Melanesia in the 1840s and island men were quickly attracted to the nautical life. Contact with the West brought opportunity but also exploitation when in 1863 the recruitment of Islanders for farm and plantation work in Queensland began. As they ventured into the unknown on recruiting ships, Islanders engaged in performance in order to establish cross-societal bonds with villagers from islands other than their own, and also with European sailors and settlers. Experimenting with any and all modes of sound making, SSI looked to music as a source of enjoyment and a means of individual and collective self-advancement. They took instruments, repertoire items, and gramophones back to their home islands as evidence of their familiarity with the wider world, and as creative resources to employ in the changing times ahead of them. Those who remained in Queensland at the beginning of the 20th century faced the challenge of how to integrate and indigenize the new musical ideas, and transform them into life – and community-sustaining expressions.     

Excavating Racial Capitalism in London's West India Docks

Focusing on the construction of London's West India Docks in 1802, I argue that this project established a feedback loop with conditions of production in the Caribbean. Through an analysis of committee minutes, letters, parliamentary papers and visual art, I move beyond economic accounts of slavery's impact to demonstrate how geographies of security and surveillance—first developed on the sugar plantation—were imported into the design and function of London's port. As such, I argue that London's docks produced a geography of segregation which offers a unique insight into the workings of racial capitalism and its exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities. Positioning my discussion alongside London's contemporary landscape, I excavate Britain's repressed memories of slavery to illustrate how they still scar the urban environment.