Negative heritage: the material-cultural politics of the American haunted history tour

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the defining features and cultural significance of the haunted history tour as it has come to be practiced in American urban spaces. A distinctive cultural form that has risen to prominence in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and other places, haunted history taps into public fascinations with “dark” history and ghosts, but does so to engage unresolved and troubling elements of local history and memory. Practitioners engage creatively with problematic histories that otherwise might be forgotten or suppressed, attending especially to their material-folkloric traces. Drawing on participatory and analytical research in several U.S. cities, in particular St. Louis, New York, and Savannah, the article moves from a characterization of the defining modes and interpretative conventions of haunted history, which are drawn from mainstream tourism and others from more-activist public history, to an analysis of its preoccupation with haunting “remainders” of the past, which, I contend, form an unacknowledged narrative and epistemological core of an experimental memory project whose primary quarry is the domain of “negative heritage”.