Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era
Tiya Miles
Abstract
This book explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of “ghost tours,” frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by relying on stories of enslaved black specters. Through an examination of popular sites and stories from select ghost tours, this book shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. “Dark tourism” often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of sl ... More
This book explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of “ghost tours,” frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by relying on stories of enslaved black specters. Through an examination of popular sites and stories from select ghost tours, this book shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. “Dark tourism” often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies, to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. The book argues that because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these scripted historical experiences, the tours continue to feed problematic “Old South” narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era.
Keywords:
African American,
Tourism,
Historic sites,
Black culture,
Black women,
Ghosts,
Plantations,
Old South,
Spirituality
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781469626338 |
Published to North Carolina Scholarship Online: May 2016 |
DOI:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469626338.001.0001 |