Travel, slavery, memory: thanatourism in the French Atlantic

Postcolonial Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 251-265

  Forsdick, Charles ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84937643926     PISSN: 13688790     EISSN: 14661888     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2014.993427     Document Type: Article

References (87)

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2. AV Seaton, ‘Sources of Slavery—Destinations of Slavery: The Silences and Disclosures of Slavery Heritage in the UK and US’, International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration, 2(3-4), 2001, pp 107-129, p 117.
3. Graham Dann and AV Seaton, Slavery, Contested Heritage, and Thanatourism, New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2001
4. Alan Rice, ‘Museums, Memorials andPlantation Houses in the Black Atlantic: Slavery and the Development of Dark Tourism’, in Richard Sharpley and Philip R Stone (eds), The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009, pp 224-246.
5. Derek Walcott, ‘Acacia Trees’, in White Egrets, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p 11.
6. Alasdair Pettinger, ‘“These New Plantations by the Sea”: The Caribbean Hotel as Site of Exploitation and Scene of Writing’, www.liv.ac.uk/media/livacuk/csis2/blackatlantic/research/PlantationsByTheSea[2].pdf (accessed 21 October 2013).
7. Ian Gregory Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002, pp 7-10.
8. Dany Laferrière, La Chair du maître, Outremont, Québec: Lanctôt éditeur, 1997.
9. Charles Forsdick, ‘Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Cultures of Commemoration’, in Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (eds), Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009, pp 271-284.
10. Philip R Stone, ‘A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions’, Tourism: An Interdisciplinary International Journal 54(2), 2006, pp 145-160.
11. Philip R Stone, ‘Dark Tourism Consumption: A Call for Research’, e-Review of Tourism Research (eRTR) 3(5), 2005, pp 109-117.
12. Richard Sharpley, ‘Shedding Light on Dark Tourism: An Introduction’, in Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, pp 3-22, p 8.
13. A V Seaton, ‘Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2(4), 1996, pp 234-244.
14. Sharpley, ‘Shedding Light on Dark Tourism’, p 4.
15. Sharpley, ‘Shedding Light on Dark Tourism’, p 14.
16. Graham Huggan, Extreme Pursuits: Travel/ Writing in an Age of Globalization, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
17. Graham Dann, The Dark Side of Tourism, Études et rapports.
18. Série L, Sociologie/Psychologie/Philosophie/Anthropologie 14, Aix-en-Provence: Centre International de Recherches et d’Etudes Touristiques, 1998.
19. Seaton, ‘Guided by the Dark’, pp 234-244.
20. I note Stone’s concern that it may be equally valid to approach such sites, ‘multifaceted, complex in design and purpose, and diverse in nature’, in terms of a spectrum as opposed to a clearly delineated taxonomy of locations.
21. ‘A Dark Tourism Spectrum’, p 150.
22. Seaton, ‘Sources of Slavery—Destinations of Slavery’, p 117.
23. J Henderson, ‘War as a Tourist Attraction: The Case of Vietnam’, International Journal of Tourism Research, 2, 2000, pp 269-280
24. Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities, Oxford: Berg, 2007
25. Olivier Dehoorne and Lee Jolliffe, ‘Dark Tourism and Place Identity in French Guyana’, in Leanne White and Elspeth Frew (eds), Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places, London: Routledge, 2013, pp 156-166.
26. Ana Lucia Araujo, Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic, Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010.
27. The Taubira law of 2001 was a piece of French legislation which, although falling short of any initially intended commitment to reparations, recognized formally and for the first time the French duty of memory in relation to enslavement and the Atlantic slave trade. The law was named after the Socialist Party Member of Parliament for French Guiana, Christiane Taubira, and acknowledged that the Atlantic slave trade and slavery were crimes against humanity.
28. Doris L Garraway, ‘Memory as Reparation? The Politics of Remembering Slavery in France from Abolition to the Loi Taubira’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 11(3), 2008, pp 365-386
29. Sébastien Ledoux, ‘“Devoir de mémoire”: The Post-Colonial Path of a Post-National Memory in France’, National Identities, 153, 2013, pp 239-256.
30. ‘The practice of poor families giving away children to wealthier acquaintances or relatives is known in the native Creole as “restavek,” from the French words “rester avec”, or “to stay with.”’ Jim Loney, ‘Haiti “Restavek” Tradition Called Child Slavery’, Reuters, 18 February 2010, www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/18/us-quake-haiti-restaveks-idUSTRE61H3F920100218.
31. Chris Ryan, ‘Dark Tourism: An Introduction’, in Chris Ryan, Stephen Page and Michelle Aicken (eds), Taking Tourism to the Limits: Issues, Concepts and Managerial Perspectives, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005, pp 187-190+188.
32. http://memoryvillage.blogspot.co.uk/ (accessed 21 October 2013).
33. Katharina Schramm, ‘Slave Route Projects: Tracing the Heritage of Slavery in Ghana’, in Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands (eds), Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa, London: Left Coast Press, 2007, pp 71-98, pp 82-84 and
34. Lauren Adrover and Christina McMahon, ‘Naming Ceremony and River Crossing’, The Drama Review 54(2), 2010, pp 155-163, pp 161-163.
35. Schramm, ‘Slave Route Projects’, p 84.
36. www.cg971.fr/images/stories/CULTURE_ET_PATRIMOINE/RouteEsclave/PDF/livre. pdf(accessed 21 October 2013). It has subsequently been supplemented by a major new project, Mémorial ACTe, an undertaking identified by François Hollande in his presidential address at the French annual commemoration of abolition in 2013 as part of the country’s symbolic reparations for slavery.
37. www.crguadeloupe.fr/upload/documents/Macte12P.pdf (accessed 21 October 2013).
38. Yarimar Bonilla, ‘GUADELOUPE IS OURS: The Prefigurative Politics of the Mass Strike in the French Antilles’, Interventions 12(1), 2010, pp 125-137.
39. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
40. Chamoiseau, Un dimanche au cachot, Paris: Gallimard, 2007.
41. Olga Idriss Davis, ‘The Door of No Return: Reclaiming the Past through the Rhetoric of Pilgrimage’, The Western Journal of Black Studies 21(3), 1997, pp 156-161
42. Paulla A Ebron, ‘Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics’, American Ethnologist 26(4), 1999, pp 910-932.
43. Rasul A Mowatt and Charles H Chancellor, ‘Visiting Death and Life: Dark Tourism and Slave Castles’, Annals of Tourism Research 38(4), 2011, pp 1410-1434+1414.
44. Mowatt and Chancellor, ‘Visiting Death and Life’, p 1417.
45. Sandra L Richards, ‘What Is to Be Remembered? Tourism to Ghana’s Slave Castle-Dungeons’, Theatre Journal 57(4), 2005, pp 617-637+623
46. Mowatt and Chancellor, ‘Visiting Death and Life’, p 1428.
47. Rice, ‘Museums, Memorials and Plantation Houses’, p 225.
48. Ibrahima Thiaw, ‘Every House Has a Story: The Archaeology of Gorée Island, Sénégal’, in Boubacar Barry, Elisée Akpo Soumonni and Livio Sansone (eds), Africa, Brazil and the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008, pp 45-62+45.
49. Jean Delcourt, La Turbulente Histoire de Gorée, Dakar: Editions Clairafrique, 1982.
50. Thiaw, ‘Every House Has a Story’; Djibril Samb (ed), Gorée et l’esclavage. Actes du Séminaire sur Gorée dans la traite atlantique: mythes et réalités, Gorée, 7-8 avril 1997, Initiations et Études Africaines 38, Dakar: Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar; IFAN, 1997 and Hamady Bocoum and Bernard Toulier, ‘La fabrication du Patrimoine: l’exemple de Gorée (Sénégal)’, In Situ 20, 2013, http://insitu.revues.org/10303.
51. Martin J Medhurst, ‘George W. Bush at Goree Island: American Slavery and the Rhetoric of Redemption’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 96(3), 2010, pp 257-277
52. Michael Ralph, ‘“Crimes of History”: Senegalese Soccer and the Forensics of Slavery’, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Cultures and Society 9(3), 2007, pp 193-222.
53. Gorée is the starting point of Rachid Bouchareb’s third feature film, Little Senegal (2001), an exploration of its protagonist’s own transatlantic journey from Senegal to North America. After many years as a tourist guide in the House of Slaves in Senegal, Alloune decides to travel to the USA, in search of traces of his enslaved ancestors transported to the New World two centuries earlier. Travelling from Charleston to Little Senegal, New York, he engages in inverse roots tourism, but also seeks an ideal vision of an African family, only to discover strong tensions between the African and African-American communities.
54. Emmanuel de Roux, ‘Le mythe de la Maison des esclaves qui résiste à la réalité’, Le Monde, 27 December 1996.
55. The thread of exchanges regarding Gorée, including Curtin and Mbembe’s contributions, is available at: www.h-net.org/~africa/threads/goree.html (accessed 21 October 2013).
56. Nicola Frith, ‘“Working Through” Slavery: The Limits of Shared Memories in Contemporary France’, Irish Journal of Francophone Studies 13, 2013, pp 17-39.
57. Lubaina Himid, ‘What Are Monuments for? Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map’, www.jellypavilion.info/ paris__london (accessed 21 October 2013).
58. Alan Rice, ‘Tracing Slavery and Abolition’s Routes and Viewing Inside the Invisible: The Monumental Landscape and the African Atlantic’, Atlantic Studies 8(2), 2011, pp 253-274.
59. Forsdick, ‘The Panthéon’s Empty Plinth: Commemorating Slavery in Contemporary France’, Atlantic Studies 9(3), 2012, pp 279-297
60. Charles Forsdick, ‘Monuments, Memorials, Museums: Slavery Commemoration and the Search for Alternative Archival Spaces’, Francosphères 3(1), 2014, pp 81-98.
61. Christine Chivallon, ‘Resurgence of the Memory of Slavery in France: Issues and Significations of a Public and Academic Debate’, in Ana Lucia Araujo (ed), Living History: Encountering the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge ScholarsPublishing, 2010, pp 83-97.
62. Renaud Hourcade, ‘Un musée d’histoire face àla question raciale: l’International Slavery Museum de Liverpool’, Genèses 92, 2013, pp 6-27.
63. Renaud Hourcade, ‘Commemorating a Guilty Past: The Politics of Memory in the French Former Slave Trade Cities’, in Ana Lucia Araujo (ed), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp 124-140
64. Christine Chivallon, ‘Construction d’une mémoire relative à l’esclavage et instrumentalisation politique: le cas des anciens ports négriers de Bordeaux et Bristol’, Les Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire 4, 2002, pp 176-203.
65. Stéphane Valognes, ‘Slave-Trade Memory Politics in Nantes and Bordeaux: Urban Fabric between Screen and Critical Landscape’, Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 2(2), 2013. pp 151-171+152.
66. Cited in Frith, ‘“Working Through” Slavery’, pp 33-34.
67. Silke Arnold-de Simine, Mediating Memory in the Museum: Empathy, Trauma, Nostalgia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp 89-113.
68. Stephen Small, ‘Still Back of the Big House: Slave Cabins and Slavery in Southern Heritage Tourism’, Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment 153, 2013, pp 405-423.
69. Emmanuelle Chérel, Le Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage de Nantes: enjeux et controverses (1998-2012), Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012, pp 41-77
70. Valognes, ‘Slave- Trade Memory Politics in Nantes and Bordeaux’, pp 164-166.
71. Christine Chivallon, L’émergence récente de la mémoire de l’esclavage dans l’espace public: enjeux et significations’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 52(4a), 2005, pp 64-81+67.
72. Frith, ‘“Working Through” Slavery’, p 29.
73. Frith, ‘“Working Through” Slavery’, p 31.
74. John Richard Oldfield, ‘Repairing Historical Wrongs: Public History and Transatlantic Slavery’, Social and Legal Studies 21(2), 2012, pp 243-255+250-251.
75. Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle: le commerce atlantique et l’esclavage, Bordeaux: Le Festin; Musée d’Aquitaine, 2010.
76. There is a need to situate these initiatives in their wider national contexts, in relation to the histories of the representation of the minority groups they include, as well as in the light of ideological approaches to cultural and social diversity. The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool was established, for instance, in the context of the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, whereas the development of the galleries in Bordeaux and Nantes is situated firmly in the post-Taubira era.
77. Achille Mbembe, ‘L’esclave, figure de l’anti-musée?’, in Françoise Vergès (ed), Exposer l’esclavage: méthodologies et partiques, special issue of Africultures 91, 2013, pp 37-40.
78. Stephen Small, ‘Slavery, Colonialism and Their Legacy in the Eurocentric University: The Case of Britain and the Netherlands’, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 10(1), 2012, pp 69-80.
79. Peter Hinks, ‘Mémorial de l’Abolition de l’Esclavage’, exhibition reviews, Journal of American History 100(1), 2013, pp 150-155+151.
80. Hinks reads this element, ‘fired in glass’, as a reflection of ‘the medium in Kongo cosmology that opens the way to the deceased, the gods, and what lies below surfaces’, in ‘Mémorial de l’Abolition de l’Esclavage’, p 151.
81. Julian Bonder, ‘On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments and Memorials’, Places 12(1), 2009, pp 61-69+65.
82. Maria Pia Di Bella, ‘Walking Memory: Berlin’s “Holocaust Trail”’, Journeys 13(2), 2012, pp 55-70.
83. Frith, ‘“Working Through” Slavery’, p 35
84. Hinks, ‘Mémorial de l’Abolition de l’Esclavage’, p 154. A number of others are in preparation, including the Mémorial ACTe in Guadeloupe.
85. John G Beech, ‘The Marketing of Slavery Heritage in the United Kingdom’, International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration 2(3-4), 2001, pp 85-106+103-104.
86. Edward T Linenthal, ‘Epilogue: Reflections’, in James Oliver Horton and Lois E Horton (eds), Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp 213-224+224
87. Rice, ‘Museums, Memorials and Plantation Houses’, p 246.