National Forgetting in the American South: White Innocence and the Racial Violence of Historic Places
Bd.20,Nr.2(2023)
Street Politics. Space, Identities, Memories, and Conflicts from the Sidewalk
Abstract: Using a cultural landscape approach, this study examines all National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) sites in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, located in the southern United States. The NRHP recognizes sites representative of “our” national heritage by listing them on this registry. From analysis of these records and related archival materials and observations garnered from field visits to select historic sites in the parish, this study interrogates the officially-designated memorial landscape of the American South. We find that preservation and re-use practices of NRHP-sites have engaged in racialized “purposeful forgetting” (Roberts 2020) and reinforced power relations while enabling the appropriation of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) labor and culture.
cultural landscapes; memorial landscapes; historic preservation; National Historic Register (US); American South; African American Studies; Louisiana
Alderman, Derek H. 2000. “A Street Fit for a King: Naming Places and Commemoration in the American South.” The Professional Geographer 52(4): 672–684.
Allen, Douglas, Mary Lawhon, and Joseph Pierce. 2019. “Placing Race: On the Resonance of Place with Black Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 43(6): 1001–1019.
Associated Press. 2013. “Many Residents of West Monroe, Louisiana are Supporting Duck Dynasty Star Phil Robertson, After His Controversial Statements About Gays and African Americans. Others Call Robertson’s Statements Devisive and hateful.”
Associates, Brian & Wishneff. 2018. “Miller Roy Building.” Retrieved November 22, 2020 (https://wishneff.com/project/miller-roy-building/).
Bonds, Anne. 2013. “Racing Economic Geography: The Place of Race in Economic Geography: Racing Economic Geography.” Geography Compass 7(6): 398–411. doi: 10.1111/gec3.12049
Boyd, Robert L. 2001. “Black Enterprise in the Retail Trade During the Early Twentieth Century.” Sociological Focus 34(3): 241–250.
Brahinsky, Rachel, Jade Sasser, and Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern. 2014. “Race, Space, and Nature: An Introduction and Critique.” Antipode 46(5): 1135–1152. doi: 10.1111/anti.12109
Bright, Candace Forbes, Derek H. Alderman, and David L. Butler. 2018. “Tourist Plantation Owners and Slavery: A Complex Relationship.” Current Issues in Tourism 21(15): 1743–1760.
Brown, David and Clive Webb. 2007. Race in the American South. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Brown, Kirk. [Melanin MeetUps]. 2020 (March 14). “Memorializing Plantations to Heal.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb4Ju2c-Ahw).
Buckley, James Michael and Donna Graves. 2016. “Tangible Benefits from Intangible Resources: Using Social and Cultural History to Plan Neighborhood Futures.” Journal of the American Planning Association 82(2): 152–166.
Carter, Perry, David L. Butler, and Derek H. Alderman. 2014. “The House That Story Built: The Place of Slavery in Plantation Museum Narratives.” The Professional Geographer 66(4): 547–557.
Cep, Casey. 2020. “The Fight to Preserve African American History.” New Yorker, February 3, 2020 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-fight-to-preserve-african-american-history).
The Department of State. 1854. Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants of and Statistics of the United States. Available from IPUMS.
DeBow, J. D. B. 1841. Statistical View of the United States. Available from IPUMS.
Dwyer, Owen J. 2002. “Location, Politics, and the Production of Civil Rights Memorial Landscapes.” Urban Geography 23(1): 31–56.
Equal Justice Initiative. 2017. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. Retrieved September 12, 2023 (https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org).
Eyerman, Ron. 2004. “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.” Pp. 60–111 in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser, and P. Sztompka. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 2016. “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3(1): 163–178. doi: 10.1086/685814
Harvey, Gordon E. 2007. Historic Ouachita Parish. San Antonio, TX: HPN Books.
Hawthorne, Camilla. 2019. “Black Matters Are Spatial Matters: Black Geographies for the Twenty-first Century.” Geography Compass 13(11): e12468. doi: 10.1111/gec3.12468
Heynen, Nik. 2016. “Urban Political Ecology II: The Abolitionist Century.” Progress in Human Geography 40(6): 839–845. doi: 10.1177/0309132515617394
Holladay, Holly Willson. 2018. “Reckoning with the ‘Redneck’: Duck Dynasty and the Boundaries of Morally Appropriate Whiteness.” Southern Communication Journal 83(4): 256–266.
Howard, Peter. 2011. An Introduction to Landscape. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jackson, Joyce Marie. 2014. “Louisiana Cultures.” Pp. 36–71 in The Louisiana Field Guide, A Creole Mosaic, edited by R. Orgera and W. Parent. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
Kinkead, Conley. 2020. The Memorial Landscape and Race: Examining National Register of Historic Places Sites in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. Master’s thesis, Morgan State University.
Leggs, Brent, Kerri Rubman, and Byrd Wood. 2012. Preserving African American Historic Places. Washington, DC: National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Logtown Plantation. 2020. “Logtown Plantation: Where Hospitality is Key.” Retrieved November 28, 2020 (https://www.logtownplantation.com/).
Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism. 2020. “Forms and Processes.” Retrieved November 28, 2020 (https://www.crt.state.la.us/cultural-development/historic-preservation/national-register/process-and-forms/index).
Louisiana Housing Corporation. 2020. “Board of Directors Agenda Item #10.” Retrieved December 2, 2020 (https://www.lhc.la.gov/hubfs/Document%20Libraries/Board%20Meeting%20Archives/2020/June%202020/Board%20Meeting%20Minutes%20-%20June%2010,%202020.pdf)
Jacksonville Metro. 2015. "Erasing the Past. What Sugar Hill Was." Jacksonville Metro, February 1, 2015 (https://www.metrojacksonville.com).
McCarthy, Lauren. 2023. "Tulsa Reaches Breakthrough in Search for Massacre Victims." N.Y. Times, April 15, 2023 (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/us/tulsa-race-massacre-murders-dna.html).
McHenry, James O. 2010. The Indigenous Black People of Monroe, Louisiana and the Surrounding Cities, Towns, and Villages: A 100 Year Documentary. Xlibris Corporation.
McKittrick, Katherine. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12(8): 947–963. doi: 10.1080/14649365.2011.624280
Monument Lab. 2021. National Monument Audit. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Mitchell, Katharyne. 2003. “Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory.” Urban Geography 24(5): 442–459.
National Park Service. 2019. “How to List a Property.” Retrieved November 20, 2020 (https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/how-to-list-a-property.htm).
National Park Service. 2020. “National Register of Historic Places (informational brochure).” Retrieved November 20, 2020 ().
National Park Service. 2020. “What is the National Register of Historic Places?” Retrieved November 20, 2020 (https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/what-is-the-national-register.htm).
National Trust for Historic Preservation, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (accessed from https://savingplaces.org).
O’Sullivan, Shannon E. M. 2016. “‘Playing “Redneck’: White Masculinity and Working-Class Performance on Duck Dynasty.” The Journal of Popular Culture 49(2):367–384.
Pulido, Laura. 2022. “Cultural Memory, White Innocence, and United States Territory: The 2022 Urban Geography Plenary Lecture.” Urban Geography 44(6): 1059–1083.
Roberts, Andrea R. 2020. “Haunting as Agency: A Critical Cultural Landscape Approach to Making Black Labor Visible in Sugar Land, Texas.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 19 (1): 210–244.
Robinson, Cedric J., Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Damien Sojoyner, and Robin D. G. Kelley. 2021. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Third Edition. The University of North Carolina Press.
Robinson, Ian. 2022. “Historic Monroe Building Part of Multimillion-dollar Project.” Monroe News-Star, February 28, 2022 ().
Rymer, Russ. 1998. “Integration’s Casualties.” New York Times Magazine, 48 (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/01/magazine/integrations-casualties.html).
Schein, Richard H. 1997. “The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene.” Annuals of the Association of American Geographers 87(4): 660–680.
Schein, Richard H. 2009. “A Methodological Framework for Interpreting Ordinary Landscapes: Lexington, Kentucky’s Courthouse Square.” Geographical Review 99(3): 377–402.
Schein, Richard H. 2010. “Cultural Landscapes.” Pp. 222–240 in Research Methods in Geography: A Critical Introduction, edited by B. Gomez and J. P. Jones III. West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell.
Thompson, Edgar Tristram and Sidney W. Mintz. 2010. The Plantation. University of Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
United States Department of the Interior. 1980. “National Register of Historic Places Inventory — Nomination Form, Logtown Plantation.” (https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/debafad6-6c9d-4818-ad4c-3b2e35b98f20/).
United States Department of the Interior. 2011. “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Miller-Roy Building.” ().
United Way of Northeast Louisiana. 2023. “Local Developers, Agencies Breathe New Life into Historic Miller-Roy Building, Reopening Feb. 2.” Press release, January 26, 2023 (http://www.unitedwaynela.org).
Walker, Amelie A. 1998. “Earliest Mound Site.” Archaeology 51(1): 26–27.
Werner, Marion. 2011. “Coloniality and the Contours of Global Production in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.” Antipode 43(5): 1573–1597.
Wood, Peter H. 2003. Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Copyright (c) 2024 Conley Kinkead, Daniel Campo, Dillon Mahmoudi