Absence, Revision, and the Other: Rhetorics of South Carolina Antebellum Tourism Sites

Abstract

The production of tourism situated within an antebellum history is fraught with tension. Moralities, power conflicts, and identities clash as tourist production based on historical apartheid in the United States proliferates and becomes more popular and profitable. Southern states such as South Carolina are particularly subject to such concerns. As one of the original thirteen colonies, South Carolina was a profitable participant in the plantation system, a system built upon rhetorics of absence, revision, and hatred. These rhetorical constructions effectively created a view of enslaved Africans that "othered" and minimized them and erased their presence, importance, and humanity. The resulting ethnocentrism, racism, and oppression still exists today within the American cultural and political landscapes. South Carolina-also the veteran of major revolts, wars, secessions, and occupations throughout its history-was a slave state for its first two hundred years. During these colonial and antebellum periods, its enslaved primarily black population outnumbered white people by the ratio of four to one (Lockley and Doddington 2012). Today, South Carolina offers a popular tourist vista dotted with homesteads, plantations, parks, battlegrounds, national historic sites, markets, and museums all originating from and documenting our nation's "peculiar institution" of slavery (Calhoun 1837). Within this cultural landscape filled with historical reproduction, a visitor might expect to find the presence of blacks-enslaved and free-permeating the presentations, performances, contexts, messages, and documentations of life in the South; such is not always the case. Communication about the experience of slavery varies widely among tourism locales within the state and is often marked more by a rhetoric of erasure, of an absence, than of a participation filled with power, production, and presence. The instances of thoughtful, varied, significant, and historically accurate inclusions of the experience of slavery on and within these historical sites contrast sharply with the absences and inaccuracies that characterize some of the other tourism offerings. In this critical rhetorical analysis of a series of tourism locales, we present and theorize rhetorics of absence and revision across multiple sites in coastal South Carolina, from Georgetown south to Charleston. Bisected by U.S. 17, this former "King's Highway" was the only land route serving 17 18