Surrogation and the politics of remembering slavery in Savannah, Georgia (USA)

The Civil Rights Movement and the Future of the National Park System in a Racially Diverse America

“…It has been found that there is some level of discomfort among whites if photographs of parks show a majority of black visitors (Stanfield et al 2005). Even former plantations worked by slaves have been whitewashed, with slave quarters and living conditions either not mentioned or presented in a positive light (Eichstedt & Small 2002 Butler et al 2008;Alderman 2010). Given that the overwhelming majority of park units are visited nearly entirely by whites, it can be expected that park interpretation and visitor facilities will not only reflect this demographic groups' needs, expectations, and desires, but do so in ways that renders this 'whiteness' invisible to this group.…”

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research

“…Legg (2005, p. 195), too, has identified how the Gurdwara site in Delhi 'functioned as a site of counter-memory not just in terms of discourse and the archive, but in terms of a local and distinctly spatial construction of memory against forgetting'. Alderman's analysis of efforts to establish sites of counter-memory to the enslaved in Savannah, Georgia in the US highlights how finding appropriate wording to encapsulate the trauma of slavery for African Americans lay at the heart of the struggle to remember (or forget) this painful episode (Alderman, 2010). Words, too, lay at the epicentre of disputes over Omagh's endeavours to publicly mark the trauma of the bombing, and, while the use of particular words provided healing for some, they became a source of dissent for others (Johnson, 2012).…”

Narratives of the Mother Road: Geographic Themes Along Route 66

“…Others have assessed the commemorative landscape and the representation of heritage that is projected to observers at monuments and other historic sites. Significant work that unpacks heritage texts in the collective memory includes how Americans commemorate (or choose to forget) sites of violence and tragedy (Foote ), memorialization of the civil rights movement in the American South (Dwyer and Alderman ), how the controversial past is remembered and forgotten in Berlin, Germany (Till ), the commemorative landscape at a Savannah, Georgia, monument remembering slavery (Alderman ), thematic representations of American Indians along the Great Plains section of the Lewis and Clark Trail (Blake ), and an analysis of the uneven process of accurately commemorating an Oklahoma land run (DeLyser ). Key to this research is an analysis of what narratives are remembered, what is ignored or forgotten, which social actors and ideologies shape the commemorative landscape, and where sites of public memory are located.…”