Journal of Hate Studies
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).
Recommended Citation
Cunningham Breede, Deborah; Davis, Christine S.; and Warren-Findlow, Jan
(2016)
"Absence, Revision, and the Other: Rhetorics of South Carolina Antebellum Tourism Sites,"
Journal of Hate Studies: Vol. 13:
Iss.
1, Article 3.
DOI: 10.33972/jhs.132
Available at:
https://repository.gonzaga.edu/jhs/vol13/iss1/3
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