Jewish Heritage Europe coordinator Ruth Ellen Gruber has had an article published on the web site of Drayton Hall, a preserved plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, dealing with several issues related to (Jewish) heritage preservation and tourism.
Called “Dark Tourism: A comparative Perspective,” the article reflects on “how buildings and other physical sites can be talismans and touchstones, opening the way into memory and history.”
In this context, she considers parallels between how Jewish heritage, culture and history are preserved and presented in Eastern Europe (including the Holocaust), and how African American heritage, culture and history are preserved and presented in the southern United States, at plantations such as Drayton Hall.
From the Jewish perspective, visiting Jewish historical sites in post-Holocaust, post-Communist Europe can be a very positive experience, emphasizing Jewish life, history and culture; but the experience also falls under what is now known as Dark Tourism—tourism to sites of what we can call “negative” history, “negative” experience: death, destruction, war.
Sites of slavery also fall under Dark Tourism, though this aspect of a historic site (such as a plantation or genteel antebellum home) often becomes masked, elided, or simply footnoted in the presentation of beautiful buildings and gardens for tourist consumption.
Much of this boils down to “who controls the narrative”—and to whom is the narrative directed [including] issues such as the point of view of interpretation and interpreters; messages and signage; how the same place can have different symbolic meanings and generate different memories for different people.
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