My presentation uses visual-material rhetorical analysis (Propen 2012) to search the Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, SC, in an attempt to find where and how the "legacies of slavery" are – or aren't – visually presented. I wish I could include the picture I took during my research visit to Magnolia Plantation, of two baby food jars – one filled with brown rice, one filled with white rice. The tour guide who narrated my visit to the slave cabin area, held up these jars as she discussed the work of the slave victims. The lids of the jars even had brightly colored kiddie style pictures of a cat and a frog.
In order to address the conference goal of reaching a better understanding of the "unworked-through legacies of the American past," my presentation focuses on asking: What effect might this type of visual, the baby food jars, have on visitors to Magnolia Plantation? What are the material effects, the consequences, on visitors as they navigate a memorial space such as a plantation site and find something as serious as work done by slaves in rice fields being presented in baby food jars? I analyze elements of the slave narrative in relation to other elements found in this memorial space, such as the iconic plantation house, in terms of sequence, distance, depth and perception. For example, for the slave cabin tour, one of several available tours, visitors must take a tram to an area located quite a distance from the other tours, all of which are accessible from the central area of the tourist site. By examining the arrangement of instances when slave elements are seen, we can begin to understand how slaves are seen – or not seen – and how racialized thinking is both formed and reinforced, which creates beliefs within the viewer that deny cultural oppression and support exclusion.
At plantations, the slave is the object unseen. Hum (2007) builds on Metz's concept of scopic regime, the "absence of the object seen," to analyze images in films to show how this way of seeing the world "denies the existence of deep [racial/cultural] differences that result from historical oppressions and exclusions" (108). We see the effects of the scopic regime in what Hum (2015) labels the "racialized gaze," which occurs when "designers may unwittingly sustain practices of racialization and perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions" (192). The slave narrative is most often hidden or excluded at heritage plantations. If visual elements that present the slave narrative, such as slave cabins, are located quite a distance from the other memorial elements, where does that place the importance of the slave narrative within the visual narrative being presented at Magnolia Plantation, and what are the material effects of this visual narrative?
My presentation focuses on these examples, as well as others, to bring attention to the value placed on slave narratives at Magnolia Plantation as understood through the visual presentation of these elements.
