By Elaina Myers
The study of rhetoric and public memory is interested in understanding the ways that arguments about the past are made and shared among a group of people. Public memory is related to history, but it is more contested and changeable because it focuses on the ways in which history is memorialized in public spaces. UW-Eau Claire Professor Dr. Cathy Rex and UW-Milwaukee Professor Dr. Shevaun Watson address these studies of heritage tourism in their first edited scholarly collection, Public Memory, Race and Heritage Tourism of Early America, published in October of 2021. This collection includes contributions from a diverse group of humanities scholars that offer their own research and expertise into all eight chapters.
“Very often historic sites of early America, where instances of race or racialized violence occurred, are discussed through the lens of tourism studies or discussed completely theoretically,” Dr. Rex explained in a recent interview. “We are trying to pull multiple threads together where humanities professors are writing about it from their different disciplines while also weaving in that tourist experience.”
Dr. Rex contributed a chapter to the book focused on her experiences traveling to Jamaica with students and visiting Rose Hall, whose history involving white enslavers appeared to be glamorized and romanticized for profit.
“Rose Hall gives candlelight tours, people get married, and they hold beautiful receptions and luncheons, and all of that would go away if they were truthful,” Dr. Rex explained. “This is the type of tension that a lot of the essays in this book unpack.”
For many, early American issues of race seem far removed from those who don’t have deep historical family ties from the period. But Dr. Rex and Dr. Watson’s edited collection reminds readers that these issues remain relevant, and vital, today. Their collection confronts many difficult truths in America’s early history, which will interest students, academics, and those interested in forming a deeper understanding of the connections between tourism in America.
Dr. Watson contributed the afterword of the book aimed to tie all the chapters together by highlighting the connections between public memory in the past and its effects on the present. She drew inspiration from the current political system, poetry, and the Dylan Roof massacre to start this discussion from different angles.
“A lot of people argue that public memory is a really important route to racial reconciliation and [that] different kinds of representation of the past helps with richer understandings of the present,” Dr. Watson said. “What we see in our public landscape about the past has a huge impact, that isn’t even palpable to us, unless we really think about it, and I feel it is something worth thinking about.”
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