Representations of slavery

Adopting collective memory as the conceptual framework, this study sought to explore dominant narratives of a publicly owned former slave plantation opened to tourists. Textual analysis of promotional material revealed prominent frames through which tourists are invited to perceive the contemporary rearticulation of the plantation. The findings revealed a process of textual semantic prosody wherein the dominant narratives enacted a rhetoric of distance from the institution of slavery and achieved a discourse of proximity to a progressive account. The plantation is viewed as a mnemonic device endowed with political dimensions that reinforce hegemonic ideologies and engender remembering while concurrently inducing forgetting.