Reframing the Remains: An Infrastructural Remediation of North Carolina Plantations

Reframing the Remains: An Infrastructural Remediation of North Carolina Plantations

Every year, millions of Americans visit national parks, museums, monuments, and cultural landmarks, experiencing guided walks, tours, exhibits, signage, and artifacts, each focused on interpretation of the important site. Historic plantations face unique challenges as locations of racialized memory, and historic interpretation of these sites hinges upon engaging communities and visitors in meaningful conversations, specifically centering around the historical artifacts and cultural sites’ embodiment of racialized memory. This materialist media genealogy of plantation infrastructure examines the complex narratives of three pre-Civil War plantations in North Carolina, detailing aspects of memory remediation. Plantation sites move from their original role as memory containers of working plantations to their reimagining as transmitters and broadcasters of memory for contemporary visitors. In this translation, critical questions emerge about the struggle for narrative space of enslaved voices in the remediation of plantation sites. Produced as an ESRI StoryMap, this project scrutinizes plantation sites’ deliveries of both enslaved persons and planter narratives and offers important reflections on the changing nature of Antebellum South historical sites.