RHI Webinar: ''The Embodied Absence of the Past: Tourism’s Transformative Role in Slavery Heritage Narratives''

Abstract:
 In an increasingly globalised world constituted by multicultural and plural societies, the stories we tell of the past can bring us together or push us further apart. Across many European countries there is an ongoing struggle with telling the contentious stories of slavery and colonialisation. Tourism practices and performances can play a transformative role in this process. In this presentation I develop the conceptual notion of the embodied absence of the past, referring to the physical presence yet narrative absence of the shared history and role of people of African-descent in European societies, showing how tourism makes visible and challenges this notion. I seek to illustrate the political and cultural work of tourism in producing slavery heritage spaces and the ensuing transformations of contested narratives about the past. This presentation is based on an ongoing NWO Veni project exploring how tourism transforms and narrates the history of slavery in the Ghana-Suriname-Netherlands triangle. In particular, I focus on the ways in which site-specific tourism practices of guided tours at the Elmina Slave Castle and Dungeons in Ghana, the guided plantation tours in Suriname, and the guided walking and boat tours in Amsterdam allow new narratives of ‘black presence’ to emerge, challenge and make incursions into the grand narrative of Dutch nationhood, identity and belonging. Herein lies the transformative cultural and political work of tourism as it actively compresses time-space by linking these diverse sites, stories and people into a coherent narrative.