CFP: Heritage Tourism and Race in Early America

Panel for the Society of Early Americanists’ Biennial Conference

University of Notre Dame

June 5-8, 2025

Early American heritage sites such as the various monuments, homes, museums, settlements, forts, etc. that dot the landscape are marketed to contemporary audiences as authentic historical or “heritage” tourist experiences while they often simultaneously ignore the complex racial dynamics that undergird their existence. These sites are charged with carefully balancing the bureaucratic, economic, and social policies that govern their operational successes and popularity with visitors alongside their responsibility to educate those visitors and authentically represent their site’s history. Very often these threads co-exist in fraught and complex ways that ultimately distort historic reality in favor of “safe ideas” that will continue to encourage active tourism and profit, particularly at sites that engage legacies of imperialism, racism, genocide, and oppression. At best, experiences with such heritage sites leave visitors with a false sense of historic “authenticity” and intellectual edification. At worst, they reinforce ideas of Anglo/Western supremacy and erase or sterilize the racist frameworks of imperial history within the Americas.

This panel seeks participants from a variety of disciplines and theoretical frameworks as well as contributions from scholars both within academia (early American literature/studies, Public History, Rhetoric [English or Communication], Tourism Studies, Geography, etc.) and the public sector (Public Historians, Museum Curators, Preservationists, Archivists, etc.). We seek proposals that examine and unpack the complexities and tensions of representing history and memories in a popular, public way, particularly at lesser-known heritage sites from before about 1830 within North America and the Caribbean that have historical and racial significance.

Send 250-word abstracts (including a title for your paper) and a brief CV to Cathy Rex, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (rexcj@uwec.edu) by October 27, 2024.