Postcarding of the Past

Moreover, when local histories do become the object of preservation and commemoration they are often subjected to what Richard Price (1998) describes as the “postcarding of the past,” through which the past is sanitized, defanged, and stripped of any potentially subversive meaning. Through this process “memories of oppression, inequality, and struggle are replaced by nostalgia, complicity and celebration” (Price 1998:184).9 This is most evident in the recent proliferation of plantation museums and plantation resorts in the French Antilles where former slave barracks have been transformed into luxe accommodations for tourists, while their underlying history is reduced to a technological account of sugar, tobacco, coffee, and rum production—with little discussion of the social and economic relations that underpinned these industries.

Yarimar Bonilla (The Past is Made by Walking)