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The Myth of Americanness: Tour Narratives of Laura, A Creole Plantation

This paper examines tour narratives of Laura: A Creole Plantation in Louisiana as an “invented tradition” of the nationalistic project for consolidating the American identity. With marketing efforts to create an authentically satisfying tourist experience, history is transformed into a cultural heritage while past memories are reassembled and reaccommodated. This mediated version of a tradition becomes important in the construction of a national identity. This paper proposes to dig up seemingly invisible ideological effects of heritage tour narratives. The tour narratives of Laura: Creole Plantation produces the myth of Americanness which seems to state that racial others were allowed to be an American citizen. When Laura rejects the traditional, immoderate Creole world and chooses to live as a modern, liberated American woman, this exotification of Creoles renders the Other invisible and silenced. Thus, a complexity of tour narratives embedded in the heritage site points to problematics in that a constructed heritage instills nationalism but silences the history of slavery and racial discrimination.