Arts, Faculty of
Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for
DSpace
UBCV
Smalley, Keira
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
This thesis introduces race into the academic conversation around dark tourism, where it has hitherto been overlooked or ignored. It highlights the extent to which phenomenologies of whiteness (following Ahmed, 2007) are supported and facilitated at racialised sites of dark tourism, through methods of ‘phantoming’ (enhancing or falsifying emplaced resonances of memory). Through two case studies I identify two distinct, though related, techniques of site management that accommodate the white body into racialised space - ‘narrative becoming’, and ‘narrative containment’. First, I lay out academic foundations for my fields of study through a discussion of dark tourism literature, highlighting key debates that relate to race - authenticity, morality, commercialisation, ‘otherness’ - but never quite name it. I also discuss psychoanalytical theory on the spectral as an interruption on the present, before outlining my own definition of the phantom as the physical resonances of place-memory. In my case study centred on Prison Escape game in The Netherlands, I theorize ‘narrative becoming’ as a process through which the white tourist self is offered a temporary experience of stereotyped Black criminality. I analyse the branding and marketing of the site to reveal how the prison is abstracted from geographical space, allowing it to become a playground of alternative desire for the white-lensed tourist. In my second case study, the reading of ghosts becomes much more literal. The Myrtles plantation in Louisiana, USA is touted as one of America’s “most haunted homes”. Here I read the site contrapunctually in order to highlight the various ways in which issues of race, white supremacy and anti-Black violence are omitted from the story told through the site’s ghosts. I frame this silencing as ‘narrative containment’, showing how the site’s managers control the narrative in ways that allow them to retain a public image of pure-intentioned, even honourable, heritage preservation. I do not reconceptualise dark tourism away from its association with death and towards racially-charged encounters, but rather argue that tourists, site managers and dark tourism scholars must begin to consider what it means for sites of racialised suffering to be marketed towards a white audience as ‘attraction’.
Raising the Spectre of Race: Phantoming andPhenomenologies of Whiteness in Dark TourismbyKeira SmalleyB.A. Hons., University of Warwick, 2013A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THEDEGREE OFMASTER OF ARTSinTHE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES(GENDER, RACE, SEXUALITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE)THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA(Vancouver)December 2021© Keira Smalley, 2021The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduateand Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled:Raising the Spectre of Race: Phantoming and Phenomenologies of Whiteness in Dark Tourismsubmitted by Keira Smalley in partial fulfillment of the requirements forthe degreeof Master of Artsin Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social JusticeExamining Committee:Dr John Paul Catungal, Assistant Professor, Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBCSupervisorDr Janice Stewart, Associate Dean, Senior Instructor, Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBCSupervisory Committee MemberiiAbstractThis thesis introduces race into the academic conversation around dark tourism, where it hashitherto been overlooked or ignored. It highlights the extent to which phenomenologies ofwhiteness (following Ahmed, 2007) are supported and facilitated at racialised sites of darktourism, through methods of ‘phantoming’ (enhancing or falsifying emplaced resonances ofmemory). Through two case studies I identify two distinct, though related, techniques of sitemanagement that accommodate the white body into racialised space - ‘narrative becoming’,and ‘narrative containment’.First, I lay out academic foundations for my fields of study through a discussion of darktourism literature, highlighting key debates that relate to race - authenticity, morality,commercialisation, ‘otherness’ - but never quite name it. I also discuss psychoanalytical theoryon the spectral as an interruption on the present, before outlining my own definition of thephantom as the physical resonances of place-memory.In my case study centred on Prison Escape game in The Netherlands, I theorize ‘narrativebecoming’ as a process through which the white tourist self is offered a temporary experienceof stereotyped Black criminality. I analyse the branding and marketing of the site to reveal howthe prison is abstracted from geographical space, allowing it to become a playground ofalternative desire for the white-lensed tourist.In my second case study, the reading of ghosts becomes much more literal. The Myrtlesplantation in Louisiana, USA is touted as one of America’s “most haunted homes”. Here I readiiithe site contrapunctually in order to highlight the various ways in which issues of race, whitesupremacy and anti-Black violence are omitted from the story told through the site’s ghosts. Iframe this silencing as ‘narrative containment’, showing how the site’s managers control thenarrative in ways that allow them to retain a public image of pure-intentioned, evenhonourable, heritage preservation.I do not reconceptualise dark tourism away from its association with death and towardsracially-charged encounters, but rather argue that tourists, site managers and dark tourismscholars must begin to consider what it means for sites of racialised suffering to be marketedtowards a white audience as ‘attraction’.ivLay SummaryDark Tourism - the visitation of sites that represent death and disaster - offers an alternative toovertly commercialised modes of tourism that prioritise luxury and comfort. This paperinterrogates the lines of power in the tourist-toured relationship, particularly the whitesupremacist institutions of the prison and the plantation as sites of Black suffering that havebeen transformed into attractions. I am interested in how site managers alter these racialisedspaces in order to welcome the white body, and maintain the ease of whiteness as a way ofmoving through the world. I argue that place holds memory, and that it is possible for one tostep inside the lingering aura of events that have transpired. I argue that this place-memory canbe enhanced, or faked, for the sake of providing tourists a thrilling and satisfying ‘dark’experience, and in order to contain the potential for narratives to emerge that decentre or evencriticise whiteness.vPrefaceThis dissertation is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Keira Smalley.viTable of ContentsAbstract………………………………………….…………………………………………………….....iiiLay Summary………………………………………………………………………………..…………...vPreface……………………………………………………………………………………………………viTable of Contents………………………………………………………………………………………viiList of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………………...ixAcknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………..xDedication……………………………………………………………………………………………….xiiChapter 1: Foundations………………………………………………………………………………..11.1 Introduction: The racial politics of whiteness, racialization and tourism……………………11.1.1 Methods……………………………………………………………………………….…..101.1.2 Positionality……………………………………………………………………………….121.1.3 Structure of the thesis…………………………………………………………………...141.2 Literature Review: Dark Tourism……………………………………………………………...161.2.1 Dark Tourism, thanatourism and other names………………………………………..171.2.2 Parameters – what constitutes ‘dark’?…………………………………………………181.2.3 Authenticity…………………………………………………………………………...…..211.2.4 Visitor motivations………………………………………………………………………..261.2.5 Moral questions…………………………………………………………………………..391.3 Defining the phantom…………………………………………………………………………..42viiChapter 2: Narrative Becoming in the Prison Escape Game…………………………………..492.1 Becoming prisoner: Selling criminality as ‘escape’ to dark tourists……………………….492.2 Situating Prison Escape: carcerality and race between local (Netherlands) and global..512.3 Navigating the prison game: Producing location and experience as markers ofauthenticity……………...……………….……………………………………………………….….552.4 Becoming other as a temporary break from the ordered world and the white self………612.5 Narrating the idealized tourist subject of Prison Escape on social media………………..682.6 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………72Chapter 3: Narrative Containment in The Myrtles Plantation………………………………….743.1 Situating Myrtles Plantation and ghost tourisms…………………………………………….763.2 Containing ghosts: Managing spectres of racial violence in the plantation………………783.3 Aesthetic and narrative choices as containment tactics……………………………………793.4 The racialized production of authenticity: managing history in the narrative…………….883.5 Ghost stories as containments of racial and gender violence: producing Chloe andCleo………………………….………………………………………..……………………………...923.3 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………98Chapter 4: Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………100Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………..105viiiList of FiguresFigure 1 - Prison Escape marketing image: fisheye lens on prison ...............................................57Figure 2 - Prison Escape marketing image: inmates exchanging money ......................................58Figure 3 - Prison Escape marketing image: inmate peers round corner……………………..…..58Figure 4 - Prison Escape marketing image: inmate in cell.............................................................59Figure 5 - Prison Escape Facebook page: marketing image of Black inmate…………………….63Figure 6 - Prison Escape merchandise: Jailbird.............................................................................65Figure 7 - Prison Escape copy: Most wanted criminals.................................................................66Figure 8 - Prison Escape petition: Free Yuri Koblenko ..................................................................70Figure 9 - Prison Escape copy describing Yuri Koblenko ...............................................................71Figure 10 - The Myrtles plantation home page.............................................................................80Figure 11 - The Myrtles marketing image: People in antebellum-era dress laughing on aporch.............................................................................................................................................81Figure 12 - The Myrtles marketing image: restaurant dressed for a wedding..............................82Figure 13 - Frances Kermeen’s book. Screenshot from GoodReads.com......................................83Figure 14 - The Myrtles copy: “The Legend of Chloe”...................................................................93ixAcknowledgementsI am deeply grateful for the hard work, wisdom and support of my supervisor Dr JP Catungal,particularly in such trying times, and with the added barrier of distance. Without your guidanceit’s hard to imagine how this research idea could ever have left the ground. Thank you forhelping me to frame the flurry of thoughts whirring around my brain, thank you for the gentlepushes in the right directions, but most of all thank you for sticking with me through everything.Dr Janice Stewart gave me the strength to finish this work. Their understanding and positivitywas a ladder out of a hole. I remain grateful for your perfect mixture of sincerity and humour inclass, and for everything you have taught me - but perhaps especially for the advice to writeabout something that is going to fuel you when it gets really hard - I never let go of that energy!Dr Pilar Riano-Alcala’s class on historical memory and social reconstruction was the spark for allof this. I cannot say how much those readings and discussions in my first year at UBC altered myunderstanding of memory, memorialisation, and my perspective on interacting with place. Youare a brilliant teacher and an incredibly kind person, thank you so much for your support andguidance in the early stages of this work.xTo my entire graduate cohort - thank you for making my experience at UBC challenging,transformative and fun. Our seminars were a supportive space from the very first week; I learntso much from each one of you, and I miss being in a classroom and/or pub together!Lastly, a special thanks to Nora Langknecht and Savoy Williams. I could not have done thismasters without you, period. We have cried together, laughed together, sung and dancedtogether. Your friendship means the world to me and I’m forever grateful to have met you.xiDedicationFor Jack, who moved to a new country without a moment’s hesitation so that I could do thisdegree. It was a dream come true, and I couldn’t love you more.xiiChapter 1: Foundations1.1 Introduction: The racial politics of whiteness, racialization and tourismInterrogating whiteness as a way of being in and of making the world has emerged in thelast thirty to forty years (Doane, 2003, 5) as a potentially fruitful point of departure for theproject of “dislodg[ing] them/us from the position of power” (Dyer, 1997, 2). Critical racestudies has long been concerned with identifying the ways in which racialisation is a socialprocess of subject-making that crafts an Other from negation, an idea of what the white Self isnot, thus leaving whiteness to assume a universality - being the ‘norm’ from which Othersdeviate (Ahmed, 2007, 153). It has been established that race is a social invention employed tosubjugate those of non-white ethnicities, deployed via genealogically imperial narratives thatcontinue to facilitate the strengthening of systematic white supremacy and whiteness as a wayof being in the world (McClintock, 1995; Said, 1978). Shifting the locus of attention from anexamination of how race creates subjects to the originating force of that creation - the whitesubject-position - highlights the fabricated nature of whiteness itself, going some way towardunseating its hegemonic claim of universality, and exposing the making of that universality.Rather than an “ontological given”, whiteness is an experience which is passed down - we1inherit a particular orientation in and to the world from generations of power and throughinstitutions, which together put opportunities, habits, capacities and possibilities within ourreach (Ahmed, 2007, 150). Following Sara Ahmed, I contend that this “phenomenology of1 I position myself in this “we”, I am speaking to my own experience of being in the world.1whiteness” manifests in the physical world around us and shapes our capacity to navigate theworld, crafting public space as an extension of the white body, so that we are able to movefluidly and seamlessly through a world that welcomes us, is built to fit our contours. Thisworld-shaping occurs over generations, an effect of decisions and scripts (institutional biases;racist policing; the neoliberal market) that continue to draw certain (white, or white-reading)bodies closer whilst pushing racialised persons away.The insidiousness with which these scripts are worked into the fabric of the material worldserves to hide them from view, so that they are not often apparent unless you are the “notwhite” subject who occupies the position of negation - the racialised body provides tension or apressure point against which place rubs up and blisters (Ahmed, 2007, 161). Global tourism,with its origins in an imperial European fascination with, and romanticisiation of, Otherness(McClintock, 2014) is a realm in which a culturally non-white place is rewritten to welcome thewhite body, so that one may seamlessly travel to exciting exotic locales without losing thecomfort of our usual way of interacting with the world. June Jordan effectively captures theuncomfortability and dissonance of the white commercialisation of Black culture and geographyin her “Report from the Bahamas, 1982”, where the Sheraton British Colonial hotel’s brandingpaints a picture of its Black employees’ willing servitude to tourists (2003). She asks “Whoserights? Whose freedom? Whose desire[s]?” are being attended to with touristic interventionson island landscapes such as this hotel. All-inclusive resorts such as the Sheraton British ColonialBahamas provide a controlled space in which guests can enjoy cultural difference from a safedistance. Other accommodations for the white body abroad are the widespread use of the2English language in popular tourist locations, and the globalisation of Western restaurant andshopping chains that ensure one is never too far from a sense of familiarity. This is not to arguethat there is some ubiquitous shared desire amongst white people for comfort and concessionin their travel, indeed many white holidaymakers would deride such accommodations as ‘false’or inauthentic. This is simply to point to how the industry of travel and leisure have risen up tomeet the white body abroad, in order to facilitate its pleasure and convenience at all times andin all places and, in so doing, encourage spending.The antidote to this inauthenticity - the ‘real’, is thought to be accessed in “other times andother places” (Heitmann, 2011, 47). The Otherness of these other places is characterised byalienation from a shallow existence - i.e., detachment from capitalistic and profit-driven modesof being, luxury and consumerism - somewhere ‘gritty’, perhaps even grisly. Therefore, thosewho wish to feel they are avoiding the “Disneyization” of tourism and leisure (following Bryman,1999) - that is, the Western commercialisation of travel, and the neat packaging of foreignculture as holiday experiences, may turn instead into the world of dark tourism, where one canget outside of one’s comfort zone.Some argue that the practice of gazing upon mass death and suffering, which are the maintenets of dark tourism, is “as old as history itself”, citing public executions and gladiatorialcombat as ancient examples (Hodgkinson and Urquart, 2016, 40). However the majority ofauthors agree that dark tourism as we know it today has ‘boomed’ in recent years, with Stonenoting an increasing number of dark sites available to visit, and Sharpley a rise in tourists’3interest in visiting them (both qtd in Ashworth, 2015, 317). Dark tourism sites offer touristsaccess to something ‘real’, a sense of history and meaning, while the proximity of deathprovides a thrill that satisfies the need for a unique travelling experience, the “plaintive need todissociate themselves from other tourists” (Mahrouse, 2011, 378). Accessing ‘authenticity’ haslong been a practice of those who occupy a white identity border-crossing into the sphere ofracialisation (Bruner, 1991). Indeed, It has been argued that these particular desires andpleasures are a particular aspect of Westerners’ practice of dark tourism (Lennon and Foley, qtdin Stone, 2006, 149). Case studies from several Asian countries have found, for example, thatinteraction with deathly sites is “generally patterned on traditional customs of ancestorworship” rather than leisure, and more prevalent at smaller, unstructured memorial locationsthan touristically-framed sites of mass death (Cohen, 2018, 169). When Western tourists visitdark sites in countries in the global East or South therefore, there can be a conflict ofmotivations between tourists and locals, which makes presenting the site challenging for itsmanagers (Van Broek, 2018). Where locals may wish to leave a particular tragedy in the past, orhonour victims in their own personal way, the revenue generated by tourist interest makes iteconomically beneficial to facilitate continued engagement with it on a larger scale (ibid.). It isagain apparent how the broader world shifts to accommodate the white body and its desires.I am interested in the extent, or depth, of the effect of a phenomenology of whiteness withinthe dark tourism sphere. Scant attention has been paid to dark tourism’s racial dimensions, orthe power imbalances in the tourist-toured relationship at certain sites. The seriousness andhistorical relevance of the events that dark sites represent confer onto them a sacred status4based on a kind of implicit authentic ‘truth’ that they hold as places. In such touristic place, theaffect of being there provides one with a sense of having seen it and felt it for oneself; a senseof liveness and closeness begets a keener sense of veracity than one can glean in, say, a writtenarchive. The stakes of the sociopolitical representations transmitted by the site are thereforehigh, closely associated as they are with historical truth. I intend to contrapuntally read the useof race at the sites I examine, by attending to political practices of racial representation andnarrativising as key to the production of these dark tourist sites, highlighting in particular howthese practices also strategically produce gaps, erasures and silences in order to promote andfacilitate a white lens (Chowdhry, 2007, 102).A key mode of racial representation that will be of particular interest in my analysis is what Irefer to as the ‘phantom’, or the spectral place-memory that ruptures organised and structuredspace. Following Avery Gordon, hauntings are the way in which past unresolved traumas,wrongdoings, or exploitations make themselves known in the present, urging our attention,imploring us to address them (1997). Sites of mass death or pain are saturated with these kindsof presences, the eerie aura of suffering that lingers. For some they may take the form ofspectral bodies, the literal ghosts, while for others it may be more of a sensation - some qualityof the air, some overwhelming emotion, some nagging sense of a present absence. Theseechoes from the past have the potential to inspire action in the present; they are the sign thatcalls for something to be done (ibid., 8). It is our reminder that the past is “anything but deadand over”, wrongs must be addressed, and action must be taken that cannot be satisfied bysimple reflectionism (ibid., 12-13). This is a key part of the sense of being there which I believe5draws people to dark sites: the desire to get close to or even inside this haunting aura, as analternative to the over-commercialization and ‘safety’ of traditional tourism.The project of accounting for and addressing these phantoms is not the work of this research.Indeed I am not convinced they could or should be empirically ‘studied’ within the conventionallanguage and structures of a graduate thesis. It would take lengthy, open-hearted and emplacedinquiry, a methodology that allowed for fluidity, and a vernacular able to carry the indescribableexpressions/affect of place-memory and haunting. Instead, my interest lies in how the desire toaccess the phantoms of dark place is operationalised by site managers. How is the idea of thephantom put to work for the economic and ideological benefit of dark tourist stakeholders?How are the appeals of haunting and dark place-memory played with, and used to market thesite? How are memories that linger in place plastered over and reformed, filtered through awhite lens, to better accommodate the white body and, in turn, generate revenue?To put it another way, I want to make visible the invisible scripts that write/formulate touristicplace. I contend that ‘phantoming’ is used as a technique of deepening investment in aphenomenology of whiteness, and as a “technology for the reproduction of whiteness”, at darktourist sites (Ahmed, 2007, 157). I will explore the ways in which the conceptual(discourse/fantasies sold through marketing) and material (physical, on site) contours of spaceare shaped and narrated by, and for the benefit of, whiteness as a way of being, and theneoliberal systems of white supremacy that have colonial genealogies.6However, as Ahmed has argued, “whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it” (ibid.)Placing too much emphasis on the invisibility or universality of whiteness risks ignoring the waysin which whiteness is also a mode of particularity, and thus exclusion. How discourses of whitesupremacy and their effects formulate the world in immediate, significant and unhidden ways(i.e. in ways that need not be coaxed out by attending to silences or absences), should not bedisregarded or understated. I will therefore need to be cognizant of how whiteness operates asan exclusionary universal both at the surface and within the layers of touristic place-making.My case studies focus on two dark tourist sites that represent Black suffering in the Westernworld. I was drawn to these examples for their potential to offer a radical commentary on theracial structures of our world. Their settings - a prison and a plantation respectively - havelong-standing and deeply embedded links to colonial world-making and the subjugation of theBlack body and spirit (McKittrick, 2011). They are both institutions that have historically usedthe unpaid labour of Black people for the profit generation of whites. They are both deeplyclassed institutions, generated out of the desire to protect and elevate those with money andopportunities, while further stripping the lower classes of rights and autonomy. It is well studiedand documented that the industrial prison system is effectually a continuation of slavery - thecombination of an anti-Black criminal justice system, with laws that sanction the use ofprisoners as an unpaid industrial production line, result in a global population of incarceratedBlack people whose punishment is servitude to the state and its neoliberal systems ofprofiteering (Gilmore, 2007; Davis, 2005; McKittrick, 2011). My case studies therefore trace thistransition, and expose the continuation of an anti-Black sensibility from their punitive and7oppressive roles as active institutions, to their after-lives as tourist sites. The sites I studyrepresent an opportunity for engagement with issues of institutionalised racism past andpresent but, as will become evident, such opportunities are eschewed in favour ofre-narrativising the sites as places of white luxury, white heroism, and white thrill. The ‘dark’side of these sites as locations of multi-generational torture of the Black body is hinted at inorder to excite white desires for transgression and “race pleasure” - the witnessing of the Blackbody in pain in order to confirm white superiority (Anthony Farley, qtd in Razack, 2007, 378),but not strongly enough to locate blame, or force an upfront confrontation with the violentbrutality of white surpemacy. Although categorising particular tourism locations as ‘dark’ is acontentious practice, due to the multiplicity of motivations for tourist visitation, and the “fluidand mobile” interpretations they offer (Hannam, 2018, 319), it is clear at both of these sites thatparticular fears are being activated in order to draw in potential visitors.At the prison site, realising the fears of incarceration and the label of criminality is offered totourists as a temporary break from the familiarity of their ordered lives. A project of ‘narrativebecoming’ is installed via faux phantoms (constructed by the site managers) of stereotypedracialised prisoners whose subject-positions the white tourists are invited to step into. FollowingAhmed, becoming is a process of movement between one entity and another, which ismotivated by a phantasy, or unconscious desire, of proximity (2000). Due to the fact that theidentity (of the prisoner) being taken on is itself a fantasy - constructed by the very subject whois attempting to try it on - this becoming will never lead to being. As Ahmed puts it, whatfascinates “is always already an image of the otherness of the other” (ibid., 53, original8emphasis). It is their very difference that constitutes their appeal, and once the gap is closed inthe mind of the white subject, this appeal ceases. As I will argue, Prison Escape Game reaffirmsthe already-racialised nature of the prison as an institution, and offers it up as a playground oftransgression, a temporary trip into Otherness. The tourist, through a process of narrativebecoming propelled by a worldly phenomenology of whiteness, overcomes the boundariesbetween the Self and the Other, thereby re-asserting their agency and ability to ‘move’. Withthis ‘move’, fears of incarceration, criminality and Blackness are managed (starting withconfrontation - entering the site, donning the uniform of inmate, and ending with disaffiliation -“escape” from prison, leaving the site). Within this narrative becoming, the white subject istherefore glorified or made hero twice - through his/her ability to border-cross, and throughhis/her ability to return.At the plantation site, The Myrtles, the fears on offer are first, the generalised paranormal - thatis, the abstract possibility of ghosts. The site has been proclaimed one of “America’s mosthaunted homes” (a title it promotes readily), so is already positioning itself within the darktourism realm, an opportunity to enter a heterotopic space usually characterised by unease orterror. This generalised paranormal ‘darkness’ is compounded by the spectre of slavery that thesite’s marketing leaves unspoken and unacknowledged. Through a project of ‘narrativecontainment’, the tortured phantoms of white supremacy’s legacy are managed and repackagedin service of the phenomenology of whiteness that refuses to face its guilt. Ghosts of slavery arerecast as colourful characters of stereotypical Black female promiscuity, exoticism anddeviousness. A white lens and a white mode of being is accommodated via first the thrill of the9possibility of encountering ghosts, and the possibility of encountering slaves, and secondthrough their containment, the technologies of narrativising that ensure these fears do notoutbalance leisurely enjoyment.‘Narrative becoming’ and ‘narrative containment’ are the frames through which I will examinewhat these dark sites are doing with Blackness, in service of the combined thrill and comfort ofa white mode of being.1.1.1 MethodsResearch on dark tourism has tended to favour either supply or demand perspectives inits methodological approach. That is, authors variously foreground the site management andmarketing or tourist motivation as the primary way in to analysing and characterising the site inthe context of dark tourism. Creating such a dichotomy forecloses the way that the meaning or‘darkness’ of a site can be produced as these elements interact. Following Biran and Poria then,I will instead adopt an “experiential approach” (their emphasis, 2012, 65), which accounts forthe site as a whole experience formed by visitor, place and employees.To that end, I will be employing case studies as my primary method of analysis. Case studies area common qualitative method that allow for an in-depth exploration of a ‘contemporaryphenomenon in its real life context’ (Yin, 2009, 13), here meaning an exploration of howproblematic racialisation manifests at and through dark tourist sites. The level of detail casestudies enable will allow for a more holistic view of each dark tourism experience, allowing me10to draw out any relationships that emerge or patterns that are indicated between examples.Case studies also provide the flexibility of using a variety of types and sources of data dependingon what will best speak to each case (Creswell, 2013, 98), meaning I am able to attend to the“particularity and complexity” of each as they present themselves contextually (Stake, 1995, xi).Resulting from this relative freedom of exploration, one potential drawback to thismethodological choice is that, as Stake puts it, case studies are a “poor basis for generalisation”(ibid., 7). Fortunately for this project, my intention is not to generalise my argument to all darktourism; indeed, any generalisations in a field so broad and diverse would be ill advised andunproductive. Rather, I hope to point out, through the two case studies here proposed, that toentirely ignore race and its intersections as a factor in the dark tourism industry is to furtherheighten the imbalances already woven into structures of the tourist-toured relationship.I will be analysing a variety of written and visual discourses for my case studies that moreholistically capture a sense of the experiences and meanings being produced at particular darktourist locations. The sources of data I have access to are largely secondary. This means I mustconsider the ways in which representation is at play in how I am able to read these sites, as eachsource will have specific intentions that colour the way the site is presented (for example,marketing materials will of course use particularly positive language). I am informed by afeminist, queer and anti-colonial methodological lens, which means attendance to thesociopolitical intersections at play in the texts I examine, as well as the impetus to “viewemotion as a legitimate source of knowledge” (Fonow and Cook, 2005, 2215). This means I will11not prioritise supposedly ‘detached’ or ‘impartial’ forms of knowledge, such as journalisticarticles, over related personal experiences, such as reviews, blogs or video snippets thatrepresent one person’s personal/emotional experience. No form of knowledge will be more‘legitimate’ than another in my data collection and analysis.1.1.2 PositionalityMy own interest in this topic was developed as I attempted to unpack some of the waysin which I, a white ciswoman from a colonising country, take from cultures that are marginalisedby the racist systems invented and sustained by white people, including the ways that theseracist systems are enfolded into capitalist imperatives of profit maximization, land theft,resource extraction and labour exploitation. In considering the acts of cultural appropriation Ihave undertaken in the past, I began to wonder at the difference between hijacking ‘positive’cultural signs – those that are considered cool, funny, or sexy and are resultingly taken intowhite cis-hetero mainstream culture, and ‘negative’ cultural signs – those that are consideredweird, frightening, ‘dark’, and remain somewhat at the margins. Whilst the pleasure thatemerges from the former is blatant, and has been discussed at length both in both popularmedia and academic literature (hooks; 1992; Zubaran & de Vargas, 2015; Stadnick, 2012i; Oh,2017; Schönfeldt-Aultman, 2013; Laidlaw, 2010; Rodriquez, 2006), the latter has beencomparatively unattended to. This interest in how some Othered subjects are “invited into life”,made visible, held up as exceptional in their association with popularly desirable cultural signs,while some are “marked for death”, both metaphorically and literally left behind (Haritaworn et12al., 2014, 2) despite being equally as valuable as subjects (/objects) of white intrigue, led me tothe world of dark tourism: where displeasure and desire meet for the consumer.As a white settler student producing this work on the traditional, ancestral and uncededterritories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm(Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh)Nations, I am a visitor to the place known as Vancouver. I must be attendant to the ways inwhich this positionality implicates me in ongoing systems of colonialism, land theft andIndigenous cultural erasure. I must also be careful to tread carefully when, as is an inevitablepart of qualitative research, making assertations or assumptions that are in no small part aresult of the particular lens through which I view the world. I state this to implicate myself inthis research, to position my voice as a voice, with biases and subjectivities, rather thanattempting to make any claim to objectivity or the production of ‘truths’ (McCorkel and Myers,2003, 200). This is of particular importance given that my area of research deals with processesof racialisation with diverse meanings that are constantly in flux - processes which I, as a whitesubject of this world, am directly involved in and actively benefit from. Locating myself willtherefore be an ongoing process throughout this work rather than a simple acknowledgement,a process of ensuring that my work does not attempt to conflate “the other woman over thereand the one who speaks for her here” (Kahn, 2005, 2023). Whilst examining the lines of powerbetween the ‘tourist’ and the ‘toured’, I must also consider the lines of power between the‘researcher’ and the ‘researched’. Keeping this in mind will also ground my critique of the darktourism industry, ensuring it does not cross too heavily into unproductive judgement upon13individual tourists, and remains focussed more on the structural, historical and institutionalproduction of dark tourism as a racialized and classed field of practice.1.1.3 Structure of the thesisThe remainder of this chapter, “Foundations”, will locate this work in the broader nexusof dark tourism research, providing an overview of its main debates, and highlighting the gapswhere the racial dimensions of touring sites of suffering are left unconsidered. It will alsoprovide a more detailed account of how I define the concept of the ‘phantom’, and so too theprocess of ‘phantoming’ that I argue is undertaken by dark tourism stakeholders.Chapter 2 is the first of my case studies, where I examine how a racialised site of suffering, oneusually characterised by fear and social condemnation, has been transformed into a playgroundof ‘narrative becoming’ marketed towards a white target audience. Through analysis of thebranding and marketing of Prison Escape game in The Netherlands, I illustrate how desires toborder-cross into racialised space, and ‘try on’ a racialised experience of incarceration, are aidedby a phantoming of the site that reinforces criminal stereotypes, and covers-over the emplacedhistories and emplaced memories in the prison.The second of my case studies, analysed in Chapter 3, shows how ‘narrative containment’ isemployed at The Myrtles plantation to stifle the brutality of the violent histories of slavery thatthe site bears. In order to appeal to tourists looking for a darker thrill, such histories are14gestured to, but filtered through a cast of ghosts that carefully manage the story so as not toelicit guilt from ticket-buying white tourists. I show how sensations of shock and awe arefacilitated by the site, and erotic fantasies stirred up, all under a cloak of Good Old FashionedChristian Southern Hospitality that claims innocence and the preservation of history.Throughout what follows I aim to demonstrate how claims to authenticity (and its associationwith ‘truth’) promoted by the sites I study, through marketing narratives of heritagepreservation and an emphasis on the realness of the location, mislead tourists about thehistories they consume. I argue that the phantoming of sites is a key method used to drawtourists in, meet expectations of dark tourism, and, crucially, rewrite narratives in a way thatappears natural - as though representative of the site’s own emplaced memory. The damagingsociopolitical meanings produced at the site are the direct effect of prioritising profit and themaintenance of a phenomenology of whiteness above radical confrontations with thestructures of colonialism, neoliberalism and racism embedded in these sites as institutions. I donot attempt to apply my analysis of these particular sites to dark tourism writ large, instead Ihope to offer new modes of thinking dark sites for future academic work: modes that attend tothe racial dimensions of the tourist-toured relationships, and what worldly phenomenologies ofwhiteness bring to bear on racialised space.151.2 Literature Review: Dark TourismIn 1996 the International Journal of Heritage Studies released an issue featuring articleson the closely-related topics of “dark tourism” (by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley), and“thanatourism” (by A.V. Seaton). This was the introduction of the phrase dark tourism to theacademic lexicon, and the catalyst for what has since become a sizeable sub-discipline oftourism studies – capturing the interest of scores of researchers from a variety of subject areas,and leading to the creation of the Dark Tourism Institute at the University of Central Lancaster.The ever-growing appetite for research on the nexus of death and tourism has led to aproliferation of definitions, scales, disciplines and lenses through which dark tourism is viewedand discussed as writers attempt to come to grips with the fundamental questions of whatcounts as dark tourism and why are tourists drawn to such places?This rapid growth has meant an overextension of meaning and the expansion of the scope ofthe concept. Dark tourism has been used to refer to sites as diverse as genocide memorials,former battlefields, ruins in the wake of natural disaster, famous assassination spots, LondonDungeons, prison museums, former plantations, pagan ritual sites – to name but a fewexamples. The range of research questions asked about these sites as ‘dark’ are just as broad.Indeed, perhaps the only thing that can be agreed upon by scholars in the field is that despiteits common usage, the concept of dark tourism remains “theoretically fragile” (Stone andSharpley, 2008, 575) and “poorly conceptualized” (Jamal and Lelo, 2011, 31). Contrary to thosewho would, in response to this fuzziness, call for yet further attempts to neatly define andboundary the phrase once and for all (Dale and Robinson, 2011), or suggest that it has become16too protean to be useful (Ashworth, 2015, 323), I contend that it is this very ambiguity andslipperiness that makes dark tourism a productive site of study. By defying straightforwardcategorisation, dark tourism can be used as a theoretical tool with which to explore a broadrange of topics related to “dissonant heritage” (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1995)2, and encouragecross-disciplinary engagement with the fields of leisure and tourism. To demonstrate this scope,and provide context for my own working definition, I will now briefly summarise what I see asthe central debates that characterise dark tourism scholarship to date.1.2.1 Dark Tourism, thanatourism and other namesIn serving as a catch-all phrase for a broad range of sites and experience, dark tourismhas been re-named and subcategorised many times over. The most common alternative is“thanatourism” – coined by A.V. Seaton in the same 1996 journal issue where “dark tourism”first made its appearance, with the specific meaning of tourism to sites of death. Dunkley et aldescribe thanatourism as the “technical” version of dark tourism (2007, 56), though if we takethe definitions proposed by each term’s originator there are some marked differences. WhereSeaton traces the origins of the thanotouristic tradition back to the Middle Ages (1996, 235),Lennon and Foley’s dark tourism is fundamentally an “intimation of post-modernity”, adesignation only applicable to sites related to events in living memory (2000, 11). Further, whilethanatourism describes visitation to solely and purely places of death, dark tourism’s originalcharacterisation included not only representations of death, but also “disasters and atrocities”2 The idea of dissonant heritage is used to refer to historical sites that preserve or recall eventsthat are discordant with today’s values and experiences.17(Lennon and Foley, “Editorial”, 1996, 195). Other names that have emerged to specify particularbranches of dark tourism include: “black spots” – describing primarily death sites as“mass-produced spectacle” (Rojek, 1993, 136); “grief tourism” (Bowman and Pezzullo, 2009);“atrocity tourism” (Ashworth and Hartmann, 2005); “morbid tourism” (Blom, 2000); and“phoenix tourism” – describing post-conflict tourism “in the context of social renewal of thedestination and its people” (Causevic and Lynch, 2011, 780). For the purposes of this thesis, Iuse dark tourism as a broad and comprehensive phrase to cover both thanatouristicengagements and all other sub-types of macabre tourism listed above. The next sectiondiscusses the parameters that distinguish ‘dark’ tourism from regular tourism, and how I defineit in my own understanding.1.2.2 Parameters – what constitutes ‘dark’?Doubtless one of the most well-worn topics in dark tourism scholarship, attempts todefine and bound the phrase primarily focus on the meaning of ‘darkness’. Indeed, part of thereason scholars have reached for alternative titles mentioned above is due to the negativeconnotations of ‘dark’ or ‘darkness’ mainly in Western cultures (Biran and Poria, 2012, 60),meaning it is rare for both site visitors and site managers to self-describe as ‘dark tourists’ or a‘dark tourist attraction’. If those persons who make up the so-called dark tourism industry donot themselves identify with the concept, how can we presume to clearly define it? Jamal andLelo propose that the notion of darkness is a socially constructed one rather than an objectivefact, contending “there is no ‘essence’ of darkness that imbues [a] site” (2011, 40), and thus is18being produced in a variety of different ways by different person-site interactions on any givenday. This provides a little more space to account for a plethora of ways to ‘do’ dark tourism,without necessarily intending to. Lennon and Foley, founders of the phrase, go so far as to claimthat accidental or serendipitous dark tourism is the very basis of the phenomenon (2000, 23).Although I agree that ignoring unwitting versions of dark tourism would severely limit the scopeof its relevance, for me there is specificity and significance to purposeful forms of engagementwith dark tourism. The knowing commodification and knowing visitation of placesrepresentative of trauma and disaster posits many worthwhile questions about the nature ofour psychological and sociological investment in the macabre, particularly through the lens ofleisure and pleasure.Another attempt to resolve the gap between academic theorising about the meaning of darktourism and the common unwillingness by those participating to identify with it is Biran andPoria’s proposition that ‘darkness’ here centres on activities “perverse and socially condemned”(2012, 67). Dark tourism, they argue, is that which is taken part in with full knowledge that “ifsuch activities were revealed to those in his/her home environment” there would be “negativesocial consequences” (ibid., 70). This model uses the uncomfortability of tourists to admit totheir dark desires as a definition in itself. The issue with this, of course, is that distaste ordisapproval are not ubiquitous reactions to any one site or experience, even within the samesociety, or even the same family or friendship group. So it does not truly bring us any closer toplacing parameters around ‘darkness’, other than to say: ‘it’s dark if people think it is’.19As is often the case in the academic lifespan of a phrase with ambiguous cultural meaning,many attempts to narrow and define dark tourism have led to its further broadening. Robbsuggests that it refers to destinations in which violence, as well as death, is the main attraction(2009, 51); Jamal and Lelo also argue for the inclusion of segregation, crime and war (2011, 40);Stone opts for the more general description of “death, suffering and the seemingly macabre”(2012, 1568), with the crucial caveat that the death on show is “spectacular death”, i.e. inunusual or violent circumstances (2018, 189); Tony Seaton argues that rather than an encounterwith death itself, dark tourism provides encounters with “remembrance of death and the dead,induced by symbolic representations” (2018, 13, his emphasis).Although my initial instinct is to resist adding my own singular definition to the ever-growingpile, due primarily to my wish to resist practicing the Enlightenment method of forcingboundaries around concepts in order to keep them neat and ordered, it is of course necessaryto establish parameters to support my own investigation into dark sites. Furthermore, I remainconvinced that each theorist’s retooling and reestablishing of the phrase serves to make it anever-more relevant and rich site of study, and this in itself works to dispel any false notion ofobjectivity applied by those who claim to have ‘defined’ it.For me, ‘suffering’ is a word that captures the events represented at a great many (if not all)dark tourism locations. Whether a site symbolises environmental or manmade disaster, war,atrocity, slavery, crime, poverty, violence or death, human and other-than-human suffering hastaken place. This is the keyword I will use as a metric to guide my labelling of particular tourist20attractions or artefacts as ‘dark’. While death is also an important component, I include symbolicor social ‘deaths’ in my dark tourism definition, following Haritaworn et al’s conceptualisation ofabjected populations “marked for death”, i.e. left behind or ignored by neoliberal mainstreamstructures of governance and the “violence of the market” (2014, 2).For this research, I am only interested in sites that have some form of officiation (e.g. a tour orexperience that runs to the site – whether government or private interest, or a product that hasbeen produced for sale in relation to the site – which, for me, is also a form of tourism). Whilst Ifully acknowledge and include unofficial tourism sites, experiences or products in my definition(e.g. an individual visiting the grave of a loved one), it is the structures that have been built tofacilitate the experience that interests me, in terms of their relation to issues of racialisation,whiteness neoliberal capitalisation.1.2.3 AuthenticityMany writers over the years have identified authenticity as a key motivation in thetourism industry, one which has long informed marketing techniques and compelled visitation(see Wang, 1999 for overview of this history). In this section I would like to address two majorroutes to authenticity that scholars have shown are particularly relevant to dark tourism:authenticity as accessed via the institution of the museum, and authenticity as accessed via theforeign.21The museum, like the library, holds a certain privileged cultural status as an objective body.Despite the private interests that may run it, and the potential paywall that limits access, itpresents itself in the social imaginary as a public service of archival safeguarding. Resultingly,museums do not simply function as a preserver of valuable objects, but rather they “makeobjects valuable by gathering them” (Casey, 2005, 2). The inferred authentic aura of themuseum is tacitly transferred onto the artefacts and information it collects (Urry, qtd inCarrabine, 2017, 20). As a subsection of museum culture, dark tourism confers a similar sense of‘truth-telling’. Indeed, the seriousness of the events memorialised at dark sites, Lennon andFoley note, tends to result in ‘sacred cow status’ (1996, “JFK”, 200), becoming untouchable tocriticism or disbelief, deepening the public’s subconscious trust. As the ‘Other’ of the tourismindustry (Laws, 2013, 103), it could be argued that telling dark histories provides the sense ofunveiling the untold, pulling back the curtain of the manicured and sanitised record to revealthe gritty, messy, grim and ‘real’ underbelly. The desire to access this exclusive ‘truth’ can be socompelling that tourists are willing to suspend disbelief or overlook evidence that would mar itsveracity. Catherine Roberts recounts a discussion with a student who had recently returnedfrom visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau, and expressed disappointment in having been told by a guidethat the gallows at the site was reconstructed, not the original. Rather than being disappointedin the reconstruction itself, she wished that the guide had not told her: she would rather it wasconcealed, so as to “enable stronger feelings of sadness and shock, despite the lack of veracitythat in part allowed them” (2018, 620). This demonstrates the way in which the status of themuseum as institution, in addition to tourists’ appetite for the effect of authenticity, can replaceor surpass the need for genuine legitimacy.22This performative authenticity, what MacCannell terms “staged authenticity” (1973, 589) alsoapplies all too well to the second route to ‘the real’ in dark tourism: Otherness. The search forthe ‘real’ has long been a tried and true marketing technique for international travel. Brunerdescribes tourists’ desire for self-transformation through encounters with ‘authentic’ culturesacross the globe, whose relative connection to the natural world is valorised in contrast to theroutines and commercialised individualism of the Western world (2011). Heitmann concurs,writing that “authenticity is thought to be found in other times or other places [...] the morealienated from modern society and a shallow existence, the greater the desire that drives thesearch for authenticity” (2011, 47). Like Roberts’ student who would have been more satisfiedby sustaining the aura of authenticity bestowed on the museum as a space than knowing theless-satisfying truth, the authenticity that tourists travel to access in foreign places has beenpre-imagined in the tourist’s head by media scripts reinforcing particular symbolic aspects ofthat place, and in many cases pre-choreographed by tourist attractions seeking to satisfycustomers through a maintenance of those scripts. Boorstin claims that tourists therefore donot experience reality, but thrive on “pseudo-events” and stereotypes: “the tourist in Japanlooks less for what is Japanese than for what is Japanesey” (qtd in Heitmann, 2011, 46). For darktourism sites, there is a representational risk that specific atrocity or disaster events, if nothandled with proper care and consideration, and if not examined with a mind to broadening thescope and perspective of visitors, will come to be tied into these repeated signs and symbolsthat story and stereotype a particular culture at large.23Thus far I have been painting with the broadest of strokes in my discussion of authenticity inrelation to the dark tourism industry as a whole, but it is important to note that of coursedifferent claims to and versions of authenticity occur at each individual site. One importantdistinction that has been addressed at length in the growing body of dark tourism literature islocational authenticity: in situ or “primary” sites vs. created or “secondary” sites (Lennon andFoley, 2000; Wight, 2006; Wight and Lennon, 2007). Miles describes this delineation as darksites of death, disaster and depravity, and sites associated with death, disaster and depravity(qtd in Dale and Robinson, 2011, 206). On Stone’s dark tourism spectrum, sites of death areplaced at the darker end of the scale (2006, 151), which exposes again the importance of theaura of place in effecting authenticity – standing where victims stood, touching crumbled wallsor hearing the wind blowing through abandoned buildings, for example. These emplacedsensorial engagements make a visitor feel present and connected, affects that produce whatWang (1999) calls “existential authenticity” – “providing the tourist with an authentic sense ofBeing”, or what Selwyn (1996) terms “’hot’ authenticity” – “an emotional ‘alienation-smashing’experience”, as opposed to “’cold’ authenticity” – cognitive knowledge about objects orexperiences (qtd in Cohen, 2018, 195). Examining these kinds of authenticity that generatemore affect for the tourist are, I believe, a key way in to examining the performative dimensionsof a site as produced by the site/visitor interaction, and taking the experiential approach to darktourism research suggested by Biran and Poria. They are also an essential facet of how I willconceptualise the ‘phantom’ at dark tourism sites (see section 1.3). The aura of authenticitythat has been discussed in this section will be one of the key lenses through which I investigatethe forms of racialisation produced in my case study experiences – how an Othering of sites and24their representational subjects operates in part via calculated affect and choreographies ofspace, reinforcing an idea of authenticity that has been prewritten for the tourist, andauthorised by the assumed trustworthiness of the museum-style attraction.This also takes us back to the argument that dark tourism is an intimation of a postmodernworld. While I have shown that authenticity is important to understanding the appeal oftourism at large, and dark tourism in particular, the question remains what version ofauthenticity is desired. Are tourists in fact happier with an authenticity that satisfies byreinforcing their presupposed ideas (offering ‘kodak moments’ of key symbols of place or eventto share with family and friends), rather than an authenticity that refuses to reassure? Jamaland Lelo argue that the tools employed by the tourism industry to interpret, frame andsymbolise the past generally “serve up a socially constructed ‘Distory’ - Disney history” (2011,33), and Dale and Robinson add that even dark tourism attractions (symbolically the hidden,sequestered, unsanitised histories) replicate aspects of “McDonaldization (Ritzer, 1998) in theirapproach to presenting death” (2011, 207). Whilst MacCannell attacks such methods ofpresentation for “obscur[ing] the real real” (qtd in Willis, 2014, 113), many in the field haveoffered alternative perspectives. Heitmann exposes how limiting the idea of the “real real” iswhen applied to the tourism industry; no matter how an attraction may try to remain objectiveand uncommercialised, tourists will “always be outsiders and only able to get a superficialview”, making true authenticity completely unattainable (2011, 56). She points to Cohen’s(1998) concept of “emergent authenticity’ – that which is inauthentic can become authenticover time (for example, Disneyland, often considered as inauthenticity incarnate, can be25perceived as an ‘authentic’ American cultural experience); everything is authentic in its owninterpretation (ibid). Similarly, Willis suggests that the “disjunctive meeting of fiction andhistory” can create “its own kind of truth, one whose reality is just as, if not more honest as theunembellished account” (2014, 113). Exposing the way in which all histories are biased, thisview makes space for interpretation as a necessary and unavoidable part of representation.What interests me is reading between the lines of the representations crafted and realitiesproduced at various sites, to reveal what meanings emerge in the tourist-toured / visitor-siterelationship at places of racialised suffering. I am less interested in what these sites and theirversions of authenticity mean for our relationship to (post/)modernity, and more interested inwhat they mean for our relationship to race and power, and the extent of a phenomenology ofwhiteness in reframing narratives.1.2.4 Visitor motivationsAs previously mentioned, recent dark tourism scholarship has spent much energypuzzling over the question of why people are drawn to dark sites. Given the nebulous and ofteninexplicable nature of human emotion and desire, pinning down a final list of concrete reasonsis a task that can never be fully completed. The touristic experience is unequivocally subjectivein nature, meaning “some visitors at some sites some of the time may be engaging in so-called‘dark tourism’ while others are not” (Morten et al, 2018, 227-8), further blurring the linesaround macabre motivations. Podoshen regrets that the “positivist-dominated world of tourismstudies” is ill equipped to account for this range of idiosyncrasies (2018, 174), and whilst mostscholars concur about the necessity of viewing travel impulses as fluid, the tide of papers and26books trying to pinpoint them is plentiful. Stone contends that there are in fact no such thing as“dark tourists” (2006, 146), referencing again the impossibility of lumping dark motivationstogether to form one cohesive intentionality, but despite this still argues that it is “crucial” to“extract and interrogate the motives” that drive people to sites. Much like the mission to definedark tourism, the studying of visitor motivations provides ways in to a number of interestingquestions about the role of preserving dark heritage in society. Getting comfortable with thefact of there being no one, or set of, clear answer(s), allows for productive experimentation anda broader range of possibilities for research.RemembrancePerhaps the most obvious, and culturally acceptable, reason to tour a site thatrepresents mass death is to engage in remembrance. Biran and Buda note that visiting suchtourist attractions as Auschwitz and Gallipoli or places of genocide in Rwanda or Cambodia is“encouraged, socially rewarded, and even considered obligatory” in some cases (2018, 525).There is a sense of duty that comes with holidaying to a place that has experienced mass tragicand impactful events, to respect that history by making efforts (whether token or genuine) toparticipate in their memorialisation. Dunkley’s interviews with four individuals who hadrecently visited sites of “warfare, genocide, grief and horror” reveal this impulse was, for them,a key motivator (2016, 111). One participant described it as “paying tribute to those who died[...] letting those people live” from the perspective that “if it was one of your loved ones thatwas killed, you want them remembered” (2016, 113-4). There is a note of reluctance that couldbe read into these accounts, less a personal desire than a want to do ‘the right thing’, or27perhaps just ‘the done thing’. Dann and Potter (2001) argue that historic events are endowedwith a moral simplicity in contemporary thought, a good/evil dichotomy which is furtherreinforced by representational methods of dark sites that often rely on a victim/perpetratorstoryline (qtd in Roberts, 2018, 612). Any pleasure that is being derived is, in this case, thesatisfaction of being a responsible tourist, having something of a moral high ground, being onthe right side of history. In the kindest of lights it can be seen as genuine interest in andwillingness to pay respects to the losses of a local culture, and in the harshest can be seen astravel box-ticking – something to be gotten out of the way so that the rest of the holiday can beenjoyed guilt-free. It is entirely possible for these seemingly opposing ways of engagement tocoexist in the same visiting party, or even the same individual – starting as obligatory and beingmoved to genuine emotion and understanding by the experience of touring. Thus is thedifficulty of asking people to specify their motivations or experiences at a site.I have thus far been referring to visitors as those who are in some way ‘foreign’ to the heritageon display – whether from another country, culture, religion, etc. than the representationalsubjects of the site. But out of all the motivations discussed in the literature that I will recount,remembrance and memorialisation is the one that could best apply too to local visitors whohave a personal connection to the event. This can create a clash of intentions: for survivors ofthe event or their relatives, the site is a place they come to remember, whereas for touristoutsiders it is a place to learn or engage with these histories for the first time (thoughsomething has of course led them there in the first place - could it be the intrigue of ‘darkness’itself?) (Hoenhaus, 2013, 152). How can site managers accommodate these two modes of28engagement at once? If a site is set up for the purpose of generating revenue, it is bound to leantowards supporting the tourist experience, and for this reason, memory and memorialisation oflocals are often performed at alternative sites “quietly [and] traditionally” (Carrabine, 2017, 31).For the white Western tourist I will be imagining as visitor in order to examine the racialdimensions of the tourist experience, while they might be comfortable seeking out “distant andforeign tragedy”, confronting histories of violence and death ‘that are closer to home’ is oftenmuch more difficult (Willis, 2014, 3), particularly that where the perpetrator(s) are morefamiliar than the victim(s). An examination of how sites work to contain perpetrator-touristparallels where their race aligns them with histories of violent and genocidal white supremacywill be key to my case study analysis.EducationSimilar to the motivation of remembrance in its social acceptability, the idea of touringto educate oneself promotes learning from past mistakes as the ostensible reason for interest inthe macabre. Moscardo suggests that the inclusion of an educational dimension to dark sitesmay help distinguish them from “recreational” and therefore “voyeuristic” ones, due to theopportunity for tourists to be more mindful and come away changed (qtd in Cohen, 2011, 196).However, as Dunkley points out, whether this attempt to impart lasting values and morallessons is successful is seldom critiqued or investigated (2016, 111). The promise of29self-transformation has long appealed to tourists, and as already discussed, the concept ofauthenticity – facilitated by accessing ‘real’ dark sites and hearing ‘real’ people’s accounts ofevents – is often valorised as a golden ticket to get there. Taking a particularly germaneexample, Gada Mahrouse conducted a study investigating tourist motivations and experiencesparticipating in travel packages referred to as “Reality Tours” provided by the company GlobalExchange (2011). Self-described as “socially conscious tourism”, Reality Tours take US citizens onfully-inclusive package trips to impoverished communities in countries such as Venezuela,Afghanistan, Syria, Cuba, Libya and Palestine, in order to be able to come home and “explain totheir friends and neighbours that these Cubans [for example] are not our enemies” (ibid., 374).Built upon the spirit of learning and understanding in order to bring about a more peacefulworld, these tours aim to “show, rather than conceal, the harsh realities of poverty andoppression that many of the local and Indigenous communities in the global South face”, anexperience which the program’s director describes as “transformative” for the individual tourist(ibid). What strikes me in this description is the extent to which the company’s focus remains onthe experience of the tourist and their transformation – into a more ‘ethical’, ‘knowledgeable’,‘globally conscious’ individual – rather than any resulting transformation in circumstance for thelocal community that could be brought about by this cultural learning and understanding. It istelling that even in the idealised marketing description for the result of the tours, the localpopulation is a footnote, a means of facilitation to the Western (in this case specifically US)visitor’s journey to self-improvement. This echoes how Sara Ahmed sees the “phantasy ofbecoming” as putting Others “at the service of a white [...] story of self discovery” (2007, 60).From in-depth interviews with participants, Mahrouse points to the frequency with which the30discourse that ‘we’ Westerners have so much to learn from ‘them’ (locals), with theirnon-material wealth and ‘simple life’, proves to be a core motivation for this kind of travel. Thisis a dangerous road into truly believing, despite having paid substantial amounts for theexperience, that one has “transcended the realities of commodification, consumption andcommercialisation” usually associated with tourism (Harrison, 2003, 23). This, in turn, providesa feeling of moral superiority as compared to the ‘traditional’ tourist, which is not onlydamaging in its self-congratulatory narcissism, but also stunts the possibility for any actualreflection or engagement after the experience is over. If one has already attained the feeling ofsuccessful personhood just by choosing to travel this way, where is the need to actually act onwhat one has seen? Sara Ahmed explains how the very proclamation of one examining one’sown privilege (in this case, ‘I am travelling to a third world country rather than a poolside resortin order to be a more conscious citizen’) can have the effect of reaffirming power imbalances:“the declarative mode involves a fantasy of transcendence”, she writes, which valorises andfurther empowers the self that expresses them (qtd in Mahrouse, 2011, 382). Indeed,Mahrouse concludes that so-called “socially responsible” tourism engaged in by white tourists isoften driven more by “a desire for moral comfort and [to] reinforce positions of innocence” thanit is to take any meaningful action to address the extreme power imbalances the touristsupposedly confronts. In Dunkley’s study investigating whether visiting dark tourism sitesenables critical reflection on everyday life, the majority of participants expressed difficultyknowing what to do with the knowledge they had gained (2016, 116). It is easy to see how eventhose people with the most noble of intentions for learning and changing end up stopping shortof taking action when they have already attained a feeling of accomplishment or pride from31having visited in the first place, and their short-lived visit does not provide the means forongoing engagement. Of course, even the concept of individual tourists experiencing a changein perspective, or being propelled into action after witnessing Others’ suffering, is premised onthe idea of the Western liberal subject. Changing one person’s perception of a particularracialised group does little to deal with longstanding and embedded constructions that existwithin the structures of society at large.Roberts proposes two site management-side failings that could be seen as contributing to thislack of material change brought about by the learning missions of dark tourists. First, I referagain to the moral simplicity presented at sites that allows visitors to place themselves firmly onthe ‘good’ side, and is unlikely to address the complexities of how tourists themselves may beimplicated in the disaster/atrocity/poor quality of life experienced by the site’s representationalsubjects, or that there may be similar events or experiences that are occurring closer to home(Roberts, 2018, 627). Second, very few sites provide adequate reflective space to process,evaluate or discuss the learning that has just taken place – visitors finish the tour and areimmediately spat back out into the ‘ordinary’ world, back onto the tour bus, back to the hotel,back to their regular lives free from any ongoing obligation to consider what they have seen(ibid, 626). Willis argues, however, that aside from any information that one may sit andintellectually reflect upon, the more pertinent learning experience is “the affect of ‘beingthere’” (2014, 204), which does not require specific reflective space to generate. She describesthis affect as “a kind of non-intellectual knowing that settles into your bones” as a result of theoverwhelming, shocking and sickening feeling of seeing visceral traces of violence and suffering32(ibid.) This goes some way towards characterising what I conceptualise as the ‘phantom’ ofplace, discussed in more detail in section 1.3. It is also descriptive of how empathic participationis supposed to occur in dark tourism, to which I now turn.Empathic being-withTang argues that dark tourism occurs in the spirit of compassion for fellow humanbeings, and of camaraderie in suffering (2018, 430). Dale and Robinson concur, writing thatexposure to sites of tragedy results in a heightened understanding of the personal pain andsuffering experienced by those who lived it (qtd in McKenzie, 2018, 670). In wider society, fromboard rooms to group therapy sessions, empathy is framed as a tool with which to resolvedifferences and prevent conflict. In the same spirit as the desire to memorialise and learn, then,the desire to empathise with victims of dark events, leading to the visitation of the dark sitesthat represent them, appears to be motivated by the intention to ‘build bridges’ ofunderstanding, respect and sensitivity to the experiences of others, and potentially even toprevent future suffering. We have already seen that this desire in the case of education is notnecessarily what is ultimately achieved. Similarly, discussions on the problem of empathy as amotivation are abound in dark tourism literature. Kerr raises the point that the more one isexposed to horrible events, one may become desensitised to the affect of “being there”proposed by Willis, or require an “ever-increasing level of horror, gore, or realism” in order toexperience the earlier levels of empathy (ibid.). Moreover, these bodily intuitive affects thatoccur – sadness, horror, shock – cannot be experienced in the first place, Roberts contends,33unless we are already familiar with such feelings in the extreme: “we can only feel for what weknow” (2018, 608). This sentiment is of course particularly relevant to the kind of touristencounter this thesis is concerned with: that of the white Western tourist with a space ofracialised Otherness; reaching to imagine what, for them, is unimaginable.Throwing doubt upon even the fundamental concept of empathy as a motivation forunderstanding-inspired change, Willis quotes Levinas’ description of sorrow for others as a“useless pain” (2014, 211). Contemplating the experience of gazing upon the dead bodies ondisplay at Murambi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, Willis argues that the more profound andethical evocation that emerges, rather than sorrow, is a sense of failed responsibility (ibid.). Thisimplicates the tourist as witness, and is therefore more likely to have a lasting impact andpotentially inspire action. Through all of this, though, Willis cautions that there is a fine balanceto strike between taking on or taking over the experience (ibid., 209, my emphasis). Chernobylsurvivors who were interviewed in Hannam and Yankovska’s 2018 study were keen todistinguish their experience of walking around the site from that of visitors, and emphasise thateven those with the best of intentions will “never understand the pain and heartache ofresidents of the Zone”, or even be able to “comprehend [their] experience” (327). Any sufferingone may feel when touring such sites, therefore, inevitably tips over from being that of thevictims to being that of our own; it is “the suffering of our seeing” (Willis, 2014, 213). Criticalrace scholar Saidiya Hartman has deepened this argument in terms of the gaze of the whitesubject upon the suffering Black subject. With specific reference to trans-Atlantic slavery, sheargues that white people’s attempts to envision and empathise with that experience here result34in replacing ‘their’ body with ‘ours’. In imagining so vividly ‘what if this happened to me’, we feelfor and empathise with ourselves, and the Black body is silenced, thrown out, erased (Hartman,1997, 18). In support of Hartman, Razack analyses the ‘good feeling’ generated for whiteCanadian audiences watching documentaries about the Rwandan genocide, showing thatpeople “left the cinema warmed by [their] own capacity to care” (2007, 382). Making thedecision to learn about, or attempt to empathise with, racialised Others - in our leisure time, noless - allows us to applaud ourselves for our humanity. It will be of interest to my case studyanalysis to see how sites might encourage the self-congratulation of tourists, in order toproduce the warming feeling of having done good in their gaze upon suffering.Confronting mortalityUsing the death of others as a way to consider one’s own is, I believe, the exact kind ofontological sleight of hand that Willis references in the above quote about tourists “taking overthe experience” or quasi-adopting the suffering that is represented at sites. Nevertheless, thisidea of facing one’s mortality as a motivation is one of the more prolific theories about thepopularity of dark tourism in the scholarship. One of the main proponents of this perspective isPhilip Stone, who has written about it at length across multiple publications. Stone’s primaryargument is that death has been sequestered in Western secular societies, removed from the“public community gaze” to the “private medical gaze” (2012, 1570), resulting in an increasedsense of mystique and, ultimately, dread around dying, which dark tourist encounters can helpto address or confront. Sharing this viewpoint, Cohen posits that thanotouristic engagementsoffer the opportunity to contemplate one’s own death without striving to ‘overcome it’ via an35act of faith or belief (2018, 158). Going one step further, Dale and Robinson suggest that suchan encounter “comes a close second to experiencing the afterlife itself” (2011, 207).Representing a counter position to the idea that the tourist draws direct parallels between thedeath of victims represented at dark sites and their own, however, Stone highlights thediscrepancy between ‘normal’ or every day kinds of death and the “Significant Other Death”that is memorialised en masse (2012, 1565). He contends that the spectacular nature of thedeath on display allows tourists to “view their own death as distant, unrelated” to the kind thatthey consume on site, and find reassurance in the hope that “their own death will be a goodRomantic death and their lives will be meaningful and ontologically secure” (ibid., 1573). Bothpositions agree that tourism helps to address ontological anxieties about human mortality, butthe disparity raises the question of whether dark tourists seek to temporarily borrow or co-optthe specific deathly experience of the representational subjects of the site, or distancethemselves from it. This matter of bringing close and/or distancing will be a recurrent themethroughout my analysis, as site management and tourists employ multiple tactics of consumingthe exotic pleasures of the racialised Other, whilst remaining at arm’s length.Speaking to the latter position – that of distancing – some research has suggested that thepsychological pleasure of Schadenfreude is a significant motivator for gazing upon the traumaand anguish at dark tourism sites. Hodgkinson and Urquart write that the allure of witnessingthe “suffering, and even death, of others” is “arguably as old as history itself”, once again callingback to the roots of thanatourism that Seaton identifies in centuries past (2016, 40). Dunkely’saforementioned interviews with recent visitors to dark sites demonstrate that they were more36likely to express a “sense of gratitude for not having had to endure the suffering” than toexpress “a desire to create change within the world, to help those who are suffering in similarconflicts and tragedies”, despite having reported original intentions of memorialising andlearning from the experience (2016, 115). The very first line of one participant’s reflection on hisvisit was: “Thank god it wasn’t me” (ibid, 112). Hodgkinson and Urquart contend that so-callededucational tours and exhibits are more often attempting to “capitalise on the potentiallyvoyeuristic nature of the visitor” by showcasing the more gruesome, sensually affectingelements of the story (2016, 40), thus leading the tourist to leave with a sense of euphoria orrenewed life appreciation at their comparatively charmed circumstances. This once againprovides some insight into who these tourist attractions are attempting to attract: less likely theactual survivors or relatives of survivors of the event in question, and more likely middle-classadults with the cash to spend on leisure activities, and the desire for the cultural capital theyprovide. A particularly illustrative example of this is Butler et al’s research into the racial profileof visitors to ex-plantation sites, where it was discovered that only 3.5% of the 1266 surveyedvisitors self-identified as Black or African-American compared to 85% who identified as white orCaucasian (qtd in Jamal and Lelo, 2011, 39). The history being written by these sites, suggestJamal and Lelo, showcases the darker, more gruesome images of slavery that excite and appalthe white tourist from their position of somatic detachment (ibid). Accessing dark tourist sitesout of a desire to reaffirm the distance between the Self and the Other can also be seen in thepotential motivation to visit dark sites out of longing for a break from familiarity and one’severyday world.37Tourism writ large has always allowed for a temporary suspension of one’s regular, ordered life(Biran and Poria, 2012, 67-8). One could argue that whether that pleasure is being derived bylying on a beach, exploring a new city, or visiting the site of a mass genocide, it is still the samepleasure. If anything, dark tourism offers this in the extreme: as close as one can safely get tothe most abject and unusual events and circumstances, offering a “challenge to the inherentorder, rationality and progress of modernity” (Lennon and Foley, qtd in Stone, 2006, 149). Tangsuggests that visitors to earthquake-prone regions, or other sites threatened by potentialhazards, may be motivated to “experience a sense of risk, danger, or thrill” as a tonic to theboredom of the everyday (2018, 432). But whilst this desire is rooted within the very knowledgeof one’s difference from those local to the place visited, does the act of visiting truly reaffirmthis distance, or temporarily collapse it in the imagination of the tourist? After all, where’s thefun if one does not fully immerse oneself in this temporary circumstance?Podoshen maintains that this desire for the unusual will lead tourists to seek out ever moreunique experiences, as what was once unique becomes more attainable (2018, 175). He arguesthat engaging in dark tourism in the age of the ‘selfie’ denotes a form of signalling behaviour,attempting to display the exclusivity of their leisure activities (ibid., 174). The conspicuousconsumption of macabre and upsetting tourism sites transforms Others’ trauma into a badge ofhonour or status symbol for the tourist, who promotes their involvement and engagementwhilst simultaneously holding it at arm’s length in the need to maintain its alterity (lest it lose itsappeal).38For the young white liberal subject in the 21st century, publicly expressing racist views orbehaviours is tantamount to social suicide, or ‘cancellation’.3 Exhibiting ‘wokeness’, therefore, isa new form of cultural currency, one which some may attempt to obtain by expressing desire toengage (in various ways) with non-white Others. bell hooks writes about young white menwhose overt sexual desire for Blackness represents what they believe to be “a progressivechange” (hooks, 1992, 369). To them, she writes, “the most potent indication of that change isthe frank expression of longing, the open declaration of desire” (ibid.) In the same way, touristsmay see their visitation of racialised dark tourism sites as a way of signalling that they are notracist, on the contrary, they are attracted to learning more about the Others the site represents.Here, erotic desires for the trasgressive foreign can be dressed up as a commendable and‘modern’ willingness to cross boundaries... boundaries that are further enforced by the whitetourist’s fleeting occupation of Otherness, that is relinquished as soon as the visit ends.Though many other motivations have been proposed in the literature, the above discussions areboth those that most frequently recur, and those that I feel are most relevant to a white gaze onracialised spaces and bodies.1.2.5 Moral questionsI have already touched upon some of the ways debates around the morality and ethicsof mixing leisure with tragedy arise in the literature. Suffice to say this is a recurrent theme, as3 This is in the broadest of terms. Fascism is alive and well in the Western world and there are of course many whitesupremacist youths who boldly and proudly espose racism. I am talking here specifically about mass culture, whereonline practices of public shaming and calling-out police the boundaries of acceptability.39authors variously weigh up the potential positives of promoting “peace, commemoration,reconciliation, conservation, learning, remembrance, and cultural understanding” (Bird et al.,2018), against the commercialisation of trauma that dark sites inevitably engage in. Put anotherway: can dark tourism be used as a means toward social justice? (Mahrouse, 2011, 375).Discussion of this question culminates in considering whether lessons are ultimately drawn fromthe visitor/site interaction that could result in action to positively benefit the community relatedto the disaster. Lennon writes that “death and tragedy are the constants that reaffirm how littleis learned from atrocity” (2018, 592), representing the sceptical side of this debate. Korstanjeand Baker, on the other hand, argue that dark tourism can help a community to overcome theloss and pain in the aftermath of a disaster through telling their story (2018, 540), placing theagency for healing and positive change on the side of the representational subjects of a site, asopposed to the visitors.For me, this question will be studied through the lens of whether racialised relations of powerare more often disrupted or reinforced at dark sites. How is the site scripted, both in itsattempts to generate visitors (marketing) and the experience once one site? Given the fact thatmany popular leisure and tourist attractions are “based on idealized roles and stereotypicalsituations which are calculated to give the feeling of reassurance”, so that the experience can beneatly tied off and send the visitor seamlessly back to their normal life, how can dark tourism atonce claim to teach moral lessons based on real stories about suffering, and simultaneouslyreinforce the message that “everything is fundamentally all right?” (Rojek, 1993, 205). I willexamine whether my case study sites find ways to support and reinforce the idea that in the40very act of visiting we become “complicit”, shedding our neutrality as we become both“spectators and witnesses” (Skinner, 2018, 145), or whether these sites, situated as they arewithin a neoliberal structure of profitability, are more concerned with providing tourists a fun,thrilling and ultimately un-challenging experience.411.3 Defining the phantomIn order to address the ways in which tour companies, site managers, and touristsengage with or dismiss the phantom in the case studies I will present, I must first establish myown working definition.Perhaps the most well-known and oft-referenced writing on ghostliness in the social sciences isAvery Gordon’s 1997 Ghostly Matters. In this book, Gordon suggests the notion of haunting,whilst usually thought to refer to the disappeared, the “over and done with”, can also call ourattention to that which lingers (xvi). To Gordon, it is the channel through which past unresolvedtraumas, wrongdoings, or exploitations make themselves known in the present, urging ourattention, imploring us to address them. It is the outline of something, a nagging presentabsence, that may have been pushed away or buried, but refuses to lay dormant.This haunting can be of individuals, a personal relationship with one’s own ghosts, or at asocietal level – a social violence done in the past, the effects of which are still felt in the present.Gordon clarifies that although these ghosts may indicate the presence of an unresolved trauma,haunting is different to trauma itself in that it calls for something to be done: it is the sign thatdemands a response (ibid., 8). It is our reminder that the past is “anything but dead and over”,and action must be taken that cannot be satisfied by simple reflectionism (ibid., 12-13).My own understanding of the phantom is informed by the above, but where it differs slightlyfrom Gordon’s haunting is in its fundamental relationship to place. Following Riaño-Alcalá, I42contend that place holds memory (2006, 65). This is not the same as saying that place cantrigger the memories of those who have been there before, but rather suggesting that placeitself has its own memory that is stored in the soil, in the cracks between bricks, in betweenlayers of concrete and paint that have built up over time. Memory of human interaction,emotion and experience, yes, but also other-than-human interventions: weather’s affect, thegrowth and decay of plant matter, and the perennial comings and goings of all of Earth’sanimals.The phantom, for me, is the presence of that place-memory making itself known to any whomight cross its path. It can be covered over, ignored, or pushed back with ever new layers ofmeaning and memory, but it is always potentially there, always at the edge of perceptibility.Like Gordon’s haunting, the phantom too is a “different way of coming to know, againstempirical knowledge and traditional ways of conceptualizing and studying the social world”(1997, 10), though it doesn’t demand to be known or understood; it simply is. It is a sensoryaffect, some excess or surplus lingering emotion that swirls and bursts at the seams of timeitself, refusing fixity. Contrary to the written archive, it cannot be articulated, only sensed. It maybe felt in the creak of floorboards beneath feet, in soft echoes or that loud kind of silence, in thedizzying height of trees and the textures of gnarled bark, in the squelch of upturned mud, instains, dinks and scratches on the surface of the walls and furniture, in the must, or freshbreeze, or some quality of the air itself.43Edensor contends that such spectres of space and place can be more keenly felt at sites that arein some stage of dilapidation. In “The ghosts of industrial ruins”, he bemoans the “fixed,classified and commodified memories” that heritage sites and museums produce, praisinginstead the “marginal”, “undercoded” and “mundane” spaces that can be found in the backsidesand forgotten underbellies of the city, for their potential to connect us to the past, to behaunted (2005, 833-4). Edensor sees the affective potential of the ruin in its liminality, the statebetween “rejection and obliteration”, which in resisting categorisation, public orstate-sponsored narrative, retains its interpretive power (ibid, 836). Lacking the polish oftraditional memorial spaces, ruins reveal physical traces of the lives that have passed through atdifferent times, providing the tourist a closer encounter with a barrier-less history. Much like myconception of the phantom above, Edensor sees this human-to-spectre interaction facilitated bythe sensory: “powerful smells, profuse and intrusive textures, peculiar and delicatesoundscapes” (ibid., 837). Whilst I agree that ruined buildings undeniably have a moreimmediate and visible relationship with the passing of time, perhaps making their ghosts moreeasily accessible, I also think that pedestalising ruins as ‘pure history’ in this way comes with itsown risks.The risk of romanticising ruins has been realised in the recent and ongoing phenomenon of ‘ruinporn’ - what I describe as the aesthetic fetishization of sites of urban dilapidation. Focusing noton the ancient ruins of cultures long since passed, ruin porn instead centres on thecontemporary cityscape, showcasing the failures of modernity, and revelling in the witness ofindustrial decline. Primarily taking the form of glossy coffee table books, Pinterest boards and44physical guided tours of ruined buildings, ruin porn takes what are, in many cases, the brick andmortar skeletons of tragic circumstances – financial ruin, job loss, eviction from homes – andtransforms them into art or leisure for the privileged. To enjoy the fallout of abandonment forits aesthetic beauty, it stands to reason that one must be detached from the circumstances thatbrought it about, and that the sight of semi-ruined buildings must be unusual, something one isnot used to seeing in ones’ own surroundings. Thus the very existence of the aesthetic pursuitof ruin porn relies on class and racial difference, and the gaze of the bourgeousie on theproletariat.The buildings that make up ruin tours, and the pictures that circulate on ruin porn forums andfeature in photography books like Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore, are mandatorilydevoid of bodies. The fantasy of beauty in the abandoned, and with it the haunting sensibility, isonly enjoyable if its consequences for the living are kept out of sight. Romanticising anderoticising the modern ruin capitalises on the economic struggles of the lower classes -including the destruction of Black geographies such as the city of Detroit, and has no interest ina mindful examination of its root causes (other than to celebrate a generalised idea of industrialcollapse, as though this in itself heralds the end of capitalism and the triumph of nature in‘reclaiming’ space). The absence of bodies, and the absence of any historical or socioculturalinformation that comes along with the stylised ruin porn images that circulate the internet,detaches them from place, time and meaning, reducing them to an abstract aesthetic: a blankcanvas which the viewer can populate with the ghosts of their imaginings.45Edensor’s suggestion that the ruin is the most unfiltered or perhaps even authentic way toaccess place history, therefore, gives me pause. As with heritage spaces and museums that havea narrative dictated by the owners/proprietors, there will always be subjectivities and narrativesthat are written by tourists themselves. One could say that if these subjectivities are trulysensed by being in place, connecting to the phantoms that make themselves known, touristsmay be closer to living histories than if they were to swallow whole the letter of the archive oncarefully labelled artefacts, or to follow pre-choreographed routes of movement through thespace of the museum. I do think that is true. I also think, however, that it is an extremelyuncommon practice, in the Western world at least, to enter a space entirely open to listening toand learning from its textures and resonances, with no pre-learned histories or expectations tocolour that experience.Moreover, an additional danger of romanticising the visible passage of time that we see in ruinsis that it sidelines the phantom of places that have been restored, revamped or colonised. LilaAbu-Lughod writes powerfully about how her father, on returning to Israeli-occupied Palestine,was able to see “beyond, between and behind” the newly built settlements and highways, to“the familiar landscapes of his youth” (2011, 127). I was once fortunate enough to learn fromxʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Elder and teacher Ti' te-in (Shane Pointe) that despite the layers ofconcrete covering the ancestral lands of his people, his relationship to the land is Sovereign andwill always remain: it lives in his body, in his relationships with people, and in Musqueamlanguage. This makes the important point that phantoms - although fundamentally of place, are46not necessarily bound to place, and have a network of channels and repositories that are fluidand mobile.The idea that if a building is not actively decaying it is not storied, or that if Indigenous place hasbeen paved over it does not hold ancestral memory, is too much invested in the idea that thematerial effect of phantoms must be seen to be felt or connected with. Place-memoriesthroughout time cannot be deleted or erased, though they can be covered over, and place itselfreframed. Whilst deeper layers of place memory may indeed be harder to sense incommercialised place, I want to make clear my belief that the places I will examine in my casestudies have phantoms despite their reframing and reconstruction as ordered tourist sites: placeis palimpsestic, and deeper layers will always leave traces.I contend that it is a key element of dark tourism that people are drawn to: temporary access toheterotopic spaces of resonant trauma - phantoms - that constitute an alternative leisureexperience.Enhancing, or even falsifying the traces of emplaced memory is therefore a route into satisfyingtourist expectations for dark place, thereby selling tickets. Further than this though, it providessite managers with an opportunity to rewrite the narratives the site produces to better fit theirparticular aims. Whether the vestiges of phantomic resonances that the tourist feels are rawand unmediated, or constructed and reformed to welcome and affirm the white body, is47perhaps a matter of the tourist’s own ability to navigate touristic space in a manner that is alertto the ways in which it can be manipulated - by both external and internal biases.48Chapter 2: Narrative Becoming in the Prison Escape Game2.1 Becoming prisoner: Selling criminality as ‘escape’ to dark touristsIn order to best illustrate what it looks like when site management put the phantom towork (or play) in their marketing for the tour or experience, the first case study I draw upon isPrison Escape: a product of Real Life Gaming, a company specialising in thriller / horrorinteractive games and events. Prison Escape is their largest-scale escape room, set in a realformer prison, located in the city of Breda in the southern Netherlands.In this interactive leisure experience, up to 420 tourist-players at a time are given the role of‘inmates’ in the prison, while a large cast of actors play their fellow inmates, wardens and prisonguards. Over the course of three hours, participants must work together following clues,decoding messages and bribing / misleading / sneaking past guards to reach the end of thestory and ‘escape’ from the prison.As a New York Times article about the entrepreneurial opportunity posed by escape roomgames states, the settings for escape room games are “usually the stuff of nightmares”, butthere is a rapidly growing market of customers willing to pay to escape such situations “for fun”(McConnon, 2018). The impulse to feel in-danger, whilst knowing a safe return to normalityawaits on the other side, is a lynchpin of the dark tourism experience. Whilst many escaperooms rely on the appeal of fantasy, allowing participants to experience a world that doesn’t49otherwise exist and is therefore largely4 outside of sociopolitical implications – a spaceship,enchanted forest, zombie apocalypse – others lean on iconographic historical settings orreal-world scenarios, providing the opportunity to put oneself in the shoes of real peoplethroughout time and geographical space. One such pair of shoes that seems to generateexcitement and intrigue to thrill-seeking-puzzle-solvers are those of a prison inmate.The ‘prisoner’ is a shadowy, threatening and ultimately doomed figure. Shadowy, first in thattheir incarceration keeps them literally out of sight and detached from the functioning of theeveryday world. They are socially, politically, culturally and materially isolated from the ‘outside’,denied that which is contradictorily valorised as both the most fundamental human right, andcapitalism’s ultimate tenet of successful personhood: freedom. As well as being literallyremoved from the public eye, convicts are made further tenebrous by the removal of theirindividuality. Convicted criminals are not often described or thought of in three dimensions:they do not have passions or hobbies (though they can be obsessive), they were never children(unless some trauma ‘explains’ their deviance/immorality), they cannot be generous, kind,creative, playful, loving. The term ‘prisoner’ is so forceful in its connotative power that it sucksup and consumes all other identities.The capital ‘L’ Law is, for many, synonymous with safety, moral correctness, and even reason orfact (as though devoid of human subjectivity, it is how things ‘are’). To break The Law is4 I say largely because, of course, allegorical representations of the real world are frequently found in fantasy. Thekey difference is that historical fictions put direct comparisons at the very surface of perceptibility. There isintentionally no question over what or who is being gestured to, and so participants agree to a clear and opencontract of representation.50therefore characterised as an act against society itself, a threat to the structural safety of ourworld as well as the bodily safety of its inhabitants. Prisoners are written as dangerous, first andforemost; they are removed from society for ‘the greater good’. As with anything forbidden,though, this pariah status, the risk they pose, and their sequestration behind locked doors canserve to make them all the more attractive and intriguing. The level of security around prisons -high brick walls, barbed wire fences - whilst punishing and isolating those trapped on the inside,also has the effect of denying access to those on the outside. Prisons are spaces we areforbidden from entering, that we will never see for ourselves other than in movies and on TV.Tourism opportunities to enter the prison are therefore of high cultural value, they maintaintourism’s origins as leisure activities driven fundamentally by curiosity (Tang, 2018, 430).2.2 Situating Prison Escape: carcerality and race between local (Netherlands)and globalDespite the largely ethnically white makeup of the location of this particular prison, Iargue that the site of the penitentiary writ large is ideologically and representationallyracialised, due to a long global history of carceral injustice that continues to write societalexpectations of the appearance of a ‘criminal’ as dark-skinned. This is compounded by mediarepresentations, both fictional and non-fictional. There is a large body of research that exposesthe overrepresentation of Black men as perpetrators of crime in news media - particularly ontelevision (which has a more global reach than print news, and impresses a longer-lasting imagedue to the sense of liveness conveyed by the moving image), when compared to bothreal-world crime statistics, and the representation of white perpetrators (Dixon & Linz, 2000;51Campbell, 1995; Entman, 1992). Cinematic and televisual representations frequently lean onthe stereotype of the Black criminal, drug user or sexual predator to simultaneously fulfil andreinforce audience expectations. Dennis Rome’s book Black Demons argues that, just as themyth of the “Black rapist” was invented to justify lynchings, a public image of the Black male ascriminal is being consistently used on our screens today ‘to perpetuate dominant society’scontinued fear and subjugation of African Americans’ (2004, 2). Although Rome is speaking outof the US context, these patterns of representation can be found wherever a system of whitesupremacy reigns.For example, there are histories and practices local to The Netherlands that align with broaderWestern patterns of race-based oppression via the justice system, and other technologies ofconfinement. In “White Order: Racialization of Public Space in the Netherlands”, Marina andSchor outline how the Dutch government continues to safeguard the whiteness of metropolitanspace by scripting the Dutch Caribbean population, and by extension, the broader Blackpopulation, as “useless” and “anti-social” (2015, 12; 18). This, in turn, authorises theirsurveillance and spatial confinement. Marina and Schor argue that the colonial genealogy ofcontaining Blackness is hidden from view in public discourse, and that its vestiges in the presentday – such as racialised architecture and discriminatory justice systems - are concealed behind a“post-political” narrative of whiteness that espouses safety, pragmatism and planning (ibid, 20).A similar treatment is given to Muslims, who often serve as the exemplary ‘Other’ from whichwhite Europe distances itself. Fatima El-Tayeb details how, in the Netherlands, an image of52Dutch egalitarianism is crafted by disguising racialized and anti-Muslim biases as concern for theLGBTQ+ community. Islamophobia is presented as “the logical, in fact necessary, response toIslam’s homophobia” (2012, 87), thus entirely erasing both queer Muslims and homophobicChristians from the narrative. Additionally, in this framing, Muslims are victims “not of Dutchracism but of an oppressive, archaic culture” from which they must be saved (ibid.). Moralpanics, particularly around homophobia, the rights of women, and illegality, are stirred up tojustify the perpetuation of white supremacy in the face of the increasing migration andasylum-seeking in Europe of those from majority Muslim countries, which simultaneouslyserves to divert attention from those same issues in white society. The Dutch identity is held atarm’s length from migrants and refugees, who are written in the news media as illegal,regardless of their actual immigration status or reasons for fleeing (De Genova, 2013, 54). Theprison I will be discussing in this case study, the setting for the escape game, once served astemporary housing for incoming refugees to The Netherlands (van Vilet, 2020). In the choice toutilize a prison for this purpose, out of all the out-of-use buildings that must exist in anindustrial metropole, one cannot help but sense a deliberate conflation of Muslim migrancy andillegality, intended to consolidate such associations in the mind of the Dutch public.The ideological project of Europe and Europeanness continues to strive toward an intrinsicallywhite identity, while Blackness serves as an “indelible biological trace of an outside otherness”,persisting from the 19th century imperial imaginary (Linke, 2011, 125), and being Muslim istantamount to violent prejudice, and/or illegality. This insidious Othering works to justify theeconomic exploitation, imperial domination and social exclusion of the Black and Muslim53population in the Netherlands and throughout Europe, leading to much higher rates ofincarceration proportionally than White counterparts (Junger-Tas, 1997, 257).It is clear, therefore, that the Koepelgevangenis prison (more widely known as the Boschpoort)in Breda which is the setting for Prison Escape, is racialised space a priori. Like all places, itcannot exist outside of the local and global scripts that prewrite its meanings. Sherene Razackcontends that in racialised space, “violence may occur with impunity”, which refers specificallyto the lawlessness with which white bodies can inflict pain and even death on Black people inthe slums and poorer areas of the city (such as in the murder of Pamela George, 2014, 116), butcan also be applicable to the symbolic violence enacted by white lenses of representation. Whatis of most interest to me in this chapter is how scripts of Blackness are taken up,operationalised, and over-written by Prison Escape’s current owner/operators. The sources I willuse for my analysis are the company’s website, their social media pages, and promotionalvideos for the experience that I have found on YouTube. It’s important to mention that, exceptfor the YouTube video which is narrated in English, all copy I will be quoting from has beentranslated from Dutch to English by the website’s own inbuilt translation software. There may,therefore, be slight variations in the exact wording of the copy from the original version, but thegeneral meanings no doubt remain the same.542.3 Navigating the prison game: Producing location and experience as markersof authenticityPerhaps the main unique selling point of Prison Escape is its setting in a genuineout-of-use prison. The website for the experience repeats this information in several differentplaces so that it cannot be missed. We are told it is an “enormous”, “impressive” and “stunning”location, all admirational ways of viewing the prison that one who has not been incarceratedthere has the privilege of seeing. We are told several times when it was built (1886, or the 19thcentury), emphasising a long history that will appeal to antiquarians and those enchanted bythe past, without explicitly delving into any details, leaving it instead to the tourist imaginationto populate. The date of its closure (2016) is also repeatedly mentioned, perhaps to provide asense of how recently it held real inmates (see figures 1-3). There are two ways in which thissetting generates more appeal for the potential tourist: authenticity, and uniqueness, or rarity.In dark tourist literature, differentiation between sites of and sites associated with death,disaster and depravity is a key mode through which the relative darkness of a site is assessed,the thinking being that the “auratic power” of places that have witnessed and borne terribleacts and tragic happenings lends them more gravitas as tourist locations, and facilitates a(stronger) affectual connection for the tourist (Seaton, 2009, 85). The notion of auratic powerrefers to a sense of the sacred or profane, and the idea that reverberations of what hashappened in and through a place can be felt: what I describe as the phantom.55Pressing the locational authenticity upon potential tourists thus heightens the sense of darknessand suggests that phantoms of place can be more keenly felt. Knowing that real criminals havebeen held prisoner in the space - despite any details of such inmates being conspicuouslyabsent - provides a deeper immersive potential for the tourist-players of the escape game,allowing them to sink deeper into their roles as ‘inmates’, and raising the stakes of the fantasyescape itself. What is striking about how the phantom of the ‘prisoner’ is put to work by PrisonEscape’s website, though, in its methods of selling us this experience, is just how much thebuilding itself is used to gesture to the real previous prisoners, without having to confront themface on.For example, Prison Escape’s website highlights the “stunning dome” that comprises theBoschpoort’s main building, housing the “enormous panoptic” that would make “prisoners feelwatched all the time”. We are told that over the course of the experience we will “get to knowthe entire building”, as though this is a main selling point of participation. We see itphotographed in dramatic fish-eye perspective (see Figure 1), with actor-prisoners andactor-guards posing in prison life vignettes - cowering in their cell; passing a note through afence; peering round a corner to check for guards - as though to illustrate the space, invokingthe phantoms of its previous life whilst replacing them with new ones that more closely relateto the concept of escape (see figures 2-4). We are told, via descriptions on the website, thisprison is known as a “dark and nasty place” , but also that it we will come to know its “magic”,signalling an appeal to the way these two usually juxtapositional descriptors are conflated in thedesires of dark tourists: there is excitement and a magnetism to the macabre. The gap in what56the various descriptors of the prison also reveals something about the distance between theprison as a material object, as a building that situates the body of the tourist, and the prison asan imaginary, as an abstracted space that situates the mind of the tourist. The physical buildingof the prison is praised and celebrated for its “stunning” architecture, but the representationalspace of incarceration is written as “nasty”. The tourist is the link that holds these two spacestogether, through which these various ways of reading and being in space pass back and forth.Figure 1 - Prison Escape marketing image: fisheye lens on prison (Homepage, n.d.).57Figure 2 - Prison Escape marketing image - inmates exchanging money (Homepage, n.d.)Figure 3 - Prison Escape marketing image: inmate peers round corner (The experience, n.d.)58Figure 4 - Prison Escape marketing image: inmate in cell (The experience, n.d.)In praising and emphasising the architecture of the building, Real Life Gaming aligns with acommon theme Jacqueline Wilson has noted in prison tourism more generally – that fascinationwith the building itself trumps interest in the lives of its previous inhabitants (qtd in Hodgkinsonand Urquhart, 2016, 44). I would suggest that there is a sense of safety for Real Life Gaming incalling attention to the aesthetic features of the building of the prison, rather than detailing thehistory of its inmates. Keeping bodies out of sight, like the simultaneous designation of“magical” and “nasty”, abstracts the prison space, avoiding directly addressing the socialimbalances created and sustained by the penal system, and the violences of incarceration, andallowing the site to serve as a blank canvas to be painted with the tourists’ own,59easier-to-stomach, imaginary version of a stereotypical criminal prisoner such as those we seein the trailer for Prison Escape (more on that to come). The former inhabitants of theBoschpoort prison exist, through this marketing move, only as phantoms that the architectureof the building reflects: the cells call up images of prisoners pacing, sleeping, staring at the wall;the iron bars on doors and windows call to mind hands rattling them and reaching through; thepanopticon structure at the centre allows us to picture inmates through the eyes of guards incontinuous observation. However, even what could have been imagined in these spaces hasbeen filled in for us with staged shots of actors, so that any phantoms that may makethemselves known and felt are disregarded, covered over. The actors become a technology offraming and writing the prison, both representing and replacing the phantoms of the space.They do so first, in the marketing shots used on the website, which are fixed representationsdirected and edited by Real Life Gaming, and second, in a more fluid and active way throughoutthe process of the game. Although there will be specific pre-planned routes to guide touristsinto, and dialogue they must follow, the immersive ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ nature of thegame will also foster opportunities for improvisation, providing some level of agency for theactors. Emma Willis contends that theatricality in tourism can successfully evoke the “alwaysarriving and yet never present” bodies of the past (2014, 7). Could these actors, therefore,whether knowingly or unknowingly, bring phantoms to bear on the present through theiragentic performance?Save for this possibility, the way in which the prison is framed for the escape room tourists is apractice of narrative reduction that serves to hide the place’s otherwise long, complicated60history. This history can be read elsewhere: according to van Vliet, the prison was the site of theincarceration (and successful escape!) of Nazi prisoners after World War II5 and also served as awomen’s prison for a long period, and then afterwards was a temporary shelter for asylumseekers - as mentioned earlier (van Vliet, 2020). These histories and the people that lived themare kept just out of reach, unbefitting as they are of the narrative Prison Escape wants to sell toits customers. Phantoming is thus a selective practice: only certain ideas about the incarcerated- those that fulfill prewritten expectations of the threatening dark-skinned male prisoner - alignwith the capitalist goals of the prison as tourist enterprise. Not raising the phantoms of the site,or speaking to the complex and contested histories of racialized incarceration in TheNetherlands, facilitates a guilt-free engagement with the site that is still thrilling in its proximityto the “dangerous criminal Other” that the site managers craft out of thin air (Huey and Broll,2017, 519).2.4 Becoming other as a temporary break from the ordered world and the whiteselfReal Life Gaming positions Prison Escape on the thin line between the modern andpostmodern tourism experience. Tourists are invited into authenticity, providing them theexperience of accessing a space that is real and tangible that holds the potential to bring abouta form of self-transformation or self-actualisation, and an empathic engagement with what itfeels like to be treated like a criminal. But it stops short of offering realism itself - after all,5 Clearly, the reason for this omission is to avoid parallels that could be drawn between Nazi warcriminals and the escape game’s customer-players. A completely reasonable marketing decisionthat nonetheless dismisses phantoms of place.61guests are not actually locked into their cells, and the whole experience is based around thefantastical concept of escaping. Instead, tourists enter into a kind of “hyperreality” organisedaround spectacle and sensation - the cornerstones of the postmodern experience (Heitmann,2011, 53). They pay to play on a caricatured landscape of good and evil characters (the goodbeing fellow inmates who help them find freedom, the evil being guards who try to thwart theirescape), where the time limit adds the thrill of haste, and donning the costume of ‘prisoner’provides them a temporary identity with which to experiment. Rojek argues that “post-tourists”are aware of the commodification of the tourist experience, and are concerned much more withparticipating in something unique and sensually exciting than experiencing any growth orchange as a result of their leisure pursuits (1993, 117). Postmodern tourist experiences offer abreak from the Enlightenment-influenced ordered and structured world, contrasting thequotidian and mundane of tourists’ everyday lives with a fantasy of difference (Urry, 1995, 132).Darker postmodern tourist experiences add an additional layer to this feeling of breakingthrough. As the “other” of the tourism industry (Laws, 2013, 103), dark tourism allows itsparticipants to confront and consume death, suffering and the uncanny at closer quarters thanis common in their day to day lives. We see this explicitly advertised in Prison Escape’s offer to“leave your real life behind” and step into “the shoes of a prisoner”, enticing prospectivecustomers to cross a border into the unreal (The experience, n.d.).Still another layer of thrilling distance from normality, another route to border-cross offered inPrison Escape, is the “spice” of racialisation that bell hooks describes as “livening up the dulldish that is mainstream white culture” (1992, 366). By casting men of colour as the inmates62both in the trailer for the live experience6 and the marketing images for the online version ofthe game (see Figure 5), Prison Escape confirms and reinforces prewritten scripts of Blackcriminality. The white tourist is invited to cross the border into racialised space, be in proximityto and try on a stereotype of Black identity, providing them with a novel and sensually thrillingexperience of becoming Other.Figure 5 - Prison Escape Facebook page: marketing image of Black inmate (Facebook, n.d.).In this move, Black bodies are made alternative playgrounds where members of “dominatingraces” assert their power over them, able to freely come and go on the symbolic frontierbetween the borders of universality and Otherness (ibid., 367), whilst the subject of theiremulation remains fixed in place. bell hooks points out that “difference can seduce precisely6 Found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kziN4ubSF_4&ab_channel=PrisonEscape63because the mainstream imposition of sameness is a provocation that terrorizes” (ibid.) Whiteculture is bored of itself. Although the exact ways of partaking in this thrilling transgression haschanged shape time and again, it has genealogies in the first European ‘explorers’ plunderingforeign shores. Africa and the Americas were a “porno-tropics for the European imagination”, acanvas of possibilities “onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears”(McClintock, 1995, 22). The exotic Other became the subject of both disgust - its ‘primitive’ and‘anachronistic’ ways derided by proponents of European reason, and of desire - its verydifference compelling and attractive (ibid., 35). Imperial exhibitions of exotic artefacts -extremely popular in Victorian England - were arguably the first vestiges of what we now term“cultural appropriation” - where symbols of a racialised identity are tried on and cast aside likeclothes. In our current politics, where undisguised public racism is a ‘cancelable’ offence, thismore subtle form of power play is rife. Unlike the examples that are usually called upon indiscussions about appropriation - hairstyles, music taste, or slang, for example, which areexpressions of Black cultural creativity and diasporic connection, what Prison Escape offers is anassociation with Black punishment, trauma and death. This kind of border crossing is thereforea more unique encounter that will appeal to “post-tourists” who like to feel they are on thefrontier of experience.Podoshen suggests that engaging in dark tourism for some may be a form of signallingbehaviour, a way to impress others with their unusual interests or their bravery for visitingsomewhere risky or frightening (2018, 174). To get a look inside a real prison (even devoid ofreal inmates) is a rare opportunity; it is somewhere the general public are usually denied access.64The website for Prison Escape proclaims it to be a “bucketlist experience” – further appealing toa sense of exclusivity and uniqueness, and also perhaps tapping into the fear of our ownmortality that Stone argues drives dark tourism, reminding us to grasp opportunities before it'stoo late. Attaining this access therefore lends a certain cultural capital, even if only in the formof a good anecdote or conversation starter. This is in stark contrast to the cultural stigma ofhaving been in prison for real.This contrast becomes all the more apparent when looking at the merchandise and branding ofsouvenirs for the Prison Escape experience, which consists of take-home “mugshots” and itemsof clothing emblazoned with the word “Jailbird” (in Dutch, “Bajesklant” - Figure 6).Figure 6 - Prison Escape merchandise: “Jailbird” (Merchandise, n.d.).65Every participant also has a mugshot-style photograph taken at the experience, which then getuploaded to the Prison Escape Facebook page, captionless, where people are invited to vote fortheir favourites. The website advertises the opportunity to win a poster-sized version of yourmugshot by gaining the most “likes”, thus becoming the “Most Wanted” inmate (see Figure 7).Figure 7 - Prison Escape copy: “‘Most wanted’ criminals” (The experience, n.d.).The play on the idea of “Most Wanted” to mean a popularity contest further demonstrates theways in which the language of criminality, and therein criminality itself, is subverted anddisarmed to facilitate a fun leisure experience. Allan Sekula has pointed to the “fundamentaltension” between photography used to “fulfill a bourgeois conception of the self” and uses that“seek to establish and delimit the terrain of the other” (1981, 16). According to Sekula, thephotographed subject is contained and objectified in the mugshot image: it is a photographused not to capture a moment, or reify a sense of self, but to catalogue and classify criminalfaces. I would argue, therefore, that the Prison Escape “mugshots” should not be described assuch, but rather, following Sekula, as “portraits”. Their function is not to objectify the66participants, or keep a record of the people who have visited, but to affirm the very raced andclassed self-making of the tourist. Looking through the photos exhibits the various ways touristschoose to engage with their ‘part’. Some are smiling as they would in a photograph with friends,others are stony-faced, presumably taking more seriously the role of hardened criminal, a feware even grinning in a threatening kind of way that I read as playing psychopath. Whethertourists see the mugshots as an opportunity to win the popularity competition, or anopportunity to sink into their character before the game starts in earnest, the social mediaelement provides a further opportunity for tourists to signal their unique experience to theirfriends by sharing the picture on their own profile. This, in turn, generates free advertising forPrison Escape, contributing to the increasing commodification of punishment noted by Hueyand Broll (2017, 520) and better slotting into an increasingly popular postmodern tourismlandscape.This method of playfully employing social signifiers that otherwise have very negativeconnotations serves the dual purpose of evoking the phantom of the prison – again serving as areminder of the actual prisoners who were contained in the same space, the very real memoriesof pain and the lives were lived and lost over decades, whilst simultaneously holding them atarm’s length – erasing them and replacing them with grinning or scowling tourists posing intheir orange overalls. This concurrent bringing close and pushing away of the realities andhistories of the prison and prisoners is consistent throughout the marketing and overall tone ofthe Prison Escape brand: phantoms are invoked in the same move that they are covered over.672.5 Narrating the idealized tourist subject of Prison Escape on social mediaPerhaps the richest site for demonstrating this marketing move is the trailer for theexperience, which can be found on YouTube. We follow a young white male protagonist arrivingat the prison amongst a group of other white players as the voiceover asserts: “this is you”. Weare immediately told in no uncertain terms who are the imagined audience, who should haveaccess to this experience. Over establishing shots of the Boschpoort, followed by the whitewarden shouting aggressively in players’ faces, the voiceover continues: “in this rotten place,they will control you, they will rule you, and you will obey.” The “they” referred to is presumablythe ‘powers that be’ of the prison landscape that are represented by the on-screen warden andguards. The positioning of these roles as all white could be read as acknowledgement of thestructures of supremacy throughout the prison industrial complex, though more likely it issimply reflecting, without critique, the common demographic of these roles in European prisonsfor reasons of ‘believability’ or ‘realism’. The designation of the prison as “rotten” reinforces thethrilling and desirable darkness of the environment, and fortifies pre-scripted ideas of racialisedspace as “degenerate” and “sullied” (Razack, 2014, 95; 98). Sentiments of forceful control aresold as an amenity for the tourist experience, rather than being offered as an analysis of the“afterlife of slavery”, which Che Gosset, using Saidiya Hartman’s words, identifies in the prisonindustrial system (2014, 33). That is, rather than intentionally pointing to the saturated racismof this system, these words are intended to excite potential thrill-seeking consumers looking topurchase a fantasy of classed and raced punishment that they have not and will not experienceas a reality. Indeed, as the voiceover reassures and reminds viewers: “But this is not your life,you have the power to be free”. The trailer sets a clear boundary between the imagined ‘you’68watching – represented by the white male protagonist and other white players around him,those who will escape – and the ‘them’ of the actor-inmates, who are shown to be majoritymuscular tattooed men of colour, and who are forever bound to the prison, playing endlesscycles of prison escape games but never themselves escaping. The choice to cast these actorsbetrays the clear racial stereotyping that both fuels potential white tourists’ expectations ofwhat being inside a prison “looks” like, and may also arouse white fears of the aggressive,potentially savage Other that is desirable to the white player in its opportunity for transgression(hooks, 1992, 367). Hodgkinson and Urquhart write:The penal gaze, rendered accessible through modern tourism practices, further serves toaccentuate the social distance between ‘us’ (i.e. the interested tourist) and ‘them’ (theprisoner, past or present) (2016, 50).Despite positioning the tourist as an inmate themselves, Real Life Gaming sets them apart andaway from the actors playing ‘real’ inmates who provide immersion in the game’s storyline,firstly through racialisation, and secondly through the voiceover’s assurance that this is notwhere you’re supposed to be, you have the right to be free. Reinforcing this distinction curbsany possibilities for radical empathic engagement that could be facilitated by engagement withphantoms of racialised place and space. By consistently centring the tourist with repetition ofthe pronoun “you”, the trailer’s narration demonstrates how a trip into Otherness, or the‘narrative becoming’ offered by the experience, is fundamentally at the service of the whitejourney of self-discovery, while the subject being emulated remains static. Within the centralnarrative of escape in the live game, a distinction emerges between those marked for freedomand those marked for imprisonment, or those deserving and undeserving of release. Within the69world of the game’s trailer, the white tourists are the deserving, who will ultimately flee, whilethe men of colour will remain incarcerated.This discrimination is further compounded by the narrative of the digital version of PrisonEscape that was released during the COVID-19 pandemic as an alternative to in-person play. Themission for participants in the online game is to help free a character named Yuri Koblenko, whowe are told has been wrongly imprisoned in the Boschpoort. On a website set up exclusively forthe escape game, a petition for his release has over 1000 signatures to date (see Figure 8). Herewe get to know Yuri - a middle-aged white man who is pictured smiling warmly, and who we aretold is an entrepreneur with a wife and a child, who volunteers for numerous charities andcoaches the local soccer team in his spare time (see Figure 9).Figure 8 - Prison Escape petition: Free Yuri Koblenko (#FreeYuriKoblenko, n.d.).70Figure 9 - Prison Escape copy describing Yuri Koblenko (#FreeYuriKoblenko, n.d.)The construction of this character as sympathetic is painfully deliberate, and has the effect ofsetting up unattainable boundaries around who is deserving of their freedom: those who areupstanding and unselfish members of their community, have a loving family, business ownerswho contribute to the economy - i.e., subjects who adhere to essentialised capitalist, legalisticand heteronormative ideas of proper citizenship. These are all aspects of an identity (or citizen)that imply fundamental moral goodness. We, the audience, are supposed to infer that it’simpossible for this man to have committed a crime. This, as well as the scripting of his71whiteness, allows him to be free from racialized connotations of criminality. The only othercharacter image we see in the marketing for the online Prison Escape is a nameless Black man,who is pictured in black and white, wearing prison overalls, next to what looks like a series offinger prints - indicating this is perhaps his on-file mugshot (see fig 11). He is scowling at thecamera, immediately indicating to the viewer we are supposed to read him as ‘bad’, orthreatening. Whereas the pictures we see of Yuri are all taken from his life on the ‘outside’ -holding a beer, wearing sunglasses, even him as a teenager, displaying the fullness of his life andframing him as already free, this man is framed only as a prisoner. In the trailer for the onlinegame, we see Yuri responding to questions from the online players, calmly telling them thatthere’s a window in his cell but it’s closed. The very next scene shows the Black man from theimage, pacing around his cell and shouting furiously what has been translated as “Go crazy inthe cell? Look at my cell!”. Towards the end of the trailer we see a flash of him again, this timethrowing something to the ground with force. The stereotype of the angry Black man is hereemployed as a shortcut to tension and drama in the narrative of the trailer, and to provide a foilto Yuri’s whiteness, pleasantness, innocence.2.6 ConclusionFrom the copy on the website inviting us to “step into the shoes of a prisoner” and“leave [our] real life behind”, to the trailer positioning a white protagonist entering a world ofdark-skinned inmates, to the take-home souvenirs that allow one to wear the identity of“Jailbird”, Prison Escape offers white tourists the opportunity to experience a simulacrum of72racialised, criminalised Otherness with the assurance of a return to normalcy and whiteness,coded as freedom. Whilst the narrative of escape from jail has the potential to offer a radicalabolitionist commentary - rejecting the punitive institution of the prison system and rebellingagainst the neoliberal powers that control it, instead Prison Escape representationally offersfreedom from the system only to those who already possess it, and makes no attempt todismantle our faith in the institution itself. On the contrary, the prison building as an aestheticicon is praised and celebrated. Phantoms of the prison’s history are gestured to with areinforcement of the building’s authenticity, then erased in favour of falsified, stereotypedversions that align with white expectations of the ‘criminal’. Prison Escape offers theopportunity for tourists to truly occupy the space and, representationally, the body of thesubjects of the site they are touring, via a mimetic action and theatricality. As Emma Williswrites, copying produces its own reality, one “not equivalent with its object”, but can “uncannilyunseat its hegemonic claim” (2014, 127-8). Prison Escape therein runs the risk of consuming theOther whole (hooks, 1992, 380), erasing and rewriting the phantoms of place (via longings tobecome them – temporarily, and with the guarantee of a safe return to normality on the otherside) until they are forgotten. Tourist-players’ sense of moral security remains unchallenged, andthey are left with the sense that they have achieved what countless others could not: escapefrom the prison, and so too escape from a fleeting racialised positionality.73Chapter 3: Narrative Containment in The Myrtles PlantationThe previous chapter examined Prison Escape game as a stark example of how darktourism facilitates the ‘narrative becoming’ of dark tourists through the act of trying on andbeing in proximity to the racialized subject position of ‘prisoner’, specifically a version of‘prisoner’ crafted by the calculated phantoming of the prison space in the game’s marketing.Becoming will never lead to being, it is fundamentally a temporary state, and this is essential toits pleasure (and indeed, the pleasure of all tourism). In this chapter, I focus on another mode ofwhiteness enabled by dark tourism: ‘narrative containment’. Narrative containment refers tothe methods by which histories of Black suffering and Black resistance are managed and/orsilenced so as to curb their interruption on a pleasurable embodiment of whiteness in place. Iuse a case study of the Myrtles Plantation to highlight how narrative containment deals with thephantom of enslaved subjects by taming them.The concept of white racial superiority that justified the practice of slavery continues tounderpin the infrastructures of modern US society, long after the abolition of the trans-atlanticslave trade as it functioned up to the 19th century. The racial inequality in healthcare is oneexample that has been rendered more visible over the past two years under the COVID-19pandemic, where the rate of both infection and death has been much higher in Black USpopulations, as well as other ethnic minorities, compared to that of the white US population(Anyane-Yeboa et al., 2020). As I argued in the previous chapter, the institution of the prison isanother stark reminder of present-day racial disparities. Fed by a racist justice system, and withits unpaid workforce, the prison is “the logical extension of the plantation” (McKittrick, 2011,74955). It is important to keep in mind this afterlife of slavery in order to speak back to rhetorics ofslavery as over and done with.West Feliciana Historical Society made the local news in 2020 for the permanent cancellation ofits annual Audubon Pilgrimage. Unlike most large scale events that were cancelled that year, theglobal pandemic was not to blame. Instead, accusations that the spectres of slavery were tacitlycelebrated by the festival’s traditions - including giving wooden paddles and whips to localchildren to play with - gained traction in concert with the Black Lives Matter movement’s publicresurgence following the police murder of George Flyod (Jackson, 2020, my emphasis). Thismarked a small step in Louisianan acknowledgement of its instrumental role in the dark historyof US slavery, and the ways in which the actions of its tourist industry today continue toperpetuate the denigration of its Black citizens in favour of a system of patriarchal whitesupremacy. The multitude of plantations that pepper the area stand as spatial reminders of thecountless lives lost to the back-breaking labour and horrifying human brutality that was sufferedby enslaved Africans between the 16th and 19th centuries. But rather than facilitating any aimsof memorialisation, reconciliation or learning related to the slave trade and the history ofAfrican Americans in the South, these sites are carefully crafted to conjure a fantasy of homelyand charming Southern hospitality. Plantation homes thus serve both the fiscal needs and theideological imperative of local government, via a whitewashing of history that ensures difficultconfrontations are avoided. It is in this ‘narrative containment’ that my interest lies.I argue, in this chapter, that the owners of the Myrtles put carefully crafted phantoms to work inservice of a manicured narrative of the plantation’s history, one which allows the maintenance75of a wholesome portrait of plantation life, and the antebellum nostalgia that is bound up in afantasy of wealth and luxury for the white subject. The stories told about the history of theplantation are managed through a cast of Black ghosts who allow site owners to address thehistory of slavery in a controlled manner - producing stereotypes of Black promiscuity andexoticism that soften the blow of white guilt around slavery - but in a way that appears ‘natural’,as though the site is speaking for itself. Despite espousing goals of preserving emplaced history,I argue that the methods of narrative containment employed by the plantation owners revealthe ultimate intention of profit gain, as facilitated by the maintenance of a phenomenology ofwhiteness.3.1 Situating Myrtles Plantation and ghost tourismsThe Myrtles Plantation is located in St Francisville, Louisiana. Like many plantations inthe US South, The Myrtles was transformed from private property into a bed and breakfast inthe early 1980s when its then owners took advantage of the fiscal opportunity antebellumnostalgia could hold (Vaughn, 2016, 166).During their tenure, the current owners - the Moss family - have gone to great efforts to havethe property declared “one of America’s most haunted homes”, and take a great deal of thecredit for increasing its profitability (ibid.). This has been achieved by drumming up pressinterest with photos that have been independently verified as “authentic” (i.e. no cameratrickery or editing), inviting paranormal investigative TV shows to the property (such as76Unsolved Mysteries; Ghost Hunters; Most Terrifying Places in America), and features inmagazines both print and online (such as Country Living; Atlanta Magazine; NationalGeographic). Although the previous owner, Frances Kermeen, was also deeply and publiclyengaged in the idea of the plantation as haunted, it has been the Moss family’s approach tomarketing the property that has afforded it the frenzied popularity it holds today. Theiconography of the charming, homely South, with the ‘romantic’ French colonial culturalheritage and architechture of St Francisville, contrasted with the thrill of the paranormal, andthe capitalist employ of its history of slavery, make for a multilayered and contentious touristdestination that offers excitement to a wide range of guests.In dark tourism literature, ghost tourism is often seen at the “lighter” end of the scale –“frivolous”, “fun” and “silly” (Sharpley, qtd in Miles, 2015, 10). It is generally assumed that themetanarrative of the experience is that of a game, like playing make-believe. There tends to be astrict social boundary, therefore, around what kinds of historical events and locations areoff-limits to the ghost tour. As Miles points out, there is no ghost tour at the site of theSeptember 11 attacks, for example, because the nature of such a tour would ‘dishonour thelives that were lost there’ (ibid, 11). However, the sheer number of ghost tours that have sprungup at plantation sites would suggest that African American lives, and histories of Black slaveryparticularly, are not given the same respectful treatment (ibid.). Contrasts like this reveal theextent to which the racial politics of grievability conducts who is deemed worthy ofmemorialisation (following Butler, 2009).773.2 Containing ghosts: Managing spectres of racial violence in the plantationJill Pascoe writes that there is a saying in Louisiana that “every respectable plantationhas at least one good ghost” (2004, 7-8). When looking at this trend next to the research thathas found a disturbing lack of information or engagement with slavery history at plantation sitesthroughout the South, finding that instead tours tend to focus on the lives of their wealthywhite owners (Butler, 2001; Vaughan, 2016, 227), one cannot help but feel cynical about thelikelihood of ghost tours to engage with haunting in terms of its radical potential to inspireaction based on past social violence (Gordon, 2008). Instead, one fears that what is taking placeis more akin to what Inglis and Holmes have termed a “spectral colonization”, where phantomsof place are called up in service of the financial gain of the site’s owners, reflecting the broaderdark tourism trend of commercialising pain and suffering (2003, 53).In this section, I analyse the site management and marketing of The Myrtles plantation, via itswebsite; a critical ethnography written about the site in 2012; a book written by the formerowner; and interviews with the current owners, in order to discover how the phantoms of placeare being put to work at the site in service of a narrative containment of its difficult histories. AtThe Myrtles, phantomic presences go through modes of containment to defang their potentialforce as reminders of anti-Black violence: they are strategically managed via marketing practicesfocused primarily on aesthetics and narration. I discuss these below.783.3 Aesthetic and narrative choices as containment tacticsOne of the great fallacies of the European philosophy of reason is that objectivity isattainable as a human output, or method of communicating knowledge. In all heritagepreservation there will be experience-informed choices made about the framing of history:which elements or events to push forth and which to gloss over. Narrative containment istherefore a practice of all historical representations - the written archive; museums;preservational institutions; fictional retellings. A close reading of such institutions is therefore asrevealing - if not more so - about the particular biases and desires of those who designed orwrote the scripts of a certain place, as it is about the history of that place itself. At The Myrtlesplantation, a version of history is mobilised that erases the anti-Black violence of the site bothpast and present. As I will detail, this silencing process is undertaken both at the surface of thecreation of the site as tourist location, and within its layers. The plantation as an aesthetic - anaesthetic that valorises romantic colonial architecture and white luxury - is prioritised over andabove the sociopolitical meanings of the plantation as a cultural institution.Having first heard about The Myrtles in the context of its position as a famous haunted house,when beginning my research on this site’s marketing I found the lack of obvious ghostlyiconography used on its website and social media surprising. The Myrtles website has areserved, or one might say tasteful, colour palette: duck egg blue, black and white. All copy iswritten in an elegant serif font, and there are regency-style ornamental patterns bookendingtext and decorating corners (see Figure 10).79Figure 10 - The Myrtles plantation home page (Homepage, n.d.).Sweeping drone shots of the plantation house and grounds on a sunny day greet you on thehomepage, and below that we see a group of four older white people in antebellum-era dresslaughing on a porch, next to an image of the site’s expensive-looking restaurant dressed up for awedding (see Figures 11 and 12) .80Figure 11 - The Myrtles marketing image: People in antebellum-era dress laughing on a porch(Homepage, n.d.).These editorial choices craft an image of beautiful Southern whiteness. The ornamental designsand elegance of the colours denote wealth, tapping into the fantasy of luxury that plantationtourists seek to wrap themselves in. Evoking nostalgia for the past with costuming, and theexplicit mention of the “antebellum splendour” of this “circa 1796 National Historic” home,provides a sense of safety for the white viewer. First, in that a sense of warm hospitality isassociated with the fantasy of the Good Old South that is being evoked. Second, in that thedistinct lack of Black people featured in the images, and the noticeable absence of the word“slavery” in the copy about the historical relevance of the plantation, reassures the white touristthat they will not be made to confront any such ugliness here at The Myrtles.81Figure 12 - The Myrtles marketing image: restaurant dressed for a wedding (Homepage, n.d.).Interrupting this sense of safety, and seemingly at odds with the aesthetic of the branding, is ahomepage banner that declares – in large capital letters, as the first text readable whennavigating to the website – “Escape to the Myrtles Plantation, one of America’s most hauntedhomes” (see Figure 10). After coming to read and watch interviews with the current owners,John and Teeta Moss, this juxtaposition began to make a lot more sense.John and Teeta bought the property from Frances Kermeen in 1992 (Capital One, 2014).Although I am unable to find any marketing materials from Kermeen’s tenure as owner andproprietor, her 2005 book entitled The Myrtles Plantation: The True Story of America's MostHaunted House speaks volumes to the valley of difference between her methods of framing theproperty and the Mosses’. Kermeen’s book is a much more representative of what one would82expect of a dark tourist location – the front cover shows a negative image of the house, tintedred, with the title text in bold black and an orange glow on a black background (see Figure 13).Figure 13 - Frances Kermeen’s book. Screenshot from GoodReads.com (The Myrtles Plantation,n.d.)It looks, at first glance, like a cheap horror novel, and based on the majority of reviews onGoodReads.com, it reads like one too: “It appears that Ms. Kermeen was profoundly influencedby The Amityville Horror as she recycled several events recounted in that book [...] Ms. Kermeenhas made a mockery of the history and legends of The Myrtles and I sincerely hope that no onewho reads this book will take it seriously.” (Ms. J Johnson, 2008). A number of reviews mention,in various degrees of shock or mockery, that the book tells the story of a guest who is raped bythe ghost of one of the former plantation owners, amongst other disturbing and directly83harmful occurrences. Although determining the extent of the ‘truth’ of her claims in the book isnot my place, nor is it truly possible, what interests me is the way that the entire tone of thebook aims at fear-mongering.The book opens with a story about Kermeen and her boyfriend on holiday in Haiti, where, deepin the jungle, they come across “voodoo warriors” engaged in some kind of ritual, described as“chanting in a strange tongue” and dancing “scantily clad [...] their faces smeared with paint,making them look angry and scary” (Kermeen, 2005, 7). From the very beginning, Blackness iswritten as uncivilised and threatening; disparaging wording like “scantily” and “smeared” isoperationalised to indicate her disapproval of the practice she witnesses. Instead of a language,they have a “strange tongue”, which distances them from a sense of humanity, as does thedescription of them becoming ever more “feverish” and “wild” as they shake their “primitive”rattles (ibid.). Descriptors like these craft a racial hierarchy with a clear imperial genealogy,denigrating Black Haitians as less-than: behind the modern, civilised and progressive whites.Despite the displeasure Kermeen clearly feels in witnessessing this display of culture - telling usshe wished she’d gone shopping or gotten tipsy at the bar instead, she cannot resist taking aphoto to “show [her] friends” (ibid., 8). This exemplifies the way in which the bodies of thetoured become objects. Their strangeness, though unpleasant to look upon, has value in itscollectability, its rareness, and it becomes a badge that the tourist can add to their colourfultapestry of experience. In this instance, her thoughtless objectification has severeconsequences. The flash of Kermeen’s camera draws the attention of the dancers, who“suddenly [...] lunge” towards her and then give chase as the guide pulls her away, “shouting84unfriendly, unrecognizable words” (ibid.). The guide later explains that the Haitian warriors haveput a voodoo curse on Kermeen due to their belief that, in taking a picture, she was stealingtheir souls.Opening the book with this story frames this moment, and specifically the curse, as the reasonKermeen ended up purchasing The Myrtles shortly after the holiday, and so too the reason forall the horrors and misfortunes that unfolded in her ten year tenure as its owner. Although sheonly suggests tentatively that the curse led her to The Myrtles, professing that such a thought is“absolutely absurd” (ibid., 118), she has chosen to introduce herself and The Myrtles hauntingsvia this anecdote, so that the reader is primed to associate the rest of what unfolds in the bookwith this singular instance of Black magic: Voodoo. In the latter half of the nineteenth century inthe US South, casting the Voodoo religion as synonymous with evil was part of a series of tacticsthat sought to maintain white supremacy both during and after slavery (Gordon, 2012). Bycirculating public narratives in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals condemningVoodoo as wicked and violent, presumptions of “Black savagery” were confirmed, and used asfurther justification for the social, political and spiritual denigration of the Black population(ibid., 768). The inclusion of this story serves the purpose of both tapping into pre-establishedlocal Louisianan superstition and lore about Black magic (which serves the overall aim of thebook to generate fear and titlation around The Myrtles property), and displacing Kermeen’sculpability for, and agency in, the misfortunes and betrayals she experiences thereafter.85In keeping with its set up, Kermeen’s book also marks the first time that Black ghosts had beenintroduced to lore and legend surrounding The Myrtles, which had previously consisted only ofits white owners (Miles, 2015, 105). This marks yet more ways in which stereotyped andwhite-lensed Blackness is employed to facilitate an additional layer of fear and social discomfortaround the hauntings. First, the Black Haitian voodoo warrior is set up as the originating villainof the tale, where tropes of wildness, primitivity and mysticism are relied on to drum up whitefear. Second, the spectral presence of the enslaved Black body is engaged to provide shock andawe for readers, in ways that contain any potential guilt, and leave only the stimulation suppliedby Black trauma and the taboo of slavery. Kermeen’s book, therefore, despite the inclusion ofwhite ghosts who are just as (if not more) threatening and troublesome than the Black ghosts(see, for example, the rape stories), engages in racist representational violence for the sake ofshocking readers and increasing sales.John and Teeta Moss have made concerted efforts to distance themselves from Kermeen andher version of The Myrtles. The same GoodReads review quoted above goes on to note:- “Iwould also like to mention that the current owner and employees of the Myrtles do not endorsethis book. When asked about it, they will tell you quickly that it is not true (the ones that Italked to used much stronger language). This book is not even sold in the gift shop on thepremises” (ibid.). This information is corroborated in the 2012 critical ethnography of TheMyrtles written by Holley Ann Vaughn, who says she was expressly told to avoid it by a tourguide at the site (241), and then later told by an archivist at West Feliciana Historical SocietyMuseum, with what sounds like some degree of disgust, that ‘“we do NOT sell that woman’s86book here” (original emphasis, 249). The Mosses’ Myrtles, and the ghosts it contains, have (atfirst glance) undergone quite a rebrand away from Kermeen’s fear-mongering, cursed accountof the property. The Mosses present as old, white, traditional, Christian kind of people – mildmannered, neatly-dressed, and interviewed sitting on their porch gently rocking back and forthon rocking chairs. They claim that when they bought the property, they had no idea that thehaunting was “actual”, thinking that it was just a “marketing ploy” (Capital One, 2014) – again,this seems to indicate the less than subtle approach taken by Kermeen, and the Moss’s feelingson it. This precise choice of wording – “ploy”, with its negative connotations of self-serving oreven untruthful behaviour - distances them from Kermeen’s actions, turning their noses up atthe idea of using the hauntedness of the property to sell tickets.The earnestness with which John, Teeta and their son Morgan (the proprietor of the businessnow that his parents have retired) discuss the ghosts of the property takes a tone of ‘I know, Ican hardly believe it myself’, which invites even sceptics in to suspend their disbelief. Twobusiness-minded reasons to dial down the sensationalism in marketing a haunted property inthis particular region of the US emerge from the literature on plantations and haunting. From aheritage perspective, the “fantastical, paranormal content of ghost stories makes them suspect”in a field that values the preservation of documented archival fact (Miles, 2015, 15). In a radiointerview, Morgan Moss proclaims that “although there’s definitely spiritual encounters...” –note the choice to use the word “spiritual”, a more subtle and eclectic term than referringoutright to “ghosts” – “...our job is to preserve history” (Blog Talk Radio, 2016). This marks anappeal to a vocal contingent of local historians and competing plantation owners who deride87The Myrtles’ claim to hauntedness, deeming it “histrionic hogwash” that has marred the“authentic history” that the site represents (original emphasis, Hamilton, qtd in Vaughn, 2012).Here we see how history becomes socially constructed as objective ‘truth’, something worthpreserving, where the spiritual or ghostly - that which European reason cannot explain - isdesignated false and unworthy of attention. The avoidance of the word haunted in The Myrtlesbranding language (everywhere but on the home page banner described above) comes downeven to the naming of the tours at the site. Guests can choose either a “History Tour” or a“Mystery Tour” - the latter of which tells the stories of the plantation’s ghosts, and providesguests with a chance to encounter them themselves, but suggests a stay of the sensationalismand kitsch that other haunted locations offer up (Vaughn, 2012, 166). It also makes a show ofkeeping the supposed ‘authentic’ history apart and away from the ‘frivolity’ of the ghosts,tacitly confirming the binary that critics of The Myrtles claim renders its ghosts non-existentfantasies.3.4 The racialized production of authenticity: managing history in the narrativeAvowing to protect the sacred authentic history of the site above all else would suggestthat histories of the enslaved Black men and women, whose stolen labour kept the plantationsrunning, would be a key part of the experience - or be, at the very least, mentioned. This isalarmingly far from the case, suggesting that the ‘truth’ status of the History - the officialnarration of the site - is produced through racial erasure, another afterlife of anti-Blackness.88This brings me to the second business-minded reason for the shift from the Kermeen eraMyrtles branding (darker, promoting the eeriness of haunting) to the Moss era Myrtles branding(lighter, promoting heritage and romanticism). David Butler asserts that plantations’ decision toexclude slavery from their meta-narrative - as is the rule rather than the exception for over 100plantations examined in his study - reflects the unconscious assertion of its custodians thatslavery “did not happen, especially at this location” (2008, 170). He suggests that this alignswith tourist desires, who are not there to have “too much of the ugly historical reality” exposedto them, and are instead looking for a fantasy of wealth and splendour to indulge in (ibid, 171).If this is true, the Mosses may have seen the darker, more frightening version of ghostspresented by Kermeen’s Myrtles as potentially off-putting to the kinds of tourists whocommonly visit plantations (i.e., those who want to daydream about the simple yet luxuriouslife afforded to wealthy plantation owners), in the same way that darker historical truths aboutthe consequences of that luxurious life (i.e. the enslavement of Africans) would interrupt thedaydream. Such omissions, though, must be carefully managed, as narratives of both ghosts andenslaved people are as attractive as they are troublesome. Despite outward efforts to downplaythe density of haunting and slave histories present at the site, the Mosses also have a clearawareness of the fundamental pull that these darker narratives have on the tourism market. Ablog post on The Myrtles website from June 2019 confirms as much: “...while gnarled live oaksand the giant front porch rockers of the pre-Civil War era mansion are certainly a draw for someof our 60,000 annual visitors, the main drawcard has, for years, been our haunted history [...] Inshort, people come here to meet our resident ghosts” (Tales from the Plantation Blog, 2019).89There is an equation to balance between those who see haunting as a frivolous distraction fromthe ‘Real History’, those who may be put off by the prospect of facing the spectres of slaveryand/or ghosts in general, and those who are visiting the site first and foremost for the promiseof a haunting encounter, or an encounter with Black history and violence. The Mosses appeal toall these potential audiences by presenting a friendly and mischievous bunch of spirits who a)tell the story of the history of the house, b) represent both white owners and Black enslavedpeople, and c) pose no threat of harm to tourists - in terms of both actual bodily harm, and therisk of having to confront their guilt around, or complicity in, the system of white supremacythat birthed slavery. Teeta Moss says “we don’t like to use the word haunted, we feel that wehave guardian angels” (Capital One, 2014), bringing in just the slightest flavour of GoodSouthern Christianity, and putting the ghosts at their service, within their control. In thisformulation, hauntings are happening not to them, but for them. Even in death, they are stillenslaved to the plantation’s white owners.Contrasting the description of the property’s ghosts as angels with the one provided inKermeen’s book shows the extent to which phantoms of place can be manipulated to follow thenarrative that befits the individual aims and desires of its owners. Despite what the Mosses mayespouse, however, when it comes to actually being on site and experiencing the tours, themanagement of ghosts is quite different. According to Vaughn’s ethnography, where she visitedThe Myrtles too many times to count over five years (2016, 98), the tour guides’ delivery of theghosts to an eager audience employs storytelling and theatricality to excite their desires for thebone-chilling paranormal. Although the guides do not depict the ghosts as evil, they certainly do90not characterize them as “harmless” and “peaceful” (ibid., 171). As well as telling the nowwell-worn stories of the most beloved and anticipated Myrtles ghosts (which I will come to),they tease overnight guests, asking if they are “gluttons for punishment”, and reference thefrequency with which guests flee in the middle of the night to the “safer” Best Western hoteldown the road (ibid., 171). To convince guests of the ghosts’ veracity, guides will tell touristshow many of their previous colleagues have quit after a short amount of time due to “scaryincidents” (ibid., 188). The phantoms of place that the guides call up are given names, visibleforms (in photographs of hauntings) and extensive, though fluid, backstories. They are calledinto being for the purpose of providing guests with the feeling that they are accessingsomething other-worldly, something hidden and secret made visible, which is the primary allureof the phantom (Hannam and Yankovska, 2018, 326).It could be that this is a strategic choice from the Moss family: publicly promoting history,education and the fundamental goodness of The Myrtles’ “guardian angels”, whilstsimultaneously working very hard behind the scenes to have the property declared as one ofAmerica’s most haunted homes (according to Vaughn, 2016, 166), and instructing tour guides toperform a darker narrative to tourists when on site. What seems more likely, though, is that tourguides themselves have the agency to produce the ghosts in ways that they feel best befitstourist expectations. Vaughn notes that although guides learn from each other, orally passinganecdotes to incorporate into their own performance, there are discrepancies that emerge inthe details from guide to guide (ibid., 199). As a tourist, then, you will meet a different versionof the ghosts depending on who is conducting the tour that day. Vaughn describes incidents of91guides even omitting certain information for what they deem to be ungrateful or rudetourist-audiences, and likewise giving their best, most detailed performance of the ghosts forenthusiastic and engaged groups (ibid., 186). Phantoms of place are therefore filtered throughtour guides’ bodies in their physical enactment - gesture, tone of voice, expression, and alsothrough their personal experience - with The Myrtles, with the paranormal in general, and withaudiences.3.5 Ghost stories as containments of racial and gender violence: producingChloe and CleoFar from abstract spirits or vaguely human-like apparitions, the Myrtles ghosts arefully-formed, named and storied individuals who tourists buy into. By employing a cast ofspectral characters, the Myrtles owners open up a world of storytelling possibility that betterengages visitors and encourages return visits, including the potential for branding andmerchandising the plantation as a unique, heterotopic and ‘spooky’ narrative experience.Further than this, though, they become a channel through which the plantation owners cancontain the narrative of slavery and anti-Black violence that surrounds the site.By a long way, the most famous and beloved of the Myrtles’ spirits is Chloe. This is evidencedfrom the frequency with which her name comes up in articles about the plantation; fromVaughn’s report of her receiving “top billing” in the press (ibid., 2); tourist anticipation and92excitement around her entering the tour (ibid., 195); and that she is the only named ghost onThe Myrtles website (see Figure 14).Figure 14 - The Myrtles copy: “The Legend of Chloe” (Legend, n.d.)Slightly different versions of the story of Chloe’s life, and how she came to her end, abound bothonline and on tours, but some details remain consistent: Chloe was an enslaved Black girl whowas hanged on The Myrtles property (from one of the live oak trees the website’s copyenthuses about), and whose lifeless body was weighed down with rocks and thrown into theMississippi river, as a response to her having poisoned the wife and children of Clark Woodruff,the white plantation master who owned and raped her. Accounts online and in The Myrtles tourlike to use the less ugly and affronting terms of “affair” and “mistress” to describe therelationship between Chloe and Woodruff (ibid., 36; National Geographic, 2008), which is a toolto purposefully erase the power differential inherent in their positions as master and slave.Using the language of mutual desire to narrate the rape of captive Black women has beendescribed by Saidiya Hartman as a “discourse of seduction” (1997, 81). This discourse ispremised first on the racist concept of “Black lasciviousness” - an “immoderate and93overabundant sexuality” possessed by Black women that presumes all sexual intercourse is“welcomed, if not pursued” (ibid., 86). It is second premised on the need to obfuscate the“extremity of violence in master-slave relations and in the construction of the slave as bothproperty and person”, to facilitate a guiltless exploitation and enjoyment of the enslaved body(ibid., 81). Finally, crafting for the Black woman an ensnaring and seductive “criminal agency”displaces blame for adulterous wrongdoing away from the white slaveholder, which provides alegitimate and actionable target of rage for his wife (ibid., 87). The use of this particularnarrative in The Myrtles lore and history hints at the quotidian nature of this type of‘relationship’ during slavery, which was “fully within the purview of everyday sexual practices”under laws which saw Black people as the rightful property of their masters (ibid., 85). Insteadof highlighting and condemning these tragic violences, The Myrtles version of events furtherburies them. Predictably, there are numerous other ways this tool of unabashed whitewashingof the sexual, physical and spiritual violence of slavery operates in and through the spectre ofChloe.In some versions of the story, the alleged poisoning is the result of Chloe becoming jealouswhen Woodruff takes another so-called ‘mistress’, or sometimes a more general fear that he islosing interest in her. The poisoning is by turns accidental - Chloe intending only to make thechildren sick so that she is called to care for them, thus maintaining her position in thehousehold, or purposeful - Chloe murdering the children out of spite for Woodruff’s lack ofattention. It is never cast an act of radical resistance to her position as slave, or her rape. Thisdirectly contravenes research showing the frequency with which Black women rebelled against94their oppression with methods including precisely poisoning food (Davis, 1972, 91). CastingChloe as passively submitting to, or even erotically investing in, her subjugation tacticallyreconfigures and opposes what Angela Davis has shown to be a common “consciousness andpractice of resistance” undertaken by Black women under slavery (ibid., 84). Directly dismissingnarratives of Black rebellion is part of a larger system of downplaying the horrors of slavery thatThe Myrtles plantation, and thousands others like it, are directly implicated in. This dismissal isdoubled down upon in some versions of the story, which disturbingly claim it was at the handsof Chloe’s fellow slaves, in their fear of associative retribution resulting from Chloe’s actions,that she met her end. Given that Black enslaved people engaged in open rebellions with “such afrequency that they were as much a part of the texture of slavery as the conditions of servitudethemselves” (ibid., 86), this version of events seems unlikely. It seems, in fact, like a tactic ofcasting African slaves as fundamentally loyal to their master above all else, of envisioning amonolithically and rightfully obedient group from which Chloe was the wayward exception. Thestory of Chloe framed by The Myrtles as a jealous femme-fatale desperate for the attention ofher master is a method of romanticising and melodramaticising the life of a plantation slavepurposefully designed to appeal to (and appease) present-day white audiences. Theall-too-common fabrication of the Black enchantress cultivating a relationship with heroppressor is “a dastardly ideological weapon” designed to blunt any potential feelings of angerand devastation that could emerge from an honest depiction of plantation life, and to “impairour capacity for resistance today by foisting upon us the ideal of male supremacy” (ibid., 99).95The figure of Chloe becomes all the more interesting when one learns that the first reportedsighting of her, indeed the first named mention of her throughout recorded history, was byTeeta Moss. The Myrtles website details how Moss was photographing the property forinsurance purposes just after she and her husband had acquired it, and the figure of “a slavegirl” appeared between two buildings (The Legend of Chloe). Over the intervening years, thelegend of Chloe has evolved from this inadvertently captured and nameless ghostly figure, to afleshy vessel, a fully developed icon, even, for the quelling of white America’s fear of its ownpast. Somewhere along the way, the spectral figure Teeta caught on camera has merged with astory told in Kermeen’s book about the ghost of a slave girl wearing a green turban (despite thefact no such headwear can be seen in the famous photograph, this imagery was too evocativeto resist it seems). She has been coloured in with a salacious and adulterous story, and, in thewords of Teeta Moss, the personality of a “meddlesome gossip” (Vaughn, 2016, 196), oncemore working to contain her into an all-too-easily believed caricature of the Black jezebel(Miles, 2015, 96). As many righteous online paranormal debunkers have discovered, when onechecks the historical record for the plantation there is no mention of a slave named Chloe, andthe cause of death of the Woodruff wife and children is registered not as poison, but yellowfever. “Chloe” is therefore a false phantom, named and storied by various white stakeholders atThe Myrtles for the benefit of silencing horrifying truths that would demand reparative actionsfrom its current owners and ticket-buying white-lensed tourists.Despite the Mosses public derision of Kermeen’s “marketing ploy” ghosts, and their espousedcommitment to preserving the plantation’s history, then, the lines of difference between the96two approaches to site management - that both benefit from the eminent draws of darktourism’s thrill - are blurrier than it may first appear. Where the Mosses have gotten away withit, so to speak, is in their skillful subtlety: darkness is laced, invisible but present, like a spectreitself, through and behind facades of good old-fashioned Southern hospitality, charmingpre-Civil war architecture, and ‘mischievous’ ghosts.Chloe is not the only famous Myrtles ghost. Her counterpart, Cleo, with a suspiciously similarname that is also suspiciously absent from historical record, and with a suspiciously similar storythat also results in the death of white children and the hanging of its protagonist. In the lore,Cleo is called upon to save the child with her voodoo medicine, but she fails and is put to deathall the same. Cleo thus fulfills another ever-popular Black southern US stereotype, that of thevoodoo priestess (Miles, 2015, 93), and so recalls the association Frances Kermeen put in placeat the beginning of her book on the hauntings of The Myrtles.To read Cleo’s story with a critical race lens brings into focus a figure conjured out of whiteexoticising of the Black female subject-object, a figure whose faith and the practice thereof isrendered ‘primitively African, culturally impenetrable, and spiritually dangerous’ (ibid.), andmust therefore be punished with death.Both Chloe and Chleo’s horrifying stories are simultaneously heightened and contained by theirpresent-day spectral forms. Heightened in that they provide guests with the alluring fear-factorof potentially encountering a ghost, moreover a Black slave ghost who excites tourist desires for97the foreign and forbidden unknown. Contained, in that their affect in the physical world extendsto brushing up against guests’ legs, emitting faint sounds of tribal drumming, and stealingguests’ earrings. They represent a gesture to the plantation’s history of exploiting, torturing,raping and murdering Black people, neatly and palatably presented as folkloric anti-heroes whobrought their fate upon themselves. In this move, the true phantoms of The Myrtles: thememories that occurred within its walls pulling at the edges of perceptibility, the traumas thatwere undergone, the hatred and fear, the joys too, all that life swelling and bursting and tryingto make itself known, to make itself accounted for, is covered over and replaced with spectralfigures that best serve - both at once - the capitalistic success and culpable denial of itsproprietors.3.3 ConclusionIn this chapter I have demonstrated the methods of narrative containment employed byThe Myrtles plantation - from aesthetic and branding choices to the scripting of characters thattell a defanged history of slave life. I have argued that these choices are the result of desires tofacilitate the continued ease and comfort of whiteness as a mode of being, even (or especially)in a location saturated with the phantoms of white supremacist violence against Black people.Whilst both the processes of narrative becoming and narrative containment entailborder-crossing into racialised space, becoming is concerned with heightening andchariacaturing the racialised aspects of place in order to satisfy white fantasies of Otherness,while containment is more focused on a de-racialisation, or whitewashing, of the plantation sitewrit large, in order to avoid the handling and confrontation of white supremacist racial violence,98and retaliatory acts of Black resistance. The owners of The Myrtles, just like West FelicianaHistorical Society, like their history “sweet and unblemished” (Vaughn, 2016, 117), save for themanufactured thrill of the ghosts they script. Both narratives of slavery and its afterlives arebrushed under the rug woven by whiteness and its worldly hegemonic entitlement.99Chapter 4: ConclusionHere at the end, I want to begin by reaffirming that whiteness is not a biologicalproperty of particular bodies, but a way of being in the world, a sensibility, a set of socialmeanings and a network of opportunities. It is a sociopolitical orientation, one which takes upspace on the global stage and has the dictative power to reframe narratives to its benefit.What I hope I have offered through the course of this thesis is an alternative way of readingdark touristic place, one which attends to the lines of power and racial dimensions of darkleisure as an experience and as a product of the neoliberal market. I have attempted todemonstrate the extent and reach of whiteness as a phenomenology, exposing the ways inwhich even (or especially) powerfully auratic space, space which represents the death andsuffering of Black bodies, is not safe from a white reframing. The two methods of this reframingthat have emerged through examination of my case studies are ‘narrative becoming’: theopportunity to border-cross into racialised space and return unchanged, and ‘narrativecontainment’: the technique of selective historical storytelling and whitewashing that facilitatesguilt-free - even fun - engagement with traumatic resonance in-place.Dark tourism, as a field of practice, is deeply invested in the politics of memorialisation. AsDunkley (amongst others) has argued, though, more than this there is a general sense that sitesshould be actively engaged in teaching “lessons of the past” in order to “influence societalprogression in the future” (2016, 119). In taking on the representation and cultural mediation ofhistories of disaster and atrocity, the literature generally agrees that sites are duty bound to100offer dynamic learning opportunities that situate the tourist in relation to past wrongdoings,and influence them to instigate change in their present day (ibid.; Roberts, 2018, 628). This is inkeeping with a Western neoliberal ideology that promotes individual action and actualisedselfhood as the way to bring about societal change, as opposed to addressing systemicimbalances in the foundations of governance. Nevertheless, installing the imperative to noticeand speak up against societal inequalities or discriminatory rhetorics is, I think, a reasonableexpectation of sites that deal with histories of race-bassed oppression and/or genocide. Fromthe perspective of the literature, this sentiment seems to relate most keenly to sites thatprovide focussed representation of one particular historical event, one which falls under thepurview of a generalised ‘lest we forget’ didactic. Are the sites examined in this thesis part ofthis group?Certainly Prison Escape is not attempting to represent any one particular emplaced event ormoment in history. If anything, other than the locational authenticity of the site itself as abuilding, the prison space tourists enter is abstracted from time and geographical space in orderto facilitate an openness of storytelling within the tourist’s imagination. It is clear from the site’smarketing and general brand image that they are attempting to capture the ‘darkness’ ofincarceration - both in the conceptual image of the prison as a “nasty” or “rotten” place, and inthe racialisation of its fictitious inmates. But rather than engage with this as a sociopoliticaltheme, or opportunity to encourage thinking through the broader landscape of carceral(in)justice, the fundamental social purpose of the site is leisure and profit. Does this place it atthe “lighter” end of the dark tourism spectrum, as Stone suggests is the position of101“entertainment orient[ed]” sites (2006, 151), or does the transposal of the experience ofincarceration into a commercialised vehicle of amusement itself amount to a ‘darker’ culturalproperty than if the site were to try to grapple head-on with its own emplaced histories ofviolence? My intention for this research has never been to engage in a practice of categorisingor ‘scaling’ sites as compared to one another, as I believe the concept of dark tourism is at itsmost productive when space is left for fluidity and contradiction in its motivators and themeanings produced. Certainly, though, I would argue that the larger the gap between themorbidity and brutality of what a site represents, and its irreverent treatment as a touristlocation, the more cause for moral concern over the intentions of site managers and themeanings being produced and consumed at the site.The owners of the Myrtles plantation publicly espouse goals of education and the preservationof heritage, which shows a clear awareness of the societal imperative / expectation of theirfunction as a tourist site. Since heritage as a concept is socially constructed, however, there is analmost infinite variety of ways to shape and story history for the requirements of particularsocial groups (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996, 8). Exposing the contours of touristic place, as Ihave done in this thesis, provides valuable insight into which of these groups are being attendedto. Despite the in-situ element of the plantation’s ties to slavery, which would usually be aselling point due to the desire for locational authenticity in historical tourism, I have shown thatthe site privileges a white lens of ignorance and containment in the handling of its own history.Quite the contrary to a sentiment of ‘lest we forget’, The Myrtles employs methods of narrativeerasure in order to craft an untarnished scene of Southern hospitality and comfort. The ghosts102provide an ‘edge’ that makes the site more dynamic, and appeal to a broader range of people,including those under the dark tourism umbrella.Far from providing access to ‘authenticity’ as an alternative to commercialised package travel,dark tourist sites employ techniques of containment and re-narrativising that forecloseopportunities for meaningful engagement with the phantoms of suffering that linger.Supposedly ‘gritty’ experiences that engage with suffering and death are, in this case, just asmanufactured and carefully crafted to welcome the white body as the resort hotels offeringcomfort and relaxation.Phantoming has been the key technique of this manufacture that I have identified. The conceptof the phantom is how I have come to understand and conceptualise place-memory and thelingering sensations of lives lived within a space; phantoming is the practice of enhancing orfalsifying these resonances in order to better immerse the tourist in ‘dark’ place, and satisfyexpectations of an auratic experience at sites of death, suffering and tragedy. I remainconvinced that being alert to the ways in which place speaks for itself opens up possibilities fora more ethical engagement with in-situ histories of violence. Although, as I have argued, it isimpossible to detach ourselves from the prewritten biases, assumptions, sensitivities and waysof being in the world that we bring to bear on all space. It is a fallacy to believe we can attainunmediated access to worlds of the past whether through the traditional controlled museumspace or the untouched ruin, just as it is a fallacy to think we can truly empathise with painsthat we have not ourselves experienced. However, noticing, accepting and incorporating these103distances into our efforts to reach for emplaced learning and understanding of dark historiesperhaps sets us up better for an ethical engagement. Attending to the ways in which place, andour experience of it, can be altered by what we bring in our bodies, as well as what has beendone in its reframing for tourists, makes room for ghosts to speak and be heard.In concluding this work, I want to resist offering an alternative set of best practices for runningracialised dark tourist sites in general, or even the particular ones here examined. This is firstlyfor the obvious reason that there can be no ‘one size fits all’ way of doing memorialisation orpreservation ethically. It is also because it would take an entirely different mode andmethodology of research to discover the desires of the subjects (or descendants thereof) beingrepresented/toured - who then of course would not themselves be unified. Finally, jumpingstraight into efforts to ‘fix’ the problem would recentre myself, a white subject, “as an agent,rather than as implicated in the critique” (Ahmed, 2007, 165). Although white pople must ‘dothe work’ of decolonialising our thinking, examining our complicities and ultimately moving toaddress the violence and ubiquity of white supremacist logics and systems, leaping into action issomewhat akin to ‘shouting over’: it signals a resistance to actually hearing our faults. AsAhmed argues, it is important to “let the critique sit”, for “if we want to know how things can bedifferent too quickly, then we might not hear anything at all” (ibid.) Let me finish, then, byoffering the space for those reading this who are protected by the cloak of whiteness toconsider the ways we move through the world, and who is ultimately served when we attemptto ‘experience’ racialised space or modes of being.104BibliographyAbu-Lughod, L. 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eng
Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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Catungal, John Paul
Raising the spectre of race : phantoming and phenomenologies of whiteness in dark tourism
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