Description
Book SynopsisWhen residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people.
Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.
In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.
Table of Contents
- Foreword by Anne Valk and Teresa Mangum
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Thank You, Cousin Geneva!
- 2 Heritage Tourism in Mississippi
- 3 The Behind the Big House Program
- 4 Reconciling Race
- 5 Academic Values and Public Scholarship
- Epilogue What to Throw Away and What to Keep
- Appendix A Historic Site Evaluation
- Appendix B Small-Group
- Discussion Questions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
