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Plantation Memories, Labor Identities, and the Celebration of Heritage The Case of Hawaii’s Plantation Village
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In this article, I discuss the role of plantation museums in confronting, legitimizing, and filtering the racialized violence on which the plantation economy stood. I start with a brief review of the literature on plantation societies, discuss the plantation–race nexus, and highlight the renewed interest in plantations raised by contemporary approaches to the environment, the Anthropocene, cropscapes, and nonhuman agencies. Next, I compare different modes of instrumentalizing and displaying the memory of the plantation, some of which are critical of its violence, and some of which are oblivious to it. Some are focused on technical aspects of sugar production, while others are focused on its labor force. Finally, I present in detail Hawai‘i's Plantation Village in Waipahu, O‘ahu. This community-based museum is designed in accordance with the prevailing narrative of a multiethnic Hawai‘i. While it provides visitors with an overview of the plantation experience in general, not excluding the discipline and violence endured by laborers, its main focus is on the specific cultural heritage of each one of the nationalities that arrived in Hawai‘i to work in sugar. I argue that the museum project is consistent with an idealized view of Hawai‘i's society as a multiethnic racial paradise. This image emerged in the 1920s and helped expunge from collective perception the racialized hierarchies that structured the labor force while also erasing from the picture the structural tension between natives and settlers regarding the appropriation of land and subsequent rights, entitlements, and impediments. I further argue that the presentation of a collective heritage composed of multiple distinct identities originating in the plantation era provides a tool that counterweights the unresolved and unsettled tensions of the contemporary post-plantation world.
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Citação
Bastos, C. (2020). Plantation Memories, Labor Identities, and the Celebration of Heritage The Case of Hawaii’s Plantation Village. Museum Worlds, 8 (1), 25-45
Editora
Berghahn Journals