Transforming Mount Airy into Mayberry: Film-Induced Tourism as Place-Making

Film-induced tourism is increasingly popular in the United States and globally. Scholars have tended to emphasize the effect of movies and television in forming the image of tourist destinations and thus influencing traveler motivation and experience. In this article, we shift discussion of film tourism beyond simply place image formation to consider it in the broader context of place-making. Such a perspective offers a fuller recognition of the material, social, and symbolic effects and practices that underlie the construction of film tourism destinations and their place identities as well as the ideologies, power relations and inequalities that become inscribed into the place transformation process. We focus on film tourism in Mount Airy, North Carolina, the birth place of television actor Andy Griffith, and delve into the remaking of his home town into a simulated version of Mayberry. Griffith popularized the fictional town of Mayberry in his 1960s television series and it continues to resonate with fans of the show. Mount Airy is marketed to visitors as the “real life Mayberry,â€� despite what Griffith has said to the contrary, and the city hosts an annual Mayberry Days Festival, which we visited and photographed in 2010. A preliminary interpretation is offered of the landscape changes, bodily performances, and social tensions and contradictions associated with the remaking of Mount Airy into Mayberry. We also assert the need to address the social responsibility and sustainability of this transformation, particularly in light of the competing senses of place in Mount Airy, generational and racial changes in the travel market, and the way in which African Americans are potentially marginalized in this conflation of the “realâ€� and the “reel.â€

Trauma Written in Plywood and Flesh: Hurricane Graffiti, Post-Katrina Tattoos, and the Value of Narratives to Hazards Research

Dr. Alderman explained that narratives are an important way to understand how people were impacted by a hurricane. Graffiti and tattoos are visually evocative narratives written on plywood and flesh as opposed to paper. Hurricane graffiti can serve as a practical tool or as an indicator of tensions and needs. Post-hurricane tattoos serve as memoirs, vehicles for retelling hurricane stories, and as a way to express trauma. A visual content analysis was used to identify specific themes evident in hurricane graffiti inscriptions. Some of the major themes included history, defiance, desperation, territoriality, humor, politics, and prayer. An example of graffiti as history is a piece of graffiti outside of a store that said, "1) Charles, 2) Frances, 3) Ivan, 4) For sale." An example of graffiti as defiance is, "Take a hike Ike." An example of graffiti as desperation is, "We need power!" An example of graffiti as territoriality is, "Looters will be killed." An example of graffiti as humor is, "Santa’s naughty list: Charles, Frances, Ivan." In the tattoo study, tattoo artists were interviewed. One artist, Tom, decided to get a tattoo of an X on his leg after Hurricane Katrina, which references the rescue symbol. This tattoo, like many tattoos, elicits stories from others, allows him to retell his story, and serves to provide a collective memory. Narratives are significant because they are personal and social and provide tremendous insight. For this reason, these types of narratives are important to natural hazards research

The House That Story Built: The Place of Slavery in Plantation Museum Narratives

This article examines the characteristics and opinions of tourists visiting Laura Plantation Museum in southern Louisiana, paying close attention to their interest in slavery relative to other narrative themes presented at the site. Laura is noted for its “big house” as well as its remaining slave quarters, but museums are built as much around narratives as they are around artifacts. Museums tell a story that they hope audiences will want to consume. Envisioned as an audience study, this research examines data gathered from surveys and interviews conducted at Laura and uses the conceptual framework of “narrativized worlds” to gain an understanding of how visitors, especially African Americans, interpret and react to the representation of antebellum life offered by the museum\u27s managers and docents

On the importance of environmental claims making: The role of James O. Wright in promoting the drainage of Florida\u27s Everglades in the early 20th century.

Responding to recent calls to analyze the authoritative role of scientists in producing environmental knowledge, this article conceptualizes applied scientists as “environmental claims-makers” who play an influential role in shaping how the public perceives and interacts with the environment. Analyzing the knowledge claims of scientists, particularly applied scientists, requires a consideration of both cognitive and interpretive claims-making activities. The concept of environmental claims-making is used in analyzing the historical geography of one of North America\u27s most famous wetland landscapes—the Florida Everglades. Specifically, we examine the role played by engineer James O. Wright in making scientific claims about the Everglades and its climate and how he (and others) used these claims to promote reclamation of this wetland during the early twentieth century. Our study critiques Wright\u27s claims-making activities, evaluating the quality of environmental knowledge he constructed, the social and economic context within which his knowledge claims were interpreted and appropriated, the lasting impact that these claims had on settlement patterns, and the hazards of future scientific/engineering claims. Wright made fundamental errors in calculating how much water would need to be removed from the landscape in order to make it agriculturally productive. At the same time, Florida politicians and the South Florida real-estate industry used both Wright\u27s work and his status as a scientist to represent the Everglades to prospective land buyers as an agricultural paradise. Flaws in Wright\u27s drainage plan become clear only after thousands of people purchased land in South Florida that remained subject to periodic flooding. Experts were utilized in an effort to reclaim the Everglades, but the complexity of the Everglades ecosystem and the chronic lack of funds doomed the project until the 1950s. It took more than half a century of research and the technical and financial resources of the federal government to finally convert significant chunks of this vast wetland into productive farmland

Reexamining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement

Geographers have assessed the success and failure of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in terms of the African American struggle for justice, social identity, and economic survival. Conspicuously absent from the geographic literature are pedagogically oriented studies of the historical geography of the Civil Rights era. The Movement’s popular image has congealed into a celebratory collection of names and dates, the sum of which is a vague, nearly mythic retelling that students might recognize but not necessarily care about. As a result, the Movement is at once contemptuously familiar yet bewilderingly strange for our students. This article offers a sympathetic critique of conventional Movement narratives, introducing the notion of empathetic pedagogy and presenting a case study of theMontgomery bus boycott. Our pedagogical approach stresses the role of empathy, both as a factor in shaping the actual sociospatial development of the Movement, as well as a strategy for encouraging students to appreciate the everyday courage and sacrifice that animated so many of its participants. Our study brings together two burgeoning literatures that have the potential to cultivate empathy among students: the critical reevaluation of mobility and explorations of subjectivity from a psychoanalytic perspective. Here mobility is understood in both its literal and figurative sense: in the case of the bus boycott, the intricate network established to literally move African Americans around the city, as well as the figurative movement of sympathy and solidarity that “moved” people to support their efforts and now informs popular, selective understandings of the protest

Was Tulsa’s Brady Street really renamed? Racial (in)justice, memory-work and the neoliberal politics of practicality

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In 2013, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma ‘renamed’ Brady Street in its downtown arts district to M.B. Brady Street and designated the road as Reconciliation Way to rid itself of ties to Wyatt ‘Tate’ Brady, the original namesake. Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan leader, participated in a 1921 massacre that killed, injured, and displaced many black Tulsans. Honoring M.B. Brady, a Civil War photographer with the same last name but no ties to Tulsa, was part of a neoliberal compromise to ensure the name change would have the least disruptive impact on the financial interests of white business owners on the road. The Tulsa case demonstrates how convenience and practicality—although represented as a matter of neoliberal ‘nonpolitics’—is nonetheless a political technology used to justify sanitizing controversial histories and prioritizing capital accumulation over social justice. The faux renaming of Brady prompts a critical consideration of how neoliberalism weakens cities’ ability to engage in the restorative ‘memory-work’ of recovering (from) past racial violence. Our study contributes to the study of neoliberal place naming, struggles over urban space and memory, and the possibilities and limits of street naming as a vehicle for (re)claiming a black sense of place

Tourist Plantation Owners and Slavery: A Complex Relationship

© 2016, © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper examines owners of plantation heritage tourism sites as memorial entrepreneurs who control and negotiate the inclusion and specific treatment of the history of African enslavement. Interviews with owners of four South Louisiana plantations are used to document and analyse their complex relationship with the topic of slavery. Interviewed owners reveal varying understandings of tourist demand for the inclusion of slavery on tours and differences in their own personal desire to advertise and fully narrate enslaved heritage. Indeed, owners continue to propagate common myths surrounding the nature of slavery. Conceptualizing owners as memorial entrepreneurs has implications for understanding the interpretation and delivery of heritage tourism not only as a product but also a set of social values about the past