Popular Culture Review 32.1
Those wishing for a brief respite from the pleasures of
New Orleans often take the afternoon to visit a plantation outside the city . This drive to explore the South ’ s antebellum past is both nostalgic and educational , contradictory impulses that often work at cross-purposes . When tourists exit Interstate 310 and hit the crossroad of Highway 18 , the choice of which direction to turn is at once political , social , and cultural . Most turn left and follow the Mississippi as it meanders down to Oak Alley Plantation . A convenient turn-off on the right shoulder offers a view of Oak Alley ’ s magnificence and the “ 28 Oaks ” leading to the “ Big House ” (“ Plantation Overview ”). Blocked from that view are the newly restored ( and impeccably constructed ) slave cabins , which tell the story of the plantation ’ s other residents . Visitors may ( or may not ) choose to tour this exhibit at their leisure ; it is self-guided . The “ Big House ” is not . Here they get the official narrative . They can marvel , for example , at the air-conditioned dining room — a large fan set atop a block of ice — without considering the enslaved person who would operate said fan for the entirety of dinner . When they are shown the private spaces of this house , they learn this place is about tragedy and trauma : the tragedy and trauma of white women who struggled throughout the 19 th century against a culture of domesticity that sought to control them . Like those cabins behind the house , any comparisons one wishes to make to enslaved persons are self-guided .
Audiences make similar navigations from their living rooms as they select the media they consume . Increasingly , visual narratives have eschewed the past in favor of the near future as these shows become sites where contemporary social issues can be safely explored . Two of these narratives , Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan ’ s Westworld ( 2016 ) and Bruce Miller ’ s The Handmaid ’ s Tale ( 2017 ), present viewers with similar
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