Placing African American Museums in the American Tourism Landscape: The Colored Girls Museum of Philadelphia, PA

Keywords: Black Geographies, Museum Geographies, Cultural Geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

According to the Association of African American Museums (AAAM), there are more than 200 African American history and cultural museums (AAHCMs)—or other sites with substantial African American collections such as libraries and archives—across the U.S. Many of these museums were founded shortly after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, with a surge in the 1970s. AAHCMs serve to decenter white stories of America and refocus on Black lived experiences. From the National Civil Rights Museum to cramped one-room museums that emerged as havens in historically Black neighborhoods, AAHCMs are dedicated to affirming that African American people have not only a history in America, but a history at the center of America.

While geographers have studied a wide array of sites of memory, heritage, and tourism, museums remain understudied and under-theorized despite engaging in valuable local public pedagogy and, often, teaching national- and global-scale historical and geographic narratives. Building upon museum geographies (e.g. Geoghagen 2010; Azaryahu & Foote 2008; Smith 2019) and Black Geographies (e.g. Delaney 1998; Woods 1998; McKittrick 2006; McKittrick and Woods 2007; Gilmore 2007; Shabazz 2015; Bledsoe, Eaves, & Williams 2017; McCutcheon 2019; Bledsoe & Wright 2019; Hawthorne 2019), this paper examines the ways AAHCMs are integral to relationships between Black place-making and tourism landscapes often steeped in anti-Black racism (Philipp 1994; Carter 2008; Benjamin & Dillette 2021). Utilizing semi-structured interviews as well as content analysis of online travel reviews, this paper will focus on the place-making work of the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.