Blog​​​​​​ ​​​​​​

Nov 11, 2026, 12 noon
Campus Westend, Eisenhower Room (IG 1.314)

This paper addresses recent calls to develop a political economy of memory (Olick 2016) through a site-based analysis of heritage tourism in the US Gulf South. Positioning memory work as a constitutive element of racial capitalist modernity, we argue that heritage operates as a cultural technology through which the material effects of racialised expropriation and environmental exploitation – past and present – are naturalised, perpetuated, and contested.

Building on recent critiques of the 'missed encounter' between Marxism and memory studies (Allen 2016; Kirn 2022; Gonzales 2023), we contend that memory must be examined across both symbolic and material registers, tracing how commemorative narratives intersect with property relations, labour regimes, and uneven exposure to environmental harm. The Gulf South's heritage economy offers an ideal terrain for this intervention. This sanitised memory regime sees the representation of regional history imbricated with the reproduction of contemporary racial and environmental injustice (Bond and Rapson 2023; 2024; 2025). Exploring the political and economic power structures that inform the commemoration of the regional past, we examine how popular tourist attractions (e.g., plantation sites, industrial heritage, and prison museums) whitewash histories of racial violence while greenwashing contemporary extraction, distributing uneven cultural legitimacy alongside unequal economic resources.

We thus argue that memory work must be situated within the wider infrastructures that govern tourism management: corporate sponsorship, urban development, state intervention, and environmental regulation. Ultimately, we contend that developing a proper political economy of memory would enable scholars in memory studies and beyond to establish how memory work participates, materially and symbolically, in historically embedded processes of accumulation and dispossession that determine whose lives and living environments are rendered surplus to racial capitalist structures of expropriation and exploitation. 

Lucy Bond is Head of the School of Humanities and a Reader in Literature and Memory Studies at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics and Law (2015), and co-author of Trauma (2020). She is co-editor of The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders (2014), Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (2016), Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (2018), and The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies (2025). Together with Rick Crownshaw, Brett Ashley Kaplan, and Jessica Rapson, Lucy is series editor of Bloomsbury's Critical Memory Studies.

Jessica Rapson is a Reader in Memory Studies at King's College London. She is the author of Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Lidice, Babi Yar (2015). She is co-editor of The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders (2014), Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (2018), and The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies (2025). Jessica is also series editor of Bloomsbury's Critical Memory Studies.