"Despicable and disgusting": Emotional labor, and the fear of dark tourism

In the early 1990s the historical city of Williamsburg, Virginia entered a period of interpretive change, both in the formal institution that called the city home, Colonial Williamsburg, and in the many small local tour businesses that depended on it. Most notably both entities began to embrace what is now called "dark tourism"offerings, witch and pirate trials, mock hangings, ghost tours, and a slave auction. This chapter will focus on the last two: the ghost tours and the slave auction and illustrate how commodification transformed reality into darkness, and the intentionally dark into an ataractic. Colonial Williamsburg's slave auction was one program within a larger effort by the museum's African American Interpretation Program to address the reality of race and class that the interpreters, and scholars, felt was missing from the institution's predominantly elite white presentation of eighteenth-century Virginia life. These new offerings challenged white visitors who felt that the narrative of slavery sullied the celebration of the United States' intellectual foundations. The Black community expressed a measured acceptance of the new African American cultural programs but found the all-too-realistic presentation of a slave auction inside of the increasingly commercial historical site to be wildly inappropriate. By the end of 1994, it was clear that the reality of slavery was too dark for the American audience. At the same time, Colonial Williamsburg's interpretive staff were challenging their day-time guests to look directly at eighteenth-century life, private tour companies began offering night-time ghost tours that promised hidden or alternative histories but delivered the familiar, overwhelmingly white, consensus history that the museum's interpreters sought to challenge. In practice, the ghost tours offered guests a way to engage with the eighteenth century under the guise of rebellious dark tourism, without having to face the history that day-time audiences found to be too dark to truly engage with. When placed together the public outcry before, during, and after the mock slave auction, and the popularity of the ghost tours highlight the inherent darkness of critical historical interpretation, and the lightness, or pacifying nature of what is more often deemed dark tourism.