As I prepare for my upcoming lecture Erasing History—or Caring for Our National Soul? I keep circling back to a simple but unsettling truth: forgetting history is sometimes accidental – but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes, history is curated and aestheticized. Sometimes history is written by the losing side of battles, or by the nostalgic, or by the people who desperately need the past to be something more flattering than it was. And sometimes, history is sold to us with a mint julep and a guided tour.
Suzannah Herbert’s new documentary film Natchez, which
turns its lens on plantation tourism in Mississippi, captures this dynamic vividly. The film is not just about a place; it’s
about a performance — a carefully staged version of the past that comforts
visitors while burying the truth beneath layers of charm and choreography.
Orwell’s Warning: Memory as a Battleground
George Orwell famously wrote that “who controls the past
controls the future.” He understood that the past is contested terrain. In my
earlier post on Orwell
and erasing history, I explored how defeated movements — such as post‑WWI
German nationalists and the architects of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy —
often craft seductive counter‑historical narratives. These stories don’t
triumph because they’re accurate. They triumph because they’re emotionally
satisfying. Natchez shows this process unfolding in plantation tours that
become a kind of soft‑focus propaganda where slavery is minimized or euphemized,
violence is reframed as hardship, enslaved people are reduced to
footnotes, and architectural beauty becomes a distraction from human brutality.
This is not history. It is mythmaking. And it is exactly the kind of mythmaking
Orwell warned us about.
The Plantation as a Stage Set
One of the most striking insights in Natchez is how
plantations function as theatrical spaces. The tours are scripted. The costumes
are curated. The narratives are polished until they gleam. Visitors are invited
to admire the chandeliers, the gardens, the gowns — everything except the
system of racial terror that made those luxuries possible. The film exposes how
this “heritage tourism” industry relies on a kind of emotional laundering. The
past is cleaned up, softened, and made palatable. The result is a version of
history that feels safe, even charming, but is fundamentally dishonest.
This is erasure by substitution. Not deleting the past but
replacing it with something prettier.
Losers Writing History: The Lost Cause Lives On
What makes Natchez so powerful is that it reveals how
the Confederacy — a defeated cause — still shapes American memory. The
plantation fantasy is not a victor’s narrative. It is a loser’s narrative that
has been elevated, repeated, and monetized until it feels authoritative.
The defeated can rewrite history just as effectively as the
victorious, especially when their version of the past meets a psychological
need. The plantation myth serves to ease
guilt, evoke nostalgia, deflect responsibility, and craft a sellable narrative.
In this sense, Natchez is a case study in how
societies choose comforting lies over difficult truths.
The Soft Erasure: How Forgetting Really Works
Sometimes erasing history is dramatic with book burning and
censorship. Sometimes erasing history is much less than dramatic. It can be something
quieter: selective omission; euphemism; aesthetic distraction; or narrative
substitution. Natchez captures this soft erasure with painful clarity.
The film shows how plantation tours don’t deny slavery; they simply bury it
under magnolia blossoms and romanticized storytelling. This is how forgetting
becomes a cultural habit.
Why This Matters Now
We are living through a moment when the past is being
contested with new intensity. School curricula, public monuments, museum
exhibits, and tourist attractions have become battlegrounds. The question is no
longer what happened but whose version of what happened will define
our collective memory.
Natchez forces us to confront the stakes of this
struggle. It asks whether we are willing to face the truth — or whether we
prefer the comfort of curated forgetting.
Reclaiming the Past Without Rewriting It
If we want a healthier relationship with history, we must
resist both forms of distortion: the victor’s triumphalist rewriting and the
loser’s sentimental rewriting. We must insist on a memory that is honest,
unsparing, and humane. That means telling the full story of plantations — not
as romantic estates, but as forced‑labor camps. It means centering the lives of
the enslaved, not the fantasies of the nostalgic. It means recognizing that the
struggle over history is not about the past at all. It is about the future we
are willing to imagine.
Natchez reminds us that the past is not gone. And
unless we challenge the myths, it will continue to shape us in ways we do not
see.
