Heritage Tourism and the Digital Turn: Contextualizing Daufuskie Island

Heritage tourism refers to travel centered on cultural, historical, and communal sites—spaces where visitors seek to engage with the legacies of place. It encompasses both tangible heritage—such as vernacular architecture, family cemeteries, and sacred landscapes—and intangible forms, including oral traditions, spiritual practices, foodways, and rituals of memory.¹ While the sector has become one of the most profitable and rapidly growing in the U.S. South, it is also a site of contestation. When designed without accountability to local communities, heritage tourism can exploit cultural labor, flatten memory into marketable myth, and hasten displacement under the guise of preservation.

These dynamics are particularly visible in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, designated by Congress in 2006 to recognize the unique cultural contributions of Gullah Geechee people across the coastal Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. The Corridor’s Management Plan explicitly calls for a shift away from plantation nostalgia and toward community-based cultural interpretation, economic inclusion, and narrative sovereignty.² Yet many sites still lack the infrastructure—visitor centers, interpretive signage, protected access—that would allow Gullah communities to define and benefit from their own cultural heritage. More often, descendants are left out of key decision-making processes, even as their stories are spotlighted for tourists and branding campaigns.

The economic stakes underscore this paradox. In 2010, South Carolina recorded $15 billion in travel spending and $4.7 billion in tourism-generated wages.³ Cultural heritage tourists—those who travel specifically to engage with local traditions—tend to spend more, stay longer, and seek what the industry terms “authentic experiences.” But who gets to define authenticity, and on whose terms? As Deepak Chhabra argues, “authenticity” in tourism is often staged—constructed to meet consumer expectations rather than reflect living, evolving cultural realities.⁴ In Gullah contexts, this leads to reductive narratives that privilege surface-level performances—basket weaving, dialect samples, “storytelling”—while obscuring structural issues like land loss, climate vulnerability, and intergenerational displacement.

These tensions raise a critical question: how might Gullah communities reclaim tourism not only as an economic engine, but as a site of self-determined storytelling? Michelle D. Commander’s concept of speculative return offers a powerful response. In Afro-Atlantic Flight, she defines return not as a literal or geographic act, but as a form of diasporic imagination—a creative reengagement with ancestral geographies through memory, story, and design.⁵ This project takes up that call. Through Daufuskie3D, a community-anchored digital platform, Gullah descendants and diasporic audiences can reenter Daufuskie’s cultural landscape through immersive tools: layered LiDAR scans, oral histories, ambient soundscapes, and annotated memory sites. This is not tourism as simulation. It is heritage as relation—a form of presence grounded in witnessing, care, and responsibility.

Daufuskie3D actively resists the extractive tendencies of conventional heritage tourism. Rather than rendering Black cultural sites as aesthetic backdrops for external consumption, it invites what Chhabra calls visitor mindfulness—a slowed, reflective mode of engagement that privileges listening over looking.⁶ It also reframes the role of branding, rejecting tourism-as-product in favor of what the Corridor Plan terms virtual stewardship: the application of preservation ethics to digital space without severing ties to the land, labor, and community knowledge that gave rise to it.⁷

This critique becomes especially sharp when considered against the backdrop of plantation tourism—a lucrative heritage genre in the Lowcountry that continues to flatten Black life into nostalgic spectacle. These spaces, as Commander notes, often aestheticize slavery and minimize Black resistance, offering “consumable narratives devoid of continuity or agency.”⁸ By contrast, Daufuskie3D centers what I describe as narrative sovereignty—the right of Gullah people to define their own stories, to control the means of cultural transmission, and to intervene in the market forces that shape collective memory. The immersive interface becomes a kind of subaltern counterpublic, what Nancy Fraser describes as “parallel discursive arenas” in which historically marginalized communities can circulate oppositional interpretations of history, identity, and belonging.⁹

What emerges is not tourism-as-entertainment but tourism-as-witnessing. A reparative digital encounter. A refusal to let the memory of Daufuskie be shaped solely by the demands of the marketplace.