Plantation Afterlives: History, Criticism, Ecology (Convenor: Prof Martin Crowley)
鈥楤ut the shipped, the held, and those in the wake also produce out of the weather their own ecologies.鈥� (Christina Sharpe)
This seminar series explores forms of theoretical, critical, and critical-creative work through which scholars, writers, activists and artists from the United States and the Caribbean have responded to the historical fact and ongoing reach of the mass transatlantic transportation of kidnapped Africans and their enslavement in the Americas. The work considered accordingly confronts the fundamental challenges to historiography, criticism, and creativity posed by the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, and forced labour in the plantations, and develops specific strategies to respond rigorously and combatively to the scale of these challenges. Following the approach of those studied, the seminar invokes the history, architecture, and mode of production of the plantation as drawing together sites of racialized abuse in the US and the Caribbean and the perpetuation of this regime in continuing forms of racial injustice and environmental destruction. Engaging the notion of the 鈥淧lantationocene鈥�, notably as aligned with critiques of the so-called 鈥淎nthropocene鈥�, the seminar further follows those studied by deploying the concept of ecology to gather, honour, and analyse modes of resistance and survival within and against this regime.
The first session of the series provides sustained focus on the work of Saidiya Hartman, whose work both establishes the historiographical challenge posed by the rupture of the Middle Passage and the archival absenting especially of the voices of enslaved women, and develops specific critical strategies to address this challenge, in the context of ongoing racial injustice theorized by Hartman as the 鈥渁fterlife of slavery鈥�. With this framework in place, session 2 then introduces for comparison approaches formulated by Christina Sharpe and Fred Moten. Designed to serve similar ends, these approaches emphasize in particular the necessity for criticism to invent forms of seeing and hearing, of reading and writing, which might disclose and, in some cases, swerve the racializing logic persisting in contemporary documents and images. Informed by the concept of the 鈥淧lantationocene鈥�, as developed by Anna Tsing (along with Donna Haraway) and expanded by Malcom Ferdinand, and understood as critical alternative to the 鈥淎nthropocene鈥� (in harmony especially with the work of Kathryn Yusoff), session 3 then introduces the historical reality, spatial organization, and phenomenological effectivity of the plantation regime. Through the work of Caribbean thinkers Sylvia Wynter, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, and Ferdinand himself, the session brings out both the connections made by these thinkers between this regime鈥檚 exploitation of forced labour, its monocultural agriculture, and its global extension, and their attention to practices of resistance to this continuum, from alternative agricultural forms, to marronage, to historical research and critical writing.听 The final session continues this focus on practices and ecologies of resistance: taking Christina Sharpe鈥檚 use of the term 鈥渆cology鈥� to describe forms of survival and combat in the wake of the plantations鈥� regime of enslavement, exploitation, and racialized violence, the session dwells with creative works 鈥� including poetry, visual art, and essay-writing 鈥� which engage specific formal practices in this way, and so 鈥減roduce out of the weather their own ecologies鈥�. In addition to the works listed for this session, students will be encouraged to share other works, in any medium, which for them embody such an approach.
Students interested in the seminar are invited to consult the following, by way of pre-reading:
Achille Mbembe, 鈥淓xit from Democracy鈥� and 鈥淣ecropolitics鈥�, in Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 9-41 and 66-92.
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Programme
Session 1
Critical practice (1): redress and critical fabulation
Saidiya Hartman, 鈥淩edressing the Pained Body鈥�, in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 49-78.
---, 鈥淪o Many Dungeons鈥�, in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route [2007] (London, UK: Serpent鈥檚 Tail, 2021), 60-70.
---, 鈥淰enus in Two Acts鈥�, Small Axe 12.2 (2008): 1-14.
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Session 2
Critical practice (2): annotation, redaction, glossary, performance
Christina Sharpe, 鈥淭he Weather鈥�, in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 102-134.
---, note 97, note 105, and 鈥減reliminary entries towards a dictionary of untranslatable blackness鈥�, in Ordinary Notes (London, UK: Daunt Books, 2023), 126, 134-36, and 196-225.
Fred Moten, 鈥淭aste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis)鈥�, in Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 67-85.
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Session 3
Plantations: history, phenomenology, ecology
Sylvia Wynter, 鈥淣ovel and History, Plantation and Plot鈥�, in We Must Learn to Sit down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays, 1967-1984 (Leeds, UK: Peepal Press, 2022), 291-299.
Edward Kamau Braithwaite, 鈥淐aribbean Man in Space and Time鈥�, Small Axe鈥�25.3 (2021): 90鈥�104.
Malcom Ferdinand, 鈥淭he Matricides of the Plantationocene鈥� and 鈥淢aroon Ecology: Fleeing the Plantationocene鈥�, in A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (密桃视频, UK: Polity, 2022), 36-47 and 144-158.
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Session 4
Forms of survival
M. NourbeSe Phillip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
Suzanne C茅saire, 鈥淭he Great Camouflage鈥�, in The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), 39-46.
Florence Price, 鈥淒ances in the Canebrakes鈥�: ; ; (performed here by pianist Anthea Waites on her 1993 collection, Black Diamonds)
Faith Ringgold, Black Light series, 1967-69:
Donald Locke, Dageraad from the Air, 1978-9, Acrylic paint, canvas, metal and steel on canvas, Tate Britain, London, UK:
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Selected indicative reading
Benjamin Barson, Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024).
Malcom Ferdinand, S鈥檃imer la terre: D茅faire l鈥檋abiter colonial (Paris: Seuil, 2024).
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
脡douard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Donna Haraway, et al, 鈥淎nthropologists Are Talking 鈥� About the Anthropocene鈥�, Ethnos, 81:3 (2015), 535鈥�564.
Maeve McCusker, Fictions of Whiteness: Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean Novel (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2021).
Kobena Mercer, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Sonya Posmentier, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
Jessica Oubli茅, Tropiques toxiques: Le scandale du chlord茅cone (Paris: Steinkis, 2020).
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press , 2021).
---, 鈥溾�業nner Plantation鈥�: Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, and a Black Theory of Freedom鈥�, Small Axe 25.3 (2021): 116鈥�126.
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
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