Elizabeth Robins's Alaskan Fiction and the Global New South

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In the summer of 1900, at the height of the Nome gold rush, actress and soon-to-be suffragist Elizabeth Robins traveled to Alaska. Following her return, Robins published two novels and several stories set in the region. Yet even as she capitalized on the popularity of gold rush settings and tropes, Robins's Alaskan fiction consistently undermines the romantic mythology that typically characterizes gold rush narratives, highlighting instead the environmental and human degradation that gold mining entailed. Focusing primarily on her novel The Magnetic North (1904) and the connected story "Monica's Village" (1905), this essay explores how Robins's Alaskan fiction recycles US Southern plantation mythology in order to imagine an alternative form of Alaskan development, one that would transform Alaska's Indigenous population into a racialized labor force to be exploited in ways comparable to African Americans under Jim Crow. Though the environmental conditions of Alaska foreclosed the possibility of traditional plantation agriculture, Robins's fiction maps plantation dynamics onto the forms of mineral extraction transforming the region. In doing so, these texts reveal the pliability of the plantation imaginary as well as the global scope of plantation modernity. This essay argues that the Plantationocene offers a useful framework for reconsidering the intertwined histories of plantation agriculture and mineral extraction. Robins's vision of Alaska as a New South ultimately highlights the ways in which mineral extraction in the Far North follows a pattern established by plantation agriculture throughout the Global South.