Abstract
ABSTRACT Studies of plantation surveillance have provided important understandings of the material dimensions of elite power and control over enslaved people. These studies have emphasized inter-visibility of managerial housing and the living/working spaces of enslaved people, as a panoptic strategy to enforce self-discipline. This emphasis on inter-visibility of living and working spaces, however, assumes a static population, rather than a complex, industrial society in motion. Using Space Syntax analysis, cartographic records, historic travelers’ accounts, and landscape documentation, this study addresses surveillance and planter control through a mobilities approach, elevating the status of road networks, while identifying the plantation as a carefully orchestrated landscape of movement. I demonstrate how understanding the manner in which movement is limited or itinerated, and for whom, represents a productive avenue of research at the intersection of inequality, control, and mobility. This approach is developed through a distinct archaeology of infrastructure.
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More From: Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage
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