Plantation House Research Articles

Minor Architectures of the Plantationocene: A Colonial Family Romance

This article unfolds environmental stories of a plantation house and grounds on the Seychelles archipelago by reclaiming the importance of the minor architectures that support and resist its imperial hold. The Seychelles, first colonised by the French, then ceded to the British, claimed independence in 1976, before a coup d’état brought about a single party state that maintained power for fifteen years. Using feminist autotheory and field philosophy as its primary methodologies, the article draws on oral history interviews with Seychellois cultural workers, family archives, and spatial memories passed down through the generations of a former plantation owning family. Thinking with the scholarship of decolonial feminist scholar and activist Françoise Vérges, a colonial family romance is satirically told of the blind spots and lacunae articulating spatial memories of colonial architectures. How can alternative spatial and environmental narratives be foregrounded that seek emancipation and resist power when it becomes most oppressive?

Europe as a big house – examining plantation logics in contemporary Europe

ABSTRACT As a way to address the current postcolonial moment, characteristic of ongoing relations of resource extraction and border control, we turn to the metaphor of the plantation, offering an interpretation of Katherine McKittrick’s idea of plantation logics. Plantation museums, centered on former planters’ mansions (the ‘big house’) in the U.S., are important vehicles for narrating the historical period of slavery. However, such historical sites have traditionally steered away from addressing the role of enslavement in the production of the space of the big house. This erasure of the enslaved obscures the spatial and social relationality of the plantation. While continental Europe lacks these plantation houses and thus museums, it is no less important for the former colonial states in Europe to narrate their own historical involvement in slavery and, equally important, its contemporary legacies. In both contexts, we see a selective remembering of the past that is grounded in a spatial and temporal distancing of the plantation that renders the centrality of slavery to the production and reproduction of Europe invisible. In this article, we use the metaphor of the big house to illustrate how the logic of the plantation is replicated across scales of time and space. We argue that a failure to recognize the ongoing reality of the plantation logic as embodied by the European big house enables its reproduction, including in the environmental catastrophe of the Plantationocence. A consideration of Maroon geographies explores narrations of the plantation that point to a way forward to alternative futures.

The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation

In the decades leading to the Civil War, Maryland's Southern proclivities and sympathies were strongest in the rural Eastern Shore, where some of the oldest and wealthiest families owned plantations fueled by slavery. In The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation, Lucy Maddox details everyday life, individual biographies, and the interpersonal relationships on Rose Hill, an Upper South plantation on Sassafras Neck, through the 1840s. Maddox's study is unusual because it benefits from a woman's diary. Few such diaries remain from antebellum-era, midsize, mixed-farming plantations in a “middle state” like Maryland. As a result, The People of Rose Hill contributes an important and significant place-based perspective on a turbulent era in the nation's history.Maddox first establishes the poignancy of the antebellum era by casting forward to discuss the Emancipation Proclamation, the border states, and the Civil War. She then turns back in time to establish the history, setting, and characters of Rose Hill. The people enslaved to Thomas Forman, the owner of Rose Hill, lived during a critical historical moment “in which men like Forman acted on their belief that the future prospects of the country required a continuation not only of their energy, their skills, their legitimate desire to improve the lives of Americans, but also of the slave culture they had done so much to shape” (5). The people enslaved at Rose Hill, and those who interacted with them, of course, shouldered the implementation of Forman's ethos. The main characters include Forman (Revolutionary War hero, businessman, cad), Martha Ogle (reluctant bride, disappointed wife, attentive household manager), hired overseers and servants, and enslaved persons. Martha's diary is a treasure: her record of everyday life, in combination with family records and letters and archival records, aids in developing biographical portraits of real people who would otherwise be lost to history. Maddox reads between the lines in order to glean people's attitudes and interpersonal relationships, which is useful for understanding the motivations and strategies for behaviors and events discussed by Martha. In addition, Maddox addresses gaps in historical knowledge about Rose Hill by exploring broader practices through comparative material from other Eastern Shore plantations in Maryland.By recording daily activities and perceptions, Martha inadvertently insured that the people enslaved at Rose Hill would not be forgotten. Maddox draws on Martha's diary to reconstruct as much as she can about each enslaved person, especially their family relationships and where and when they worked at the plantation. Martha notes summoning doctors to attend to difficult births or ailing people, the talent of some individuals for certain tasks, and the ongoing laborious work facing her and the people she supervised. These provide a sense of what a day, a season, or a year was like at Rose Hill. There are also portraits of men, women, and children. For example, Martha described Rachel Allen Antigua in glowing terms, a “perfect” servant whom she moved from the fields into the house. She performed precisely as Martha wished and was adored for it. But the enslaved, however favored, were also their own people. Samuel Gilmore, a favorite of Thomas's who was trained to manage horses and accompanied him to races, executed a “French exit,” and despite Martha's belief that he would return, he never did.Maddox's study complements current literature that aims to restore agency to enslaved people. Closing the introduction, Maddox notes that “in spite of our best efforts . . . no matter how intensely we may examine an enslaved life, when we are done, we can still only wonder how close we have managed to come to the truth” (21). The critical irony, however, is that the source material makes it impossible not to return to Thomas and Martha as reference points. I was thus surprised that Maddox drew from the history, but not the archaeology, of Wye Plantation and related sites, which has added considerable primary source information about the lives of enslaved people. I also wondered about the integrity of the plantation home and its potential to yield information about life at Rose Hill. Maddox notes, however, that the plantation house has been remodeled several times and is now a private home. Since Rose Hill is not a museum, its story would be inaccessible to the public without Maddox's study. As a result, in The People of Rose Hill, Maddox provides not only an academic contribution but a public service in writing an accessible, fascinating study about real people living in challenging times.

Submerged in Nature: Coming of Age in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding

The Fairchild family in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding likes to tell the story of the family favorite George braving an oncoming train to save the young Maureen, confirming the family's legend of happiness. However, another story lurks under the surface of the family narrative, questioning the family's foundations. This submerged story is the story of submersion: three female characters contemplate or experience submersion in water, with imagery that speaks to coming of age: revelation, marriage, sexuality, pregnancy, and/or death. Their experiences happen necessarily within and because of the natural world. While the family's surface stories align with what they can best control, the liquid wilderness around and under the plantation structure allows for dreams, the imagination, and the supernatural. For the women, the medium of water becomes the message of vibrancy. Although physical submersion in water can be deadly, the natural world reveals different possibilities for women than the surface world of trains and plantation houses. When the White female characters physically step outside the structure of Fairchild houses and metaphorically escape the surface narrative structure, they have the opportunity to imagine an enmeshment with the natural world that sparks multiple potential narratives for their adult lives.

The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques

Reviewed by: The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques Laura Wilson (bio) The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques In her touching preface to this collection of Danièle Pitavy-Souques's essays, Pearl McHaney writes that: "The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty offers readers and scholars a global perspective of Welty's achievements" (xi). The volume, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2022, was originally conceived by Pitavy-Souques as a way to collate writings from her decades-long commitment to Welty studies, but was sadly never finished before her death in July of 2019. McHaney worked with Pitavy-Souques during the initial stages of planning for the collection and was supported by Danièle's husband François Pitavy in bringing his late wife's idea to fruition. Bookended by McHaney's introductory remarks and a closing remembrance of Pitavy-Souques's and Welty's friendship written by François, the book now stands as a shining memorial to Pitavy-Souques's inimitable work on Eudora Welty and the achievements of her own life, including the highest French merit Légion d'honneur and the highest Eudora Welty Society accolade, The Phoenix Award. Thinking about the perspective of this collection offers us the chance to consider Welty's art of representation, alongside the way she so often plays with appearances and points of view (visual, moral, political). At the same time, perspective is a common term in visual arts such as photography, painting, and film, all interests of Eudora Welty that are deftly explored in this book. Focusing on the perspectives of this collection emphasizes Pitavy-Souques's examination of what we might call the language that is eyes: that is to say, moments where Pitavy-Souques shows us how Welty viewed, illustrating the multiple perspectives that she wrote both from and about. Explorations pertaining to sight abound in this volume. A word concordance demonstrates that the word see is featured 115 times in addition [End Page 175] to seen 43, sees 28, and seeing 13. Eye or eyes appears 79 times. The first visual tool that really stuck out for me in the work, the mirror, lexically appears 40 times (50 if you include its plural and connected words), as Pitavy-Souques suggests that "Welty used mirror effects quite early," calling this a "modernist feature favored by Virginia Woolf in her short stories and by surrealist filmmakers like Jean Cocteau" (116). The mirror symbol offers readers another chance to interrogate Welty's fictional technique, questioning the accuracy of reflected images produced by layers of metal and glass, a surface that only ever provides a virtual image since light rays never actually cross over in a reflection. In turn, Pitavy-Souques argues that in Welty's work, "the surface functions as a lure; behind the apparent picture or story, there lies another one, much more instructive or disturbing" (111). A reading of Delta Wedding illustrates well such ideas of illusion and false representation: From the first, in spite of its apparent hugeness, the Delta and the plantation appear to Laura [McRaven] as a closed world limited by reflection: the sky mirrors the fields, the name Fairchild refers to the place as well as to its inhabitants, and characters come and go between two identically furnished plantation houses. The black waters of the bayou reflect a house that was never lived in. (117) Twinning and repetition feature often in Welty's work as extensions of the perceived image, with the reflective façades of Shellmound and Marmion working to trap Laura McRaven inside layers of outward appearance, the idealized front-facing image of plantation culture that historically concealed many real horrors. Horror and fascination relate to another key argument that flows throughout the book: the notion of the mythical hero Perseus as a symbol for the artist, indeed Welty herself, who "questions her art in the very moment she is creating it" (11). Given my own particular fondness for the Gorgon myths and Welty's use of Medusa, I was very much drawn to...

Integration of shallow geophysics, archaeology and archival photographs to reveal the past buried at Ingleside Plantation, Piedmont North Carolina (USA)

AbstractGround penetrating radar supported by electrical resistivity tomography and gradiometer surveys were used to map buildings and infrastructure documenting sequential property use by three generations of the Jacob Forney family who began as farmers in the backcountry of North Carolina and rose to prominence in government and industry within the Southeastern United States. At Ingleside, the antebellum plantation house has been preserved, and the adjacent property remains relatively undisturbed. Context for the geophysical surveys was provided by archival photographs, written accounts including monographs and newspaper articles, and an archaeological excavation of the stone hearth within the plantation's summer kitchen. The location of an early log home with a stone‐lined cellar with ties to the Piedmont Campaign of the American Revolution (in 1781) was newly discovered. In addition, a historic road, kitchen garden, and the postholes from an early post‐in‐the‐ground building were imaged within the subsurface. The external summer kitchen and privy are associated with the plantation house constructed in 1817. Several cesspool vaults of potential privies are ingrown with trees. The results of the geophysical surveys document the evolving land use within one family in the American South and can be connected to a specific event in history, a goal of historical archaeology.

Starting with Eye, Long, And, Down, Wall, and Shelf, and: House, Grandmother, Child, Stove, Almanac, Tears

Starting with Eye, Long, And, Down, Wall, and Shelf, and: House, Grandmother, Child, Stove, Almanac, Tears Kimiko Hahn (bio) Starting with Eye, Long, And, Down, Wall, and Shelf Who invented the shelfand did they identify needor eyeball nature—say a low tide—that sparked a longing?I imagine finding myself in a caveand, unconsciously,setting down a cup,placing it on a ledge. When itcomes to imagination,walls are not always evident.For a shelf especially sobecause solutionsare often accidental. Evenincidental. That’s the longand short of sinks, bowls,bedstands, umbrellas,belts, and even hairbands.Take the blanket: whointroduced goose down? Or,who spied a wall to draw a buffalo?Chicken or egg? My parents’first bookshelf of bricks and plankswas sheer utility: Walt and Maude’sgallery of objets, art and otherwise.I wasn’t born yet. Andwhen I was born, Father hastilybuilt proper display cases,so nothing on a lower shelfcould wedge downmy baby throat. Nor could mywalleyed uncle then criticizetheir bohemian decor. Father’d said,“Shelve it, man!” Now,Funny to shelve an opinion, [End Page 71] I think. How long would it stand down?And what if the very wall crumbledunder the weight of self? [End Page 72] House, Grandmother, Child, Stove, Almanac, Tears Borrowing words from Bishop just for fun Long ago, chickens scratched outside Paia housewhile inside Grandma stood over Grandpa’s favorite childplaying by the stove and, contrary to the almanac,hoped against rain—though the luna wouldn’t’ve shed tearsif the sky let loose its own drops of tears. And when the yard filled up with sun outside the plantation house,Grandma hung bachelor-laundry and the child(my mother) toddled from the stove to her brother’s almanac(he was old enough to cut cane and the almanacgave him a heads-up on the weather) to tear out pagesand carry them out the house to her mother (my grandmother)who couldn’t read the alphabet to her child. Inside, in the large dented pot on the stove, she boiledone of her chickens. On the stove in a smaller potsteamed—if the almanac had said to plant—daikon she’d torn from the patch beyond the outhouseand laundry lines. Grandma’s seven children—the youngest would be an uncle and was the childshe was carrying—all knew the black stove with four burnerslike the almanac ad. There, decades later, Grandpa shed tears while playing hanafuda becauseI asked, Jii-chan, why’re your teeth in a cup? Grandmawas nowhere in my memory. Grandma may have beenaround since I was the child of Grandpa’s favorite—or at her stove. Was the War foretold by the almanac?When Go-for-Broke Uncle returned, were marvelous tears shed?No bakemono wandered her house! Still, [End Page 73] a house empties. Grandma set a Grandpa shrinenext to the stove and a granddaughter visits just to readthe tattered Almanac to those ancient ears. [End Page 74] Kimiko Hahn kimiko hahn casts a wide net for subject matter. In her new collection Foreign Bodies, she revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal’s body, objects removed from children’s bodies, hoarded things, and on. She teaches at Queens College, City University of New York. Copyright © 2022 Kimiko Hahn

Mračna prošlost ropstva u američkim plantažnim kućama - veb-promocija i percepcije posetilaca iz recenzija sa veb-stranice TripAdvisor

The visual and linguistic representations of tourism destinations for promotional aims may be affected by their primary function of acquiring new visitors; for this reason, they are not always "value-free expressions of a place's identity" (Pritchard & Morgan, 2001, p. 177). The concept of dark tourism seems to perfectly mirror the connection between terminological choices and culturally-bound constraints. It has been acknowledged that several dark tourism sites tend to valorise (or hide) events associated with tragedy and death, attracting tourists' interest for their (non)macabre details at the expense of historical objectivity. This is the case of plantation houses in the US, whose narrative on slavery has often been "whitewashed" and minimized (e.g., Harnay, 2022; Butler, 2001; Eichstedt & Small, 2002). This study aims at investigating how visitors to popular plantation destinations in the US perceive and evaluate the presentation of the experience of slavery in these sites vis-à-vis what is presented on the plantation websites. The analysis is therefore twofold: first, a qualitative multimodal study of the content included in the websites of the plantations will shed light on whether the websites include information on the role of slave labour in the plantations, and secondly, a corpus-assisted investigation of the visitors' reviews posted on TripAdvisor will attempt to clarify how visitors perceive the plantations as a tourist location, and the importance they place on receiving honest information about the brutality of slavery during their visits. The mixed-methods approach has allowed researchers to delve into this phenomenon from two opposite, but intertwined, perspectives: one driven by experts officially promoting the visit through the websites and the other offered by visitors sharing their personal experiences and feelings.

Memorializing Dinah and Reckoning with Enslavement

Inequality in Bronze is a two-year project (2018–20) reckoning with the history of slavery at Stenton, a plantation house museum in Philadelphia, by commissioning a new memorial to Dinah, a woman enslaved at the property in the mid-1700s. Drawing on data collected throughout the project, this article argues that historic house museums need to move from “community participation” to “community integration” in their efforts to forefront racial equity. This article asks how we can redress centuries of erasure and the absence of Black lives at historic sites. It offers points of consideration for other historic house museums contemplating similar projects as the collective work to address the legacies of American enslavement continues.

Learning Slavery at Home

Abstract Since Stephanie Camp wrote of the “rival” geography that enslaved people created on slave labor plantations, few studies outside the field of architectural history have used the built environment as a source to understand the lives of enslaved people and the mindsets of enslavers in the United States. This article takes adolescent outbuildings in Louisiana (garçonnières) as a starting point to understand how white parents taught and reinforced ideas of dominance over both the environment and enslaved people and simultaneously rooted young white sons to a slave labor plantation “home.” Using architectural evidence, alongside testimony left behind by both enslavers and the enslaved, this article argues that by moving young male enslavers out of the main plantation house and into a separate building, white enslaving parents created a “risk space” for sexual violence within the sexualized geography of the slave labor plantation. The garçonnière, with its privacy and age-and gender-specificity, constituted just one space of increased risk for enslaved women on Louisiana slave labor plantations from a violence that was manipulated within the built environment.

Pembuatan Asap Cair Guna Mendukung Pertanian Organik di Desa Bulusari, Kecamatan Kalipuro, Kabupaten Banyuwangi

Bulusari is a village located in Kalipuro District. This area consists of settlements, agricultural land and plantations. The villagers live in 3 hamlets, namely Bulupayung, Kopensere, and Plampang. The typical residential area here is a typical plantation house. The houses of the surrounding residents are planted with coffee and a few cloves. The agricultural land is planted with rice, cassava, coconut and fruit. Bulusari also has a wood serkel business. The wood serkel business leaves a lot of waste wood being wasted. The purpose of this activity is to assist the community in utilizing wood waste and producing superior products. The method of implementing this activity is the introduction of innovations in the form of utilizing wood waste into liquid smoke, designing and manufacturing tools, practice of using tools, application of using liquid smoke. The technology applied is able to produce liquid smoke with grade 3 and grade 2. The use of this liquid smoke is as a vegetable/organic pesticide, and food preservative. The production of liquid smoke is also expected to be able to provide organic pesticides and create new jobs for the people of Bulusari Village.

Artefak Kolonial Perkebunan Panglejar, Maswati, Rajamandala Masa Hindia Belanda: Arti dan Arah Sejarah

Colonial plantation artifacts are an important cultural in the history of plantation at Bandung, West Java. What and how the plantation artifacts are the main problem in this paper. the purpose of this paper is to explain the colonial plantation artifacts in the form of inscriptions and old maps of the garden. The method used is a desk research on archeological research reports, books, and the internet. The data sources obtained are the inscription of the establishment of the old Panglejar tea factory in the IHT Building, the inscription of the establishment of the Administrator of Maswati Plantation house in the Pusdiklat Building, and the old map of the Rajamandala P lantation in the Office of Rajamandala Afdeling 1 of Panglejar Platation. The three colonial artifacts give special meaning to the continuity of plantation history since the days of the Dutch East Indies until now, as well as showing directions to search for and find historical information through colonial archival research and information from interviews with relevant informants at the present time.

The Representation of Kitchen Space in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

This paper focuses on a specific space: the kitchen represented in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). There are at least three kitchen spaces Stowe presents: Aunt Chloe’s in Shelby’s, Rachel Halliday’s Quaker kitchen, and Old Dinah’s in St. Clare’s but also a kitchenless space in Simon Legree’s. Slightly departing from 1970s and 80s traditional feminist readings on Stowe redeeming her canonical status by proving the author’s attempts to replace masculine and capitalist commercial marketplace with a maternal domesticity, my goal in this paper is to bring in and resurrect not only gendered but also racial space of kitchen which has been overlooked by Stowe critics. Along with the traditional concept of domestic spheres in the nineteenth century America and the role of kitchen in plantation houses, I aim to examine black inhabitants and their racial identities Stowe presents in the novel. Dinah’s kitchen might be a great example which works as a battleground between the North and South, white and black, a lady and an enslaved cook. Her kitchen is the space where she, to a certain limited extent, performs her own autonomous ‘labor’ as a ‘creative’ work. For an enslaved woman, cooking is both a ‘labor’ and ‘creation,’ which produces possible resistance and autonomy although being limited and restricted within a liminal kitchen space. The kitchen becomes a space of borderland, especially for an enslaved woman, between autonomy and enforced labor, where she enacts her own form of subversion on the threshold.

A (mush)room of one’s own: feminism, posthumanism and race in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled

The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, USA, 2017) is one of several recent films to feature mushrooms as a prominent plot device. In this essay, I argue that the use of mushrooms here allows cinema to engage with issues surrounding the Anthropocene, or the period in which capitalist man has shaped the world more than the world has shaped capitalist man. I shall in particular propose that the association between women and fungi suggests that the Anthropocene entails an anthropocentric and patriarchal worldview. That is, The Beguiledsuggests that the Anthropocene is defined specifically by capitalist man – whose world must now be replaced by one that might be deemed feminist and posthuman, not least because of how the women at the film’s all-girls’ private school work with mushrooms to bring down the central male figure, Civil War soldier Corporal John McBurney. However, The Beguiled also posits the limits of such a feminist and posthuman world. For despite the film’s Civil War setting, and despite its status as a remake-cum-adaptation of both Don Siegel’s 1971 film of the same name and Thomas P. Cullinan’s source novel, the film only deals with race as at best a structuring absence. Coppola’s (characteristic) refusal to deal directly with race nonetheless allows us to identify the whiteness of those wider issues with which the film deals, namely the Anthropocene, posthumanism, (much) feminism and perhaps cinema itself. In particular, we can draw out this latter suggestion by considering the film’s use of the Madewood Plantation House, which also features in music videos for artists like J. Cole and Beyoncé. For if cinema is a force for the white Anthropocene, it is perhaps in supposedly “unruly” media outside of cinema that black and other feminisms can intersect with posthumanism to emerge as a genuine alternative to the Anthropocene.

Visibility in a Psychiatric Hospital’s Museum

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article On Mental Health, People, and PlacesFull AccessVisibility in a Psychiatric Hospital’s MuseumEzra E. H. Griffith, M.D.Ezra E. H. GriffithSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:31 Dec 2019https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.12a9AbstractI wished long ago that J. K. Rowling had permitted Harry Potter to sell me his invisibility cloak. Then I could have made myself or others invisible or visible at will. Lacking that magical power, many of us simply turn to spending energy, time, and resources trying to render visible those whom we favor and render invisible others who, for one or another reason, confound us.On a visit to a Caribbean island, I toured a beautifully restored plantation house. The guide took me from a medium-sized bedroom through a door with a latch on it into a smaller area, just barely large enough for a single occupant. The guide asked me to guess how this inner alcove was used, but I was stumped. It turned out to be where the owner sequestered a relative who suffered from a psychiatric illness.In earlier days, some families preferred this type of physical control of an individual suffering from these illnesses. The explanation was that while the patient was rendered invisible to outsiders, it was a way of keeping the patient safe and protected from untoward events like teasing and accidents. Hospitalization in a psychiatric facility was costly in terms of stigma and its own form of invisibility. The plan of action was often reconsidered if the patient repeated violent behavior or otherwise embarrassed the family.Despite this history of rendering psychiatric patients invisible, transformative progress continues. Organized efforts have focused on attempts to normalize community living of individuals with psychiatric illness and enhance their access to privileges of citizenship.I toured an art exposition at Paris’s Sainte-Anne Psychiatric Hospital that ended last month. Titled “Rien à voir: Quand la création échappe au symptôme” (“Nothing to see: When creation escapes symptoms”), the presentation christens the new status of the hospital’s art collection as formally a “Musée de France.” Thus, the history of this psychiatric hospital and the artistic designs of a cross section of its patients are now under formal protection in the vast French museum system, under the title of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de l’Hôpital Sainte-Anne. This exposition and the act of creating a national museum in a public hospital form a unique landscape. In it, the hospital’s patients can see the possibility of their being artists.Toubal, Untitled, 27 October 1967, gouache on paperMAHHSA, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de l’Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris ©Dominique BalikoThe exposition introduces visitors to 13 artists who painted their works between 1960 and 1970. Anne-Marie Dubois, author of the explanatory text (carrying the same title as the exposition) and the exposition’s curator, dives directly into the heart of the matter. How do we look at these paintings done by people who obviously have had significant experience with psychiatric illness? What about the old-time labels (“l’art des fous,” “les productions artistiques des maladies mentaux,” “l’art brut”)?Dubois reminds us that psychiatrists joined the debate, too, and between 1945 and 1950 conjured up the label of “l’art psychopathologique.” This was to make the point that the painters’ aesthetic productions were linked to their psychopathology. That statement, for me, reverts to the theme often repeated in recent years about whether people should be defined and limited by their illness. I expect the debate, especially linked to art, will continue.I include in this column, with the museum’s permission, a photo of the painting used as the thematic reference point of the exposition. It is an untitled piece done by Toubal in 1967. Her first name is unknown, and the work was discovered during inventory of the hospital’s reserve collection. It is possible to conclude that she had spent time as a patient in the hospital, but little else. However, she serves well as catalyst for the questions raised by Dubois. Are the paintings in the museum documents of psychopathology only to be studied? Or may they also be aesthetic objects, a form of art? And are the artists not free to make of their creativity what they wish? I certainly noticed their celebrity and enhanced visibility. ■Ezra E. H. Griffith, M.D., is professor emeritus of psychiatry and African American Studies at Yale University. ISSUES NewArchived

‘Man of the Mountain’: Seeing Jefferson at Monticello

AbstractJefferson's ‘retirement’ at Monticello – built, exceptionally for a Virginia plantation house, on top of a mountain – provided the requisite audience for a carefully fashioned self‐image. Its inspiration lay in classical descriptions of country living and mountain‐top villas, which had been appropriated by eighteenth‐century polite literature as part of the imaginary of the British landed gentleman. Although conceived as part of a process of righteous self‐distancing from Europe, Jefferson's retirement nevertheless situated him in a cosmopolitan, elite and genteel company, a fact that complicated his quest to meet republican ideals.

Murder in the House of Memory: Faulkner and the Plantation Prototype of Flags in the Dust

Fig. 1. William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi. Scholars have long understood the centrality that the plantation house possesses as both institution and symbol in William Faulkner’s fictional world. The earliest critical investigations often approached his Yoknapatawpha County through a gothic literary lens, equating the plantation with the decline of the

Decaying Spaces: Faulkner's Gothic and the Construction of the National Real

Decaying Spaces:Faulkner's Gothic and the Construction of the National Real1 Lisa Klarr In his 1929 novel Sartoris (later renamed Flags in the Dust), William Faulkner introduces his readers to Yoknapatawpha, the apocryphal analogue to Oxford, Mississippi. Caught between a feudal past and a modern, industrial future, Yoknapatawpha acts as a cipher for the geopolitical status of the region during this historical era. The South is "post-structural" in that where there was once structure, a closed system, a kind of perceptible totality, there is now fragmentation: the vestiges of a past still intruding upon the present. For Faulkner, the force of decay is felt most palpably through encounters with ruinous plantation houses—large grandiose buildings, the beacons of prosperity for their time—in utter disrepair. Since built space materializes the binary oppositions that give a culture its structure, the decay of this space likewise hybridizes those cultural contradictions. Previously, the South enforced the slave system through a series of spatial codes. The Big House ordered plantation life, establishing inclusive and exclusive domains: the inside/outside of the house determining house/field status; the front door/back door a site of intense socialization, as we witness in the primal scene of Absalom, Absalom! when a young Thomas Sutpen is denied entry into the front door by an enslaved house servant. To say that a culture is in decay is to indicate that all of its physical-conceptual aspects—spatial components (house, farm, plantation), relational systems (slavery, feudalism, patriarchy), collective imaginaries (myth, story, [End Page 407] narrative)—are losing cohesion. They are being divested of their structuring power.2 Like many of Faulkner's works, Flags in the Dust is replete with spaces in decay. In an otherwise unremarkable moment, Young Sartoris passes in front of a barn, the doors of which "sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of rusty wire" (133). There is no indication as to why this building is in disrepair; it could simply be that the ravages of nature have compromised its structure. But "decay" is hardly ever neutral for Faulkner; instead, it tends to signify the inscription of a historical event coded as "natural." We learn that the Sartorises are one of many families being supplanted by mechanization: "[t]here was a hitching-post there, which old Bayard retained with a testy disregard of industrial progress" (5). In this text, the movement between obsolescence and decay is historical to natural; modernity judges the traditional farmer to be obsolete, and, without maintenance, the farm rapidly decays. Since many of the sites of ruin in Faulkner have historical antecedents—the barn reflects the shift to industrialized farming; Sutpen's Hundred is the result of numerous historical lapses (the most significant occurring during the Civil War)—the servant Simon's lament over the "gent'mun's proper equipage goin' ter rack en ruin in de barn" (112) illustrates how the process of mourning becomes intellectual, a recognition that the shifting of productive energies away from southern materialities causes these spaces to lapse. As the spatial codes of the culture give way to the natural forces of rust and decay, they open up new sites of occupation and trespass. Sanctuary, for example, is partially set in the Old Frenchman place. The ruinous house becomes the scene of a brutal rape, an act of "unnatural" sexual transgression with a corncob. In the first description we receive of the house, before we know the source of the narration, Faulkner gives us a sense of historical passage: "The house was a gutted ruin rising gaunt and stark out of a grove of unpruned cedar trees. It was a landmark, known as the Old Frenchman place, built before the Civil War" (8). The house is a "landmark," a monument to the antebellum South. It is possible that it is in decay because of the Civil War, but unlike the [End Page 408] decaying railroad tracks in The Unvanquished, this is less a reflection on the glories of the past and more of a meditation on the sterile nature of the present, a sterility underscored by Popeye's own impotence. In Temple's first...

Material Witnesses: Domestic Architecture and Plantation Landscapes in Early Virginia by Camille Wells

Reviewed by: Material Witnesses: Domestic Architecture and Plantation Landscapes in Early Virginia by Camille Wells Barbara Burlison Mooney Camille Wells. Material Witnesses: Domestic Architecture and Plantation Landscapes in Early Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780813940052 Hardcover: 200 pages When I first enrolled in a graduate course on American architecture in the late 1970s, the semester began with only the briefest mention of the early habitations of seventeenth-century British settlers. In books such as Fiske Kimball's Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (1922), Hugh Morrison's Early American Architecture from the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period (1952), and Leland Roth's A Concise History of American Architecture (1979), buildings erected by Anglophones held pride of place with the earlier Spanish and French colonial traditions barely acknowledged or buried later in the text. Rarely, or barely, were indigenous traditions acknowledged. Volume one of William H. Pierson Jr.'s American Buildings and Their Architects: The Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles (1970) almost completely dispensed with the first colonial habitations and leapt from English manor houses to the Adam Thoroughgood House in Princess Anne County, Virginia, which he claimed was built in 1636. In addition to initial Spanish and French settlements, the very earliest of English habitations were likewise largely neglected. Within the length of one lecture at the beginning of the semester, students in advanced courses in the 1970s were taught to think of buildings such as the Adam Thoroughgood House or the Parson Capen House in Topsfield, Massachusetts, as the official geneses of architectural traditions in the United States or at least the only ones that mattered. Fortunately, Camille Wells's anthology of her own scholarly articles demonstrates how far the trajectory of colonial Virginia architectural history and hence early American architectural has evolved. Wells is part of an elite coterie of scholars who, beginning in the 1970s, transformed the study of Virginia colonial architecture and, by extension, the study of American architectural history as a whole. These archaeologists, historians, and architectural historians proved that there were more important questions to be asked than those concerned solely with aesthetics, connoisseurship, or European stylistic architectural influence. These scholars addressed the history of less elite buildings, thereby contributing substantially to a much more complex and richer picture of architecture in the Tidewater region of the British colonies. Wells's various essays originally appeared in such significant journals as the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and Winterthur Portfolio. Her work brought to the attention of architectural historians and the wider public that there was clearly more to Virginia's colonial architecture than grand public buildings such as the Williamsburg Capital, elite plantation houses, and the genteel furnishings, which during the 1960s were promoted and commodified by the Kittinger Furniture Company in department stores such as the now defunct Stix, Baer, & Fuller in St. Louis, Missouri. In this anthology of nine chapters, Wells employs a variety of methodological approaches that have informed her professional career, providing a useful guide to future scholars in the field of early American architecture. She exploits documentary and visual evidence, such as plat maps and measured drawings. She addresses not only the built environment but also the more expansive agricultural landscapes of plantation culture and the role of dowries in funding the construction of [End Page 71] mansions. Additionally, she examines the way that aesthetics and subjective taste dominated curatorial decisions concerning restoration practices at Colonial Williamsburg. Wells's evidence is based on her own careful examination of extant documentary evidence found in archives, but she also generously acknowledges that she is dependent upon the work of previous archaeologists and scholars who have conducted extensive excavations and fieldwork. She demonstrates how a detailed examination of such archival sources and previous fieldwork by other scholars informs our knowledge of the broader architectural environment more so than a close visual analysis of extant elite buildings would. Wells writes in a concise and elegant manner, avoiding technological jargon while still confronting serious theoretical issues, such as the concept of "patriarchal primacy." Her introduction makes clear that she aims to make students one of her chief reading audiences. I agree with her...

Understanding genius loci to sustain Ume Bangka’s traditional architecture based on intangible material culture

The vernacular architecture used natural materials for its construction, such as wood, clay, stones, leaves, and animal skins. In tropical countries such as Indonesia, most vernacular architecture is made out of wood; this material is versatile, highly accessible, and affordable. Ume Bangka—a plantation house from Bangka—uses wood for its main construction. However, due to deforestation mainly by private sectors, such as major palm oil industries and private tin mining, wood becomes a scarce commodity. These activities also reduce traditional landscape areas and settlements that belongs to local people for centuries. As wood becomes unaffordable and less area to inhabit, people begin to abandon Ume Bangka as their future home and opt for modern housing type. This is very unfortunate because Ume Bangka shares a close relationship with local culture and natural landscape. This paper investigates the issue of the relationship between natural landscape and cultural values around Ume Bangka as a traditional Bangkanese dwelling. The main methodology in this discussion used literature studies on vernacular housing typology, especially in Bangka Island. Finding the genius loci— the spirit of a place—from the construction of Ume Bangka is the expected result of this paper that will serve as a preliminary idea in sustaining Ume Bangka’s traditional house amidst globalization and proposing Ume Bangka as the cultural identity as well as the inspiration for built-environment sustainability in Bangka Island.