Plantation Slavery Research Articles

The Black Hole

The Black Hole Richard Bell (bio) Joshua D. Rothman,The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America. New York: Basic Books, 2021, 512 pp. Figures, notes, index. $35.00. 1315 Duke Street is about two blocks down from the UPS store in Alexandria, Virginia, on a stretch of sidewalk studded with attorneys’ offices and massage places. It’s a handsome townhouse, three stories tall and gable-roofed, its brick-work painted gun-metal grey. When John Armfield started leasing the place in 1829, it had done nearly two decades’ service as a residential dwelling—a nice place to raise a family. But Armfield ripped out its guts and renovated, turning a parlor into a meeting room for suppliers and customers. He kept the merchandise that he bought and sold at the side of the property in two high-walled yards, each one much larger than the footprint of the house itself. From Duke Street, the contents of those yards could be neither seen nor heard. But everyone knew what was kept back there. It wasn’t a secret. Arm-field wanted people to know. Soon after moving in, he installed a large sign emblazoned with his name and the name of his even better-known business partner, Isaac Franklin, above the front door. In Alexandria, everyone knew the sort of business they were in. 1315 Duke Street was a slave pen, the Virginia headquarters of the most ravenous slave trading firm anywhere in the United States. The merchandise stored in this depot and detention center were men, women, and children—dozens and dozens of them caged together on any given afternoon. Today, the visible traces of all that went on in that parlor and behind the bolted, double-locked gates to the two side yards are easy to miss. The small history museum it now houses was closed during the pandemic, and has only recently reopened. An unobtrusive historic marker, flush to the wall of the townhouse and obscured by trees, struggles for the attention of any passers-by. But foot traffic is slow these days on this section of Duke Street, which is a fifteen-minute walk from Old Town, a bustling cluster of waterfront stores that trade on their ties to George Washington and to nearby Mount Vernon. In 1829, Alexandria’s tax assessor scribbled a note to himself in the margins of a ledger describing 1315 Duke Street as “Franklin’s black hole.” It was this man’s private, personal way of marking the horrors of what happened there. [End Page 361] It’s also an apt allusion to the memory hole into which the dealings of Franklin & Armfield and the broader operations of the domestic slave trade have fallen. In antebellum America, the firm had been renowned, if not esteemed, and the massive forced migration to which it contributed—one of the largest in world history—was impossible to ignore. In the decades between 1800 and 1860, traders like John Armfield and Isaac Franklin sold at least one million enslaved people across state lines within the United States, a Second Middle Passage more than twice the size of the first. For the past century and a half, however, this domestic slave trade has lingered somewhere out of sight, confined to the darkest corners of public memory. Hardly invisible but somehow overlooked and unseen, the interstate traffic has for too long been obscured from the public eye by the shadow of the better-known transatlantic slave trade and by the seemingly insular and static regimes of plantation slavery. This didn’t happen wholly by accident. The domestic slave trade didn’t stumble into this black hole of historical forgetting by happenstance. It was pushed. In fact, people have been pushing the domestic slave trade to the margins of memory for decades. Almost every slaveowner bought or sold another human being at some point in their lives. Yet, as Robert H. Gudmestad demonstrated in A Troublesome Commerce (2003), planters in both the Upper and Lower South publicly denied their fundamental dependence on nightmare men like Franklin and Armfield, promoting instead paternalistic fantasies of benevolent mastery in which no one undeserving was ever sold away. The...

Slicing the onion: reflections and projections on language education policy in the Caribbean

Abstract The history of plantation slavery and European colonization in the Caribbean has left in its wake a rich and complex linguistic landscape, a colonial education structure, and a set of contradictory (creole/colonial) identities and language attitudes that make it fertile ground for a critical examination of language education policy development in the region. Using Jamaica, a former British colony as an illustrative case, this article takes a critical look at the historical and current framing and development of the multilayered “onion” that is language education policy in the Caribbean – a uniquely creole/colonial region with conflicting language ideologies. I examine the goals, actors, processes, and challenges and possibilities of LEP implementation (Nero, Shondel. 2018. Challenges of language education policy development and implementation in Creole-speaking contexts. In Jodi Crandall & Kathleen Bailey (eds.), Global perspectives on language education policies, 205–218. New York: Routledge and TIRF – The International Research Foundation), and also look ahead, recommending ways that we might craft viable 21st century education and LEP goals for the Caribbean and other former colonies around the world, given their colonial legacy and transnational present and future.

Amelioration or abolition? British consulship, Haitian recognition, and the question of colonial emancipation

ABSTRACT Faced with the decline of British West Indian plantations and a growing abolitionist tide, Foreign Secretary George Canning embarked upon the policy of amelioration in 1823 with the aim of eradicating the worst excesses of British plantation slavery. Scholars have regarded the rise of ameliorationism within a British imperial framework, neglecting Canning’s use of a modernized consular service in this policy’s promotion, and obscuring its transnational links to other Caribbean locations. This paper argues that Canning’s flagship consular intervention, Britain’s consulate-general at the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, became a major factor in the advancement of colonial amelioration. Charles Mackenzie, the British consul-general to Haiti, adhered to Canning’s ameliorationism, despite Haitian officials’ active attempts to enlist his support in the recognition and legitimation of their radical emancipatory project. Mackenzie’s mission undermined the abolitionist cause, reinforced the policy of planter indemnification, and facilitated the marginalization of Haiti in the Atlantic world.

Space, place, and the landscapes of slavery

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale Tomich, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Carlos Venegas Fornias examines the economic and political restructuring of 19th century slavery through contemporary paintings, plans and images. Ranging across the diverse settings of the lower Mississippi Valley, Cuba, and Brazil, the authors use a landscape-oriented perspective to chart the redeployment, reorganization, and industrialization of slavery during the 19th century, a time referred to as the ‘Second Slavery’. The incremental steps toward abolition during the 19th century did not result in a decline of agriculture based on enslaved labor or weaken the institutions that supported it. Rather, plantation slavery emerged as an efficient agro-industrial system, massive in scale, that was central to the political and economic restructuring of industrial capitalism. New political-economic spaces were exploited, while old ones declined. Focusing on Cuba, Brazil and the Mississippi Valley, the authors examine the contrasting spatial and material organization of plantations to shed new light on how these landscapes expressed both global socioeconomic processes and local contexts. The volume affords an insightful view of plantation landscapes that can be usefully read by historians, archaeologists, and wider audiences.

Towards an Anthropology of More-Than-Human Resistance: New Challenges for Noticing Conflicts in the Plantationocene

In light of the Plantationocene, a term recently elaborated to capture the magnitude of power of plantation systems from European Colonialism and plantation slavery to industrial animal farming and plant monocultures in the present climate crisis, political anthropology faces new challenges in noticing resistance. While plantation struggles have been crucial for conceptual innovations since the late 1960s as well as new arts of noticing, the related crises of climate change, extractivism and exterminism garner a new urgency to rethink resistance in the light of the multispecies turn. Examining recent anthropological examples of resistance in, around, and against plantations, this article opens the concept of resistance to include the agency of nonhumans and their capacity to make social and political changes, fight back, form alliances and co-produce rebelliously charged effects, meanings and interpretations. The article discusses the emerging field of anthropology of more-than-human resistance and helps in re-calibrating the anthropologist’s art of noticing it. In doing so, the text elaborates three challenges – the risk of romanticizing resistance, of reifying it, and of conceptual stretching. To cope with the challenges in forging anthropology of more-than-human resistance, two particular strategies are further outlined – of focusing on the articulations of resistance, and fostering a closer affiliation to activism and organized protest.

On the Sublime and Beautiful: Edmund Burke, Ottobah Cugoano, and Reverberations of Eighteenth-Century Racial Aesthetics

This article examines Edmund Burke and Ottobah Cugoano's aesthetic thought in relation to eighteenth-century racial slavery. It interrogates their ideas of the sublime and beautiful which contribute to their different political positions on the abolition of slavery: whereas the former advocated the gradual abolition of the slave trade and distant emancipation, the latter sought the immediate abolition of the trade and rapid emancipation. It contends that Burke's discussions of the sublime and beautiful were racialized, his advocacy of white authority on plantation slavery was rooted in his aesthetics, and his evocation of the Black sublime throughout his long career fit well with attempts to ameliorate, reform, and gradually abolish slavery. In contrast, Ottobah Cugoano's discussion of the sublime, the beautiful, and rejection of white authority supported his advocacy for the immediate abolition of the slave trade and rapid emancipation of enslaved peoples. The article also examines the reverberation of the logics of eighteenth-century racial aesthetics in current contexts.

American Monument: Racism and Class

When we say that racism is systemic, where in the system can we see it? When we use the term ‘structural racism’, how can we identify the particular properties, internal organisation, and types of connections that determine a white supremacist structure? Structure, as used in this article, is an outcome of function. The function of racism is domination, its purpose exploitation – the appropriation of labour, as it is shaped by the type of social relations specific to each historical period. As an ideology, racism has been used to rationalise plantation slavery, maintain segregation after emancipation, and divide and conquer workers for industrial exploitation. With the globalisation of production and its movement to the (so-called) global south, racism has been politically instrumentalised, under the guise of slogans such as ‘tough on crime’ or ‘war on drugs’ that are often wielded in contradiction to actual statistics, to justify incarceration and state-sanctioned killing of the army of labour that was left behind at the metropole. Racism is one of capitalism’s survival strategies.1 Pertinent to us is the question of how a civil society and its ‘civilised’ institutions (for example universities and museums) sustain and maintain structures that determine the actions of individuals who do not intend to be racist, but nevertheless are. This article takes two iterations of the work American Monument, as it reveals some principles in the interaction of individuals with structure and system.

Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism by David Sigler

Reviewed by: Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism by David Sigler Harriet Kramer Linkin FRACTURE FEMINISM: THE POLITICS OF IMPOSSIBLE TIME IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, by David Sigler. New York: State University of Albany Press, 2021. 320 pp. $95.00 hardback; $33.95 paperback. In Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism, David Sigler postulates the existence of a set of British Romantic women writers who envisioned the future in the present. Taking pains to differentiate these writers from those who prophesied or predicted the future, Sigler considers how they positioned themselves as if they already inhabited a future that enabled them to critique or comment upon the present. That complicated temporal or atemporal plane provided them with an opening—a fracture—that gave them the opportunity to move outside of the conventional expectations of what was perceived as culturally appropriate for women and women writers. He calls these writers "fracture feminists," a term I initially resisted because common usage makes us think of a fracture as something broken. Yet that is Sigler's point: not that they are broken but that they locate ruptures in their contemporary moments to present [End Page 345] the future, writing about what Sigler calls "the contemporary future" and later terms "contretempopia," which he acknowledges as a "deliberately silly term" that plays with Jacques Derrida's notion of "contretemporality" (pp. 4, 11). While he notes that the rich group of novelists, poets, essayists, and historians he examines—Mary Wollstonecraft, the anonymous author of "Ithuriel," Mary Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, Hannah Cowley, Charlotte Smith, Charlotte Caroline Richardson, Felicia Hemans, the anonymous author of Gulzara, Princess of Persia (1816), and Mary Shelley—would, at most, identify themselves as female philosophers, his steady recognition of them as "feminists" rather than the hedging term "proto-feminists" is a local instance of his provocative and compelling argument in action. They are fracture feminists, living through intense contemporary political events such as the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, plantation slavery, the push for women's rights, and parliamentary reform, but, Sigler posits,"instead of commenting on these matters directly, these feminist writers were responding as historians to the contemporary moment, as if they themselves were not fully subject to the demands of chronology" (pp. 16-17). The two theorists who consistently inform Sigler's readings are Jacques Lacan and Derrida. Though he recognizes that their psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches sometimes distrust one another, he invokes Hélène Cixous's conception of combining the two into a kind of philanalysis. He uses Lacan and Derrida to powerful effect, but it is somewhat surprising that twentieth-century philosophers such as Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Simone De Beauvoir make only occasional appearances in this otherwise enlightening discussion of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century feminists. One of the greatest strengths of Fracture Feminism, beyond its innovative thesis, lies in the brilliant juxtaposition of texts Sigler selects to demonstrate how fracture feminists not only engage in "contretempopia" but also establish intellectual connections with one another. He begins with Wollstonecraft and observes that though she is usually seen as writing for the future, she voices the thesis that shapes his work when she memorializes the recently deceased fracture feminist Catherine Macauley in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In Sigler's words, Wollstonecraft describes Macauley as "a woman from the future who must, in the future, be remembered" (p. 29) when she urges her readers to "remember that Catharine Macauley was an example of intellectual acquirements supposed to be incompatible with the weakness of her sex. In her style of writing, indeed, no sex appears, for it is like the sense it conveys, strong and clear" (qtd. p. 29). Here (and elsewhere) Sigler pays wonderful attention to the way verbs instantiate temporal shifts by pointing out how Wollstonecraft tells her readers to remember Macauley in the present through the eternal present of her writings as an example of the future in the past. When he [End Page 346] then turns to Wollstonecraft's legacy, he quickly dispenses with William Godwin's problematic Memoir of the Author of the "Vindication of the...

Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives by Amy K. King

Reviewed by: Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives by Amy K. King Tanya L. Shields GROTESQUE TOUCH: WOMEN, VIOLENCE, AND CONTEMPORARY CIRCUM-CARIBBEAN NARRATIVES, by Amy K. King. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 248 pp. $95.00 hardback; $32.95 paperback; $25.99 ebook. Amy K. King's Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives is a deeply researched, historically contextualized, and effectively argued work that takes seriously women's violence in a range of texts—fictional, visual, and audiovisual. King's interdisciplinary effort extends the work of several scholars to provide a rich, intersectional analysis of creative texts from the Caribbean and the United States that span the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. For her, the grotesque "focus[es] on bodily performances of violence and how these performances mirror a corrupt sense of self formation in the legacies of slavery" (p. 12). In using the grotesque as a mode, King hopes "to uncover what was frequently present, yet somehow ignored . . . what we frequently take for granted in terms of identity and representation" (p. 12). She contends that the grotesque is made legible primarily through touch, and she interrogates how the absence and presence of physical touch creates and undermines the forced intimacies that are entrenched in plantation logics. This strategy allows King to study issues of power, violence, and complicity among women. By exploring the legacies of plantation slavery in this way, King scrutinizes active participation and investment in the patriarchal order, [End Page 369] particularly by white women who use a system of grotesque violence in reality and fiction. Additionally, she indicates how the uncritical repetition of such grotesque violence impacts contemporary perceptions particularly as it relates to the limitations of interracial "sisterhood." King's work uses a variety of tropes that I could not always keep track of, including jealousy, social prestige, rivalries that threaten social stability, and talking back to probe what patterns of women's violence reveal in wide-ranging and fruitful contexts in work by United States and Caribbean cultural creators. Each chapter explores multiple historical periods, genres, and geographies to interrogate these patterns of complicity. For instance, using the trope of jealousy, she discusses the iconography of plantation logics and desires in nineteenth century woodcuts and book covers of plantation pulp fiction. Chapter two analyzes how scripts of sadism are rendered by enslaved and enslaver alike in texts as diverse as Gayl Jones's poem "The Machete Woman" (1983), Madison Smartt Bell's All Souls' Rising (1995), and the Dutch film Hoe Duur Was de Suiker (2013; The Price of Sugar) by Jean Van de Velde. In chapter five, King uses the horror genre to interrogate rivalries that threaten social stability using Barbara Creed's conception of "the monstrous-feminine" (p. 143). King extends Creed's ideas to discuss how monstrous women destabilize society but are disciplined, reaffirming the social order (p. 143). To do this, she examines texts such as the anthology television show American Horror Story (2011) and the novels Unburnable (2006) by Marie-Elena John and Memory Mambo (1996) by Achy Obejas. One of the most interesting explorations is King's argument, in chapter three, about the continuum of sexual violence in the 2016 version of Roots, Valerie Martin's novel Property (2003), and several short stories from Ann Allen Shockley's The Black and White of It (1980) (p. 76). In this chapter, King considers coercion, desire, power, and the ways in which false notions of intimacy impact women's sexual experiences—particularly forced and violent ones. The chapter forecasts her analysis of sexual violence in lesbian relationships that appears in the chapter on horror, specifically her reading of Obejas's story. King's work may also have benefitted from engagment with recent novels, including John R. Gordon's Drapetomania: Or, the Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, Lovers (2018), Robert Jones Jr.'s The Prophets (2021), and Nathan Harris's The Sweetness of Water (2021), and short stories like Kei Miller's "The Business of Tea" (2014), as they also explore same gender desire in plantation settings. Nonetheless, the aforementioned chapters confront these intimate and challenging topics to...

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Childhood in Captivity: Bioarchaeological Evidence from a Late Colonial Sugar Plantation in Central Peru

Children and childhood have emerged as important topics for understanding the history of African slavery in the Americas. In historical archaeology, analyses of subadult skeletal remains have provided valuable information about the biological and social conditions of captivity, yet children are infrequently the primary subjects of study in African diaspora bioarchaeology. Recent bioarchaeological research at Hacienda La Quebrada, a late colonial sugar plantation in central Peru, brings new data to bear on these subjects. Excavations at the cemetery for the plantation's enslaved African and Afro-descendant population recovered 158 subadults ranging from newborns to 20 years old, who represented 64% of the burial sample. Paleodemographic data and skeletal indicators of stress indicate that enslaved children were disproportionately affected by the conditions of life at Hacienda La Quebrada, particularly because of insufficient diets and susceptibility to infection and disease. Although these results are specific to the context of plantation slavery in Peru's coastal sugar economy, they contribute new information about the history of African slavery in Peru and about the study of childhood in conditions of captivity and colonialism in the Spanish Americas more broadly.

The Master's House

Abstract: This essay focuses on the specific location and history of The Great House in Port-of Spain, Trinidad, to open out a Black Atlantic exposé of networks of imperial global domination, Indigenous genocide, and plantation slavery. The essay works through Audre Lorde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" and Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism to model how Black and Caribbean thinkers enable an antiracist critique of eighteenth-century studies that persists in disavowing its violent colonial histories and legacies.

Bones without Flesh and (Trans)Gender without Bodies: Querying Desires for Trans Historicity

AbstractIn 2011, a 5,000-year-old “male” skeleton buried in a “female” way was discovered by an archaeological team just outside of modern-day Prague. This article queries the impulse to name such a discovery as evidence of transgender identity, and bodies, in an increasingly ancient past. To do so, it takes up the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers as a means to push back against the impetus to name such discoveries “transgender” in order to shore up the legitimacy of contemporary trans identity. Each of these three thinkers offers a different vantage point for rethinking such naming practices that push the reader to consider how desires to name and place “transgender” in a distant past papers over the violence of plantation slavery, global imperialism, and the Enlightenment's shift toward scientific reason. This article argues not that such anthropological discoveries should not be considered transgender, but rather that the desire for them to be, or become, transgender does not legitimate contemporary transgender identity, and may instead treat certain iterations of transness as spatially and temporally universal.

Southering and the politics of heritage: the psychogeography of narrating slavery at plantation museums

ABSTRACT This paper argues that an appreciation of the effects of ‘southering’, or the identity discourse of internal orientalism in the U.S., is key to understanding the historical interpretation provided at plantation museums and the challenges associated with narrative transformation at these heritage sites. An analysis of two plantation museums in Louisiana shows that efforts to transform the whitewashed narratives that fail to account for the psychogeography of southering (as reflected in the ‘Southern’ deep story) might prove counterproductive. One solution to this problem is the spatial contextualisation of plantation slavery as not only a regional but also a national and global institution – a contextualisation that is both historically accurate and also has the potential to disarm ‘Southern’ defensiveness through its explicit acknowledgement of the ‘guilt’ and participation of whites in the system of slavery throughout the U.S. (and even globally). What we ultimately argue for is the need to transcend southering, a binary discourse that creates a moral landscape of uneven racism (racist ‘South’/enlightened ‘North’) while at the same time privileging the agency of whites and occluding African American history and agency.

“Ameliorating the Situation” of Empire: Slavery and Abolition in The Woman of Colour

In this essay, I examine how The Woman of Colour (1808) extends from the ameliorative context of the British slavery debates that were about reforming imperial rule overseas in the wake of the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade. By thinking alongside the work of Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents, I argue that The Woman of Colour abstracts plantation slavery while positioning the protagonist Olivia Fairfield, a mixed-race heiress of a Jamaican plantation, as a figure of British imperial tutelage. The abstraction manifests through Dido, a secondary character whose relationship to Olivia is ambiguously presented to readers. Although the representation of Dido is akin to the grateful slave trope, the novel represents her as a dedicated servant to Olivia, implying that their relationship is benign and harmonious. By turning to Dido’s characterization and the pedagogical objectives of the novel, I identify a liberal imperial project in The Woman of Colour: the novel envisions a paternalistic notion of emancipation in Jamaica while remaining heavily invested in colonial governance of Black people.

Katrina O’Loughlin. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century.

Katrina O’Loughlin. <i>Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century</i>.

Baudelaire's Creole Gothic : A Postcolonial Afterlife for Les Fleurs du mal

Baudelaire’s verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection’s necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection’s representation of this ‘living death’ foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘social death’. As for the poetic representation of the ‘Undead’, this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless ‘living death’ of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire’s imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife.

Reflections

This experimental ekphrastic essay meditates on the history of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century rice plantation slavery from the ecocritical perspective of the bobolink, or rice bird. The vignettes of a postbellum image of a Georgia plantation reveal the many facets of this avian migrant’s entanglement with Indigenous histories of wild rice and with Black labour and performance. Weaving in contemporary art and music, this essay explores how a prized songbird—and agricultural pest—developed its grain diet and flight patterns in tandem with the growth of plantation capitalism across the Americas and the Atlantic world.

Breadfruit in the Wake: Imagining Vegetal Mutiny in Derek Walcott's "The Bounty"

I examine Derek Walcott’s portrayal of the journey of the breadfruit in “The Bounty,” which intertwines the history of the species’ transplantation with an elegy for the poet’s own mother. In its depiction of the mutiny on the Bounty, Walcott’s poem opens up a moment of Glissantian détour in the plants’ path from Tahiti to Jamaica when they are cast asea. I center the jettisoned plants rather than the crew or captain of the ship to explore how the interpretation of the event might change if we imagine the florae themselves to be the real mutineers. Invoking Christina Sharpe’s notion of “wake work,” I argue that the bobbing breadfruit specimens perform a wake for those who have perished in the waters of the Atlantic and the plantations of the West Indies as the plants wake up to the process of their commodification and absorption into the plantation system. For Walcott, the trajectory of the breadfruit also reflects the journey of his own mother after her death, so that its appearance in Saint Lucia implies not only that the plant has been successfully imported, but also that she has arrived at her ultimate destination in the afterlife. Feeding on the nutrients of her body, the breadfruit tree reincarnates the forms of its perished human and nonhuman predecessors, becoming a vegetal afterlife to the histories of colonial importation and plantation slavery.

The Sacred Cause: The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

The Sacred Cause: The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro