White Plantation Research Articles

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans

Reviewed by: A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans Elizabeth Herbin-Triant A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. By Sydney Nathans. ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 313. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-97214-8.) In 1844 Paul Cameron used some of his family's substantial wealth to purchase a plantation near Greensboro, Alabama. Cameron, whose family's plantation outside Durham was the largest in the North Carolina Piedmont, bought the Alabama property in order to participate in the rush for rich cotton-growing land in the Deep South. Cameron sent 114 slaves to live and work on the new plantation, but he remained in North Carolina, leaving day-to-day operations to an overseer. Hoping to learn something of Cameron's slaves' experience migrating from North Carolina to Alabama, Sydney Nathans tracked down some of their descendants in the late 1970s. He discovered that Cameron had sold the 1,600-acre Alabama plantation to some of his former slaves in the 1870s and that their descendants still held it as "heir land," which Nathans defines as "land for all the heirs, to be held in common for all, to be divided among none" (p. 2). Since 1845 Cameron had hated the plantation, which had inconsistent soils, and he believed that he had been duped by the man who encouraged him to buy it. After the Civil War, the plantation suffered a series of especially poor cotton crops due to drought and army worm. Desperate to rid himself of the property and lacking white buyers, Cameron allowed his agent to sell parcels of land to African Americans, letting the purchasers pay him in cotton over several years. The buyers and their heirs called the land "Cameron Place," possibly out of gratitude to a man who allowed them to "homestead" (pp. 8, 135). In speaking with the buyers' descendants, Nathans found a rich trove of family lore, including tales of Paul Cameron's gift of gold to a favored slave, Paul Hargis, who may have used it to purchase his share of the property, and the suspected paternity of family patriarch Ned Forrest Hargress, born nine months after his enslaved mother was sent to the tent of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who stopped in the area with his troops in April 1865. However, A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland is not based solely on oral history. As luck would have it, the Cameron family left thorough plantation records and detailed letters, and Nathans has mined these as well. A Mind to Stay is a pleasure to read. It unfolds like a story, full of interesting characters and illuminated with details pulled from the archives. The most fully drawn is Paul Cameron, who suffered from kidney stones and hemorrhoids exacerbated by long hours in the saddle and who shifted from a somewhat paternalistic management style to one focused solely on maximizing profits as he settled into the role of absentee planter. The archives provide less information about the slaves and freedpeople on Cameron's land, but interviews allow Nathans to sketch out the personalities and activities of subsequent generations of African Americans on Cameron Place. We learn about their involvement in civil rights, their efforts to use cooperative programs to keep black farmers on the land, and the importance of the land as a place that down-on-their-luck family members could return to. The book tells an unusual and fascinating story that is often overshadowed by the Great Migration: a story of African American families who owned and through great determination held [End Page 458] on to southern farmland. It is a labor of love and the product of decades of relationship building and research. Sydney Nathans focuses A Mind to Stay on the Cameron plantations and the people who owned and worked them. With such a narrow focus, it would not have worked to attempt a sweeping argument, and Nathans does not seek to provide much context. He rarely uses relevant historical literature to explore broader questions such as how most black farm owners came to own their land. There are many cases where the historiography would have...

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans

Reviewed by: A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans John C. Rodrigue (bio) A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. By Sydney Nathans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 313 Cloth, $29.95.) Some forty years in the making, Sydney Nathans's new book tells a remarkable story and is a monumental achievement. It delineates the experiences, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, of a group of 114 enslaved persons and their descendants. The slaves belonged to Duncan Cameron, one of the largest slaveholders of the North Carolina piedmont, whose son Paul managed his vast agricultural operations. In 1844, Paul Cameron purchased a 1,600-acre plantation near Greensboro, Alabama, and convinced his father to allow him to remove the 114 slaves, mostly in family units, to it. The story also includes 82 slaves whom Paul Cameron later sent to another plantation at Tunica, Mississippi. (After Duncan Cameron's death in 1853, Paul Cameron remained in North Carolina as an absentee owner.) Slaves were shuttled between Cameron's two western estates before and during the Civil War. Late in the war, as Union troops threatened western Alabama, most of the Greensboro slaves were returned to North Carolina, where they gained their freedom after Confederate forces surrendered in late April 1865, at nearby Raleigh. Many of the slaves sent to Alabama, despite the trauma of the move, had come to see it as home, as did those born and raised there. After emancipation, a number of them eventually made their way back. Almost from the moment he laid eyes on the Alabama estate back in 1844, Paul Cameron realized he had made a bad deal. He came to loathe the place and saw it as [End Page 329] an albatross, from which he was unable to free himself. After trying during the immediate postwar period to turn the estate around financially, enduring all of the familiar difficulties that former slaveholders throughout the South experienced with emancipation, Cameron eventually gave up on finding a white buyer and decided in the early 1870s to begin selling it off—in small parcels, entirely on credit, and with no down payments—to a number of the former slaves (and other black people) who resided there. In essence, Cameron's Alabama plantation became one of the several black, independent communities that sprouted up in the postemancipation South. The second half of the book traces the many difficulties and challenges—including internal conflicts—that these black landowners and their descendants faced in defending their community and holding onto the land: from Reconstruction, through the Jim Crow era and civil rights movement, up to the present. For instance, one of the community's descendants, David Hargress, was a career Navy man who secured the plum assignment of cook at Camp David under President Barack Obama. In telling the story of this community, Nathans focuses on a select number of families and individuals. The account centers on the slave Paul Hargis (he changed the name to Hargress after emancipation) and his family and heirs. A child when Duncan Cameron acquired him and his parents, Hargress grew up to become a trusted slave and confidante to Paul Cameron, and he and other family members (though not all) were among the slaves first removed to Alabama. Hargress was also among the slaves sent to North Carolina near the end of the war but who returned to Alabama as a free man, along with his wife, Dicey, and later acquired Cameron land. One of the Hargress descendants, through marriage, was Alice Sledge Hargress. Born in 1914, she died just shy of her one hundredth birthday (and was the grandmother of the aforementioned David Hargress). She provides much of the backbone of the twentieth-century story and insisted on the former Cameron lands being held as "heir land"—property to be held communally and for the benefit of all, not to be broken up and sold. Other important individuals include Sandy Cameron, a carpenter and the most trusted slave of the original 114; and, later, Louie Rainey, the community's "oral historian" (247); James Lyles, a minister and visionary who played a key role in...

Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean by Christopher M. Church

Reviewed by: Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean by Christopher M. Church Séverine Bates Church, Christopher M. Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean. UP of Nebraska, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8032-9099-0. Pp. 308. Church looks at the close correlation between natural and man-made disasters, as well as socioeconomic politics in France's oldest colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Church demonstrates that, from 1870 to 1902, the Third Republic's responses to cataclysmic natural calamities, man-made catastrophes, and subsequent civil unrests led to the reshaping of its political and economic relationship with these islands that were already on the brink of economic disaster due to a failing sugar industry. The debate over France's relationship with these islands triggered another debate that put to the test the French nation's imperialist vision and self-image as a leading civilization and a fierce defender of the Jacobin ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. As documented by Church, each time disasters took place—such as the fires that destroyed Fort-de-France and Pointe-à-Pitre in 1890 or the eruption of Mont Pelé in 1902—they triggered fallouts that exposed France's double bind when it came to its Caribbean colonies. A consistent theme throughout the book is the metropole's inclusive and exclusive practices and attitude toward its Antillean citizens who, although granted the rights conferred by full citizenship (political participation, representation in the French Assembly, etc.), were still not treated as fairly as their metropolitan counterparts. These inclusive practices are best demonstrated in the [End Page 245] discourses on shared citizenship or cultural affiliation that put forth the exceptional nature of the two islands and their populations—especially the pro-assimilation mulattoes who composed their middle class. As "Tropical Frenchmen," they were the epitome of a successful civilizing mission. It was therefore on the basis of compatriotism that the French government and society came to help these distant brothers during times of hardship. Such discourses were part of a bigger narrative that served to show the superiority of French civilization and ultimately changed the image of the French Antilles in the French collective imagination—from colonies of exploitation to colonies of settlement. Nevertheless, based on racial and cultural intermixing, this vision was not commonly shared. Church underscores how conservatives, from the colonial administration and from the plutocracy that ruled the islands—the white planters known as Békés—were quick to point out the subservient and predominantly economic nature of the relationship between the metropole and its colonies. Moreover, popular uprisings (such as the 1900 general strike in Martinique) and cataclysmic events further contributed, in the Hexagone, to the depiction of the islands as socially and environmentally dangerous, haunted by the specter of socialism, and populated by unruly black masses. More importantly, they exposed the deeply-rooted racism and social issues that plagued these Creole societies. The emphasis on disasters' economic calculus over human needs, the unequal distribution of governmental aids—in favor of the wealthier (and) white citizens—highlighted indeed the French government's own prejudice toward those who, even today in the wake of hurricane Irma, continue to identify as its second-class citizens. Séverine Bates University of Evansville (IN) Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French

Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South by Brent J. Aucoin

Reviewed by: Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South by Brent J. Aucoin David E. Alsobrook Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South. By Brent J. Aucoin. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. 248 pp. $54.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1913-7. Thomas Goode Jones (1844-1914) was one of Alabama's most influential, enigmatic public figures of the New South Era. Utilizing a rich array of primary and secondary sources in this ambitious, incisive biography, Brent J. Aucoin vividly reveals the panoramic arc of Jones's life and times and his distinguished service as a soldier, lawyer, politician, and jurist. As a biography and historical monograph, Aucoin's much-anticipated work will be of keen interest to a wide audience of readers. Historians, attorneys, and casual aficionados of the Alabama saga will discover some familiar topics in this book—the postbellum Bourbon Democratic political agenda, the rise of populism in the 1880s and 1890s, the bitterly contested gubernatorial elections of 1890-92, the tumultuous constitutional ratification campaign of 1901, and the protracted struggle over the regulation of railroads in [End Page 72] the early 1900s. But Aucoin also includes a wealth of fresh insights into Jones's personal life, his phenomenal relationship with Booker T. Washington, and his philosophical evolution as a public official and jurist. Like so many other young men of his generation, Jones's courage was forged in the horrific crucible of Civil War combat—as a lieutenant commanding Company K of the 53rd Alabama Infantry Regiment and as an aide-de-camp to General John B. Gordon in the Army of Northern Virginia. Wounded in his baptism under fire at Thompson's Station, Tennessee, in March 1863, Jones later saw extensive action in some of the war's bloodiest engagements, including Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. In April 1865, General Robert E. Lee ordered Jones and a small cadre of staff officers under a flag of truce to Appomattox Courthouse, where they personally witnessed the Confederate surrender. Jones's memories of battlefield carnage and its indiscriminate toll on comrades and foes alike haunted him until he died a half-century later. He emerged from the war with deep respect and admiration for his former enemies and became a vocal champion of reconciliation between the North and South two years before the end of Reconstruction and a decade prior to Henry W. Grady unveiling his famous New South Creed. In his meteoric postwar public career, Jones served as a Montgomery alderman, chief counsel of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, and governor (1890-94). During the twenty-five years after the war, he became entrenched in the state's Bourbon Democratic leadership hierarchy that espoused fiscal austerity, generous subsidies and minimal taxation for industries and railroads, and white supremacy. Yet, as Aucoin meticulously documents, Jones frequently drifted away from the Bourbon Democrats' doctrines and dogma. As a legislator, for example, he vociferously opposed the state's lucrative convict leasing system and, openly breaking ranks with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, he supported a bill that obligated railroads to pay injured workers' medical expenses. He cast the deciding vote [End Page 73] in 1886 against the Wiley Contract Bill, a cleverly drafted initiative to provide white planters with unfettered control over African American laborers. Early in his first gubernatorial term, Jones cited the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause in haranguing legislators on the legal pitfalls of withholding state appropriations for black public schools. Almost twenty years later, Jones vehemently exclaimed that the legislature's recalcitrance on this issue "was not only unconstitutional, but … wrong in principle, morals, and policy" (31). Despite Jones's seemingly enlightened positions on black educational funding and labor contracts, the author argues that "he was not a racial egalitarian or immune to the racist ideas of his day" (32). Jones, as a product of his ancestry and environment, was a racial paternalist who fervently believed that African Americans' salvation lay in segregation, industrial education, and gradual economic advancement—all under the vigilant guidance of their white superiors. Thus, both Jones and Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute's principal...

Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama by Sarah L. Hyde

Reviewed by: Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama by Sarah L. Hyde Hilary N. Green (bio) Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. By Sarah L. Hyde. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. 240. Cloth, $42.50.) Sarah Hyde’s Schooling in the Antebellum South is a refreshing intervention in the understanding of public education across the antebellum Gulf South states. Previous scholarship has often misconstrued a lack of pre-collegiate institutions in those states as an absence of learning and a sign that white southerners did not place cultural value on education. By examining Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, Hyde reveals that formal and informal learning was common in the region. White southerners utilized a range of private and public options, and their popular support of education prompted the statewide implementation of public schools before the Civil War. Over six chapters, Hyde argues that “the history of education in the Gulf South prior to the Civil War shows that people there valued education and made considerable progress in developing school systems that most white children could access. The story of these developments offers important insight into the worldview of the people inhabiting the region and deserves inclusion in the larger narrative of southern history” (6). Hyde begins her work with an in-depth discussion of the two most prevalent modes of learning: home instruction and private schooling. Chapter 1 explores the daily instruction that was undertaken within the home by private tutors, parents, and other family members. Although this form of schooling was often underappreciated by early scholars, Hyde takes seriously how home education allowed white southerners to overcome the obstacle of scattered settlement patterns to provide their children and other relatives with an education at a relatively low cost. Mothers, older siblings, and even white northern male tutors provided generations of children with an education ranging from the basic rudiments to the most [End Page 134] advanced curriculum. More important, home education allowed southern families to benefit from their children’s labor and life in the agricultural South. Hyde concludes that the robust nature of home instruction demonstrates neither an absence of learning nor a lack of cultural importance placed on education by white southerners. In chapter 2, Hyde moves her discussion to private schools, which she shows provided the most consistent mode of instruction in the three states under review. State legislatures, local governments, and even white planters relied on these private institutions “to carry the burden for educating the majority of southern children” (25). Even when state legislatures created public school systems, Hyde contends that private institutions remained essential. Though politics and the effects of the Panic of 1837 dictated the ability of the Gulf South states to financially support schools, Hyde demonstrates how the urban centers of New Orleans, Mobile, and Natchez functioned as the “genesis of public education” (69). Of the three cities, Hyde contends that New Orleans served as the model for the other two, as well as for the Gulf Coast states, region, and nation as a whole. All three, though, served as models for their respective states. Hyde successfully weaves quantitative charts with qualitative analyses of the typical school day, teacher salaries, curriculum, and local officials’ ability to secure both city and private funding to show how urban schools thrived before the Civil War. Collectively, white popular support of home instruction, private schools, and urban schools convinced state legislatures to establish public school laws and the necessary infrastructure once the states had recovered from the Panic of 1837. Tension between state and local control influenced the widespread expansion of public schools throughout the respective states over the following two decades. As an early pioneer, the Louisiana legislature modified the bureaucratic operational system and funding models to the detriment of most parish districts, with New Orleans being an exception. Strong local leadership and additional funding streams allowed that city’s schools to overcome the legislature’s interference. Yet the modifications made by the Alabama and Mississippi legislatures enabled a more efficient system in those states and increased civic pride in...

Celebrity pedagogy and performative humility: interrogating history through ‘quiet charisma’

Subjected to years of torture and humiliation at the hands of white slave traders and plantation owners in nineteenth-century Louisiana, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofer) in Steve McQueen’s 12 Yea...

Transformative Mobilities and the Non-dit: Constructing Whiteness Across Two French Colonial Spaces

Between 1860 and 1890, several thousand migrants from Reunion Island settled in New Caledonia. Most were fleeing poverty after the collapse of the sugar industry. While local legend has it that these settlers comprised a handful of rich, white planters and a contingent of Indian coolies, recent research into this group has demonstrated that the migration was on a far greater scale and was racially and socially diverse. Indeed, most Reunionese migrants, both indentured and free, were of African, Malagasy or Creole ancestry. They had either been slaves themselves or were the descendants of slaves in Reunion. Welcomed by a new colony that was desperate for settlers and workers, the racial and social characteristics of these new French citizens were erased as was their presence in the New Caledonian historical narrative. The tradition of the non-dit (the unsaid or unspoken) teamed with French social structures and the needs of a settler colonial society facilitated this disappearing act as descendants melded into the local white settler population. Yet, there were cracks in this colonial whitewash (photographs, recipes, language, songs), traces of a hidden black migration to the Pacific. With reference to these traces and artefacts, and drawing on oral histories of descendants, I highlight in this article some of the voices, faces and stories of these settlers, while reflecting on their social transformation and the extent of their agency in constructing their whiteness in New Caledonia.

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. By Sydney Nathans

<i>A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland</i>. By Sydney Nathans

Paule Marshall Reimagining Caliban and Prospero in &lt;i&gt;The Chosen Place, The Timeless People&lt;/i&gt;

Throughout her decades long career as a writer, Bajan-American novelist Paule Marshall has consistently defined herself as a novelist of the African diaspora, explaining that her “way of seeing the world” has been “profoundly shaped by her dual experiences” as both West Indian and African American. A recurring purpose of her work has been developing diasporic consciousness, creating awareness of and representing the connections between peoples of African descent. Her second novel -- The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) – is profoundly influenced by the late 1960s/early 1970s era when radical black nationalism was most influential in the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean. Set in contemporary time and in actual and symbolic Caribbean space, Chosen Place is her epic of the black Atlantic for she depicts the imaginary postcolonial Caribbean nation of Bourne Island within the larger geographical and historical frame of the Atlantic slave trade and its legacy. Marshall links the literary traditions of African American and Caribbean literature in a work that is more like novels by George Lamming and other Caribbean nationalist novelists of the era than African American novels of a period when the Black Arts Movement was at its height. From the start of her writing career in the 1950’s, Marshall has been unabashedly feminist. Continuing a tradition of black feminist critique of white women’s imperialism, Marshall very deliberately uses women characters to explore the dynamics of the colonizer/colonized relationship, explaining in a 1979 interview with Alexis DeVeaux that Merle Kinbona and Harriet Shippen are meant to “embody the whole power struggle of the world.” Influenced by George Lamming’s brilliant appropriation of the characters Prospero and Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Marshall audaciously engenders the Prospero/Caliban trope, first in her portrayal of the relationship between Merle and the wealthy English white woman who had “kept” her while she was a student in England. She uses the trope most powerfully, however, in her depiction of the relationship between Harriet Shippen, Anglo-American heir to a fortune amassed through investments in the slave trade, and Merle Kinbona, African-Caribbean descendant of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman. In doing so, Marshall precedes the explosion of essays by black feminist critics questioning exclusions in feminist theory and racism in the feminist movement. In evoking this relationship, she also precedes by more than a decade critical writing by Caribbean and African American feminist theorists who explicitly challenge the absence of black women in The Tempest by defining themselves as heirs of Sycorax and “daughters of Caliban.” In The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Marshall uses two masterfully realized women characters to powerfully render the continuing impact of the history of colonialism and enslavement on contemporary relationships. With her gendered rendering of the Prospero and Caliban relationship, she depicts the ways white supremacist beliefs have historically and continue to contaminate the ideal of sisterhood between women.

Reconstructing Local Government

After the Civil War, the South faced a problem that was almost entirely new in the United States: a racially diverse and geographically integrated citizenry. In one fell swoop with emancipation, millions of former slaves were now citizens. The old system of plantation localism, built largely on the feudal control of the black population by wealthy white planters, was no longer viable. The urgent question facing both those who sought to reform and those who sought to preserve the “Old South” was: What should local government look like after emancipation? This Article tells the story of the struggle over the answer to that question. At the center of that struggle is an untold legal history of local government reform during Reconstruction. In the years immediately after the Civil War, idealistic Yankee reformers went south with the explicit aim of remaking the “fabric of southern culture” by rebuilding the South in the image of their northern homes. Specifically, in North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, these reformers rewrote state constitutions to replace the plantation and county court with townships modeled on the New England town. Southern conservatives resisted the new townships, understanding them as foreign impositions targeted to destroy their old way of life. Within a decade they had dismantled the new townships and built the foundations of a new Jim Crow local order rooted in the county and approximating a return to the plantation. By telling this new history, this Article contributes to present scholarship in at least two ways. First, the story highlights a binary struggle between “communitarian” localism embodied in the civic participation of the New England town and “proprietary” localism embodied in the private power of the plantation owner. This struggle was framed with crystal clarity during Reconstruction, but it remains a powerful analytic tool for understanding today’s debates and struggles over local government. Second and relatedly, this history reveals the extent to which racial anxiety shaped and continues to shape local institutions. The communitarian township experiment was fueled by a vision of racial equality — and the white supremacist response to it was fueled by resentment and resistance to that vision. When we think about localism and racial inequality, we tend to think about the responses to school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century when racial resentment and fear during the “Second Reconstruction” drove white flight and contributed to resegregation through suburbanization. This Article shows that we may be looking at the wrong Reconstruction. In fact, the pathologies of local government, racial segregation, democracy, and protection of property were framed after the Civil War, in the crucible of a direct conflict between utopian racial egalitarianism and white supremacy.

Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation

AbstractThis article examines transnational connections between African American emancipation in the United States and Chinese and Indian indenture within the British Empire. In an era of social upheaval and capitalist crisis, planters and colonial officials envisioned coolies as a source of uninterrupted plantation labor. This vision was often bound to the conditions of African American emancipation. In British Honduras, colonial officials sought to bring emancipated African Americans to the colony as labor for sugar plantations. When this project failed, interest turned toward indentured Chinese labor managed by white planters from the U.S. South. In India’s North-Western Provinces, the outbreak of famine came to be seen as a “kindred distress” to the crisis in Lancashire’s textile industry. Unemployed English factory workers were seen as suffering from famine due to the scarcity of slave-produced cotton, just as colonial subjects suffered from scarcity of food. While some weavers in the North-Western Provinces were taken into the coolie trade, the emigration of unemployed Lancashire weavers was looked to as a possible alternative to indenture. Drawing upon archives in Australia, Belize, Britain, India, and the United States, this article explores connections between seemingly disparate histories. By focusing upon their interrelation, this article locates the formation of crisis not in raw materials, but rather within a transnational struggle over racialized labor exploitation, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “dark and vast sea of human labor.”

Disarticulating Indianité: Re-imagining the Motherland in Ernest Moutoussamy's Chacha et Sosso

WRITING INDIANITE INDIANITE or Indianness, a term first introduced during the early 1970s by the Martinican researcher, Gilbert Francis Ponaman, is a cultural project that seeks to valorize the East Indian diaspora who came as indentured laborers to the French West Indies during the post-slavery era. The inception of this concept stems principally from the lack of attention accorded to the Francophone Indo-Caribbeans in critical discourses, despite the fact that they comprise approximately 15% and 3% of the Guadeloupean and Martinican populations, respectively, and have contributed to the mosaic of material and immaterial cultures of these islands. This theoretical disengagement seemingly harks back to the initial arrival of the East Indian indentured laborers, who came as a cheap source of labor to work on the sugarcane plantations. These laborers arrived into a society where a hierarchized social fabric had already been established: the white planter class occupied the upper echelon, below which were the middle classes, and the former African slaves positioned at the bottom. The East Indians were then placed, by default, at the bottom of these social class rankings, and were further marginalized because of their religious and cultural practices, which were quite different from those practiced and cultivated on the islands at the time. This culture of marginalization was further perpetuated since the East Indians represented an obstacle to the former African slaves' effort to bargain with French plantation owners because the indentured laborers were willing to accept lower wages. Their social isolation bled into their non-recognition in literary and critical discourses, which the concept of Indianite seeks to amend. Preliminary thoughts on what would eventually be conceptualized as Indianite made their debut in the journal, Soleil indien, launched in March 1974 by Ponaman, which aimed to give a voice to the often-sidelined East Indian presence in Martinique, in particular, and in the French Caribbean, in general. One of the earliest definitions of Indianite comes from Laurent Farrugia in his Les Indiens de Guadeloupe et de Martinique (1975). Farrugia considers Indianite as an inaugural concept essential to the creation of East Indian subjectivity in the French West indies: L'Indianite n'est pas une fin en soi. Pas plus que negritude n'etait une fin en soi. Mais il est necessaire que s'ouvre une ere d'Indianite, comme il etait necessaire que s'accomplissent des temps de negritude. Pour n'etre qu'une etape historique, l'Indianite n'en est pas moins une etape absolument indispensable. Au-dela? au-dela, il y a l'antillanite, concept ouvert, englobant a fois negritude, l'Indianite et l'europeanite ... (160) Similar to Farrugia's insights, Jack corzani's definition locates Indianite in relation to Negritude. Corzani defines it as a movement that tends to valorize la culture indienne (originaire de l'Inde) aux Antilles sur le modele de negritude et parfois en reaction contre cette derniere (1436). Analogous to the concept of Negritude advanced from the 1930s by Aime Cesaire, Leopald Sedar Senghor, and Leon Gontran Damas to promote the affirmation of a collective black identity that resisted French colonial systems of thought based on racial prejudices, Indianite is a necessary step forward to recognize the contributions of the East Indian diasporic community in the French Antilles, and to spark cross-cultural dialogues amongst the plural ethnicities in the French Caribbean. But it is Ernest Moutoussamy, an Indo-Guadeloupean writer and politician, aspiring, like Ponaman, to put the Francophone Indo-Caribbeans on the map, who became the main defender and proponent of this concept. He develops his thoughts on Indianite in his critical work La Guadeloupe et son Indianite, published in 1987, and explains that Indianite is an articulation of East Indian cultural patrimony that must be acknowledged as an integral part of the racial and cultural diversity at work in the French Antilles. …

PERMINTAAN GULA RAFINASI PADA INDUSTRI MAKANAN MINUMAN DAN FARMASI DI INDONESIA

The demand of food, beverage and pharmacuetical industries’ products directly affected the demand of refined sugar. In Indonesia, refined sugar are fullfilled by local products from 11 refined sugar mills and imported products. The volume of imported refined sugar are suspected over capacity, so that there is a excess supply of refined sugar that leak into plantation white sugar market. It caused an unstable condition for plantation white sugar price. This research aims to determine the demand of refined sugar for food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries, then to forecast the demand for the next 10 years and also to determine the correlation between the volume of imported refined sugar and the white plantation sugar price. The method used is a multiple linear regression analysis, simple linear corellation analysis and trend analysis. This research used national data of large and medium industries from 1991 to 2012. The result shows that the factors affected refined sugar demand for food and pharmaceutical industries are world refined sugar prices, exchange rate, sugar beet prices and tariff. The factors affected refined sugar demand for beverage industries are sugar beet prices and tariff. The tendency of refined sugar demand in food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries for the next 10 years is increasing. There is also a positive correlation between volume of imported refined sugar and plantation white sugar prices for consumer.

The Rents from Trade and Coercive Institutions: Removing the Sugar Coating

The 19th century collapse of world sugar prices should have depressed wages in the British West Indies sugar colonies. It did not. We explain this by showing how lower prices weakened the power of the white planter elite and thus led to an easing of the coercive institutions that depressed wages e.g., institutions that kept land out of the hands of peasants. Using unique data for 14 British West Indies sugar colonies from 1838 to 1913, we examine the impact of the collapse of sugar prices on wages and in- carceration rates. We find that in colonies that were poorly suited for sugar cane cul- tivation (an exogenous colony characteristic), the planter elite declined in power and the institutions they created and supported became less coercive. As a result, wages rose by 20% and incarceration rates per capita were cut in half. In contrast, in colonies that were highly suited for sugar cane there was little change in the power of the planter elite — as a result, institutions did not change, the market-based mechanisms of standard trade theory were salient, and wages fell by 24%. In short, movements in the terms of trade induced changes in coercive institutions, changes that are central for understanding how the terms of trade affects wages.

Coffee, Market Economy and Informality in Late Colonial Goroka, Papua New Guinea

Set in Goroka in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) where coffee became the staple export crop after the Second World War, this paper explores how a variant of Keith Hart's informal economy emerged among indigenous Gorokans. Colonial administration was established in the region -- quickly recognized as an almost uniquely well-favoured ('lucky') place -- only during the 1930s. The attempt, bound to create friction with an Australian government intent on honouring its 'trusteeship' obligations, was made by a small group of settlers and local colonial officials to establish an 'anachronistic' white planter community. Most observers agree that, from the mid-1940s when Gorokans were introduced to monetized economic activity, and to the establishment soon after of 'European' commercial plantations and Gorokan coffee smallholdings, indigenous people moved with remarkable speed to accommodate themselves to market norms. Against this consensus it is argued here that, together with the phenomenon of widespread informality, the occurrence of hybridity in Gorokan market dealings suggests an alternative conclusion. This is that the triumph of capitalism by the time of Independence in 1975 may have been exaggerated, due to the operation of an uneasy trio of formality, informality and hybridity.

Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution

Ferrer, Ada. Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and in the Age of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 384 pp.More than ten years in the making, Ada Ferrer's Freedom's Mirror examines the interplay between the Haitian Revolution and Cuba from the time of the Revolution's outbreak in 1791 the aftermath of Haiti's 1804 independence. Though detailed descriptions and analyses of sources occasionally weigh down the narrative (the description of a single document occupies 25 pages, 299-324), Ferrer's work is based on impressive multi-archival work in Cuba, Spain, and France and it will prove invaluable specialists of abolitionism and colonialism in the Caribbean and beyond. Her conclusions are nuanced: though the Haitian slave revolt provided a powerful counter-example the dominant slave-holding paradigm of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the period also saw the economic take-off of a Cuban sugar economy based on slave labour.The traditional view that the Haitian Revolution left every white planter in the Americas shivering in fear of a second seems well on its way being debunked. Ashli White has shown in Encountering Revolution (2010) that many US slave owners were confident that no similar outbreak could take place in the United States of America. Ferrer adds that Cuban planters viewed the 1791 slave revolt in French SaintDomingue (Haiti) not only as a threat but also a business opportunity. Eager replace the beleaguered French colony as the Caribbean's leading exporter of sugar, they hoped to emulate Saint-Domingue but contain Haiti (p. 38). Cuban booster Francisco Arango y Parreno was in Spain negotiating for looser slave-trading rules when the 1791 slave revolt occurred. News of the event, far from scaring him, prompted him double-down on his plan replace Saint-Domingue as the Caribbean's sugar juggernaut. The hour of our happiness has arrived, he exclaimed (p. 4).Ferrer also spends much time discussing the ways in which news of the Haitian Revolution was disseminated among Cuban slaves, whether in print, orally, or through commercial exchanges. Some historians have debated whether slaves knew much about the Haitian Revolution because of widespread illiteracy and official censorship, but Ferrer convincingly argues that the black population was well aware of events in Saint-Domingue, though not always accurately because wild rumours circulated as freely as truthful ones. Because Cuba continued import slaves from Saint-Domingue throughout the 1790s despite official bans and the obvious security risk, many negros franceses (French blacks) who had personally experienced the great slave revolt in SaintDomingue lived and toiled in Cuba, where they could inform their brethren of the momentous events that had taken place in SaintDomingue.The middle part of the book is equally well researched but less informative because other scholars covered similar ground in the time it took for Ferrer complete her study. Spain's use of black auxiliaries during its invasion of Saint-Domingue in 1793-1795 was already the subject of Jane Landers' Atlantic Creoles (2010). …

Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth‐Century SouthBlainRoberts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century Blain Roberts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.Positioning itself in conversation with influential histories of the senses like Mark M. Smith's Flow Race is Made (2007), Blain Roberts's Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women illuminates how Southern culture has imagined a constitutive relationship between race and beauty. The book develops an intuitive structure with alternating chapters on white and black women and then concludes with integrated analyses of cultures of in the age of the Civil Rights Movement.Though Roberts's compelling introduction promises a racially inclusive history of beauty as well as an analysis of regional differences in practices, those aims are not equally represented in the book's chapters (7). Productive insights emerge in contrasting the rural and urban South, but other regions are largely absent. There is also the question of timeline, which extends from World War I to Vietnam, rather than the span of the twentieth century evoked in the book's subtitle. Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women speaks to the New South rather than the Dirty South, fixating on the fictional Georgian belle Scarlett O'Hara rather than on, for example, the real of Texan Erykah Badu.As surprising as it might seem to contemporary Americans-who stereotype white Southern womanhood as invested in artifice and excess-Roberts's first chapter evinces an early culture war over cosmetics. Elite white planter women associated paint and rouge with prostitutes, but the intra-war period produced a culture that hitched its products to modernity and progress. Makeup became a way to leave behind rural poverty, isolation, and backwardness (31). Chapter 2 posits progress as a link between black and white cultures. Visions of progress were projected onto women's bodies, whether in marketing to white women or in the black elite's construction of respectability politics. Black women were attacked for both imitating whiteness and being too black; culture produced pitfalls even as it provided opportunities for entrepreneurship within a community where women as well as men participated in the labor market.Pageants funded by the agricultural and tobacco industries as well as by the Cooperative Extension System produced a white Southern ideal that was both racialized and ruralized, as Roberts demonstrates in Chapter 3 (107). …

Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Roots Music by Tim Ryan

Tim Ryan, Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner's Fiction and Southern Roots Music. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2015. $45, hardback. Tim Ryan's compelling new study of southern roots music and Faulkner's fiction is essential reading for anyone interested in hearing call-and-response between Faulkner's modernist narratives and music of Mississippi Delta. Building on a small core of essays by Faulknerians, music critics, and blues writers, Ryan skillfully deepens our knowledge of importance of country blues and musicians in Faulkner's work. Eschewing traditional models of comparison such as documentary or historical evidence (apparently Faulkner never met these bluesmen and they never read his novels), Ryan nonetheless proceeds with what Daniel Schwarz has called a configuration, a type of comparative work that believes art created in same time period, and across disciplines, tends to share similar intellectual and aesthetic influences and techniques. Ryan asserts that playing biographical detective is limiting and has blocked interpretive scholarship of Faulkner-Delta Blues connection for too long. In unfolding of his study, Ryan makes a strong case for exploring this culturally thick literary-musical relationship and shows us what we have been missing. The first book-length work of its kind, Yoknapatawpha Blues provides a nuanced, insightful look at cultural, aesthetic, and political connections between Faulkner and southern roots music. Along way, Ryan revises many previously held assumptions and offers surprising new readings of layered relationship of Faulkner and Delta blues. Ryan is working double-time in this book--constructing his interdisciplinary argument and putting it to test by using a combination of methodological approaches. Employing elements of cultural studies, new historicism, identity studies, close reading, and amphitextual studies, Ryan demonstrates how Faulkner's work is informed by same literary, social, political, and musical conversations of period as musicians. Using amphitextual models, a field that reads text all sides and believes in text's meaning as inherently laced with intratextual, intertextual, contextual, and metatextual strands (26), Ryan roams freely, from popular culture to haute literature, from folkways to New South media, from songs to novels. But Ryan's focus is narrow, using only six songs by canonical Blues singer-songwriters (Charley Patton, Geeshie Wiley, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Bukka White, and Lead Belly) and a handful of Faulkner texts (the novella Old Man, short story That Evening Sun, and passages from Sanctuary, The Mansion, and The Reivers). Where such a limited focus could be seen as legitimizing rarity of blues in Faulkner's work--and thus, its lack of importance--Ryan's brilliant close readings, accessible style, and compelling storytelling serve to heighten fascination. Ryan consistently points out how smallest detail, if seen (or heard?) correctly, can lead to a stream of bold and surprising insights. More than often and in more than one way, Ryan makes his points. Both Faulkner (1897-1962) and early twentieth-century blues have an intrinsic connection, he says, because they emerged from a single locale, grew up alongside each other, achieved recognition together, and declined almost simultaneously (36). But Faulkner and recorded blues share more than substantial historical and thematic similarities, Ryan says. They also negotiate between traditional/parochial and experimental/cosmopolitan in their designs, techniques, and structures (22). Both literary and musical worlds also share concerns with regional and experiential consciousness of area's natural and societal problems: the flooding of Mississippi, relationships between paternalist white planters and black sharecroppers, male sexual impotence, incarceration at Parchman Farm, and racial violence, as well as effects of boll weevil upon southern agriculture (22). …

White Nostalgia: The Absence of Slavery and the Commodification of White Plantation Nostalgia

Since the 1960s, the United States has experienced a rise in heritage and plantation tourism that plays a significant role in passing on cultural narratives and constructing memories. In cases of plantation tourism, some narratives are constructed that deny the history of slavery or mention it only as a side effect. This absence of critical engagement commodifies a specific type of nostalgia: white nostalgia. White nostalgia exemplifies an attempt to escape issues of race by downplaying their implications and rejecting the legacy of slavery. Plantation tourism sites tend to celebrate personal narratives depicting the antebellum South as a time and place of union and jauntiness despite the fact that their histories are inseparably connected with slavery. Refusing to engage in critical discussions on slavery, these historical plantation sites can be regarded as comfortable spaces of refuge longing for an uncritical and colorblind—yet unrealistic—past. In this essay, the commodification of white nostalgia will be investigated by looking at seven plantation websites, thereby examining how white nostalgia not only distorts the history of the antebellum South but also how it sells history without racism and performs memory that distances itself from emotional legacies of slavery.