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<p>Even in our contemporary moment, the word plantation evokes a distinctly Southern
and rural image in which slavery is well hidden within an idyllic botanical scene.
And yet, from the very beginning of industrialization in the United States, plantation
agriculture and enslavement were thoroughly embedded in the circuits of Northern capital
and urbanization. "Shackled in the Garden" begins from the premise that the plantation
is not an archaic institution that withered away in the nineteenth century, but rather
is an enduring site of production and reproduction in the U.S. and throughout the
Global South. Historically, the plantation has played a central role in organizing
racialized bodies, technologies and environments in the South. In the wake of widespread
ecological and social disaster across global Southern geographies, I insist that it
behooves us to take another view of the plantation.</p><p>"Shackled in the Garden"
rethinks the plantation as an ecological space: a space of dynamic relations in which
racialized bodies and technologies are aggregated and disaggregated by a powerfully
tropical environment. In the midst of ongoing crises over the sustainability of the
plantation complex in the mid-eighteenth century, the plantation metamorphosized from
an idyllic geography of botanical bounty and pure soil to a "toxic paradise": a tainted
space that enclosed usable bodies and usable lands to be put in the service of increasingly
experimental purposes. This peculiar conjoining of racialized subjects and the environment
transformed the plantation into a privileged site for investigations into natural
history, which sought to catalog and organize the natural world. Understandings of
natural history as an innocent and feminine pursuit based on non-intervention and
simple observation of the environment hid rampant experimentation on all kinds of
"specimen" on the plantation including botanical species, agricultural crops, livestock,
and enslaved persons. </p><p>While emergent biological models in the mid-nineteenth
century began to understand race and identity as being rooted in the body, climatic
or environmental determinations of identity continued to hold rhetorical power. Biology
may have achieved a hegemonic position with the increasingly legitimated theories
of Darwinian evolution, but natural history did not wither into oblivion. While individuation,
mechanization, and biology flourished in the North, the plantation South continued
to be figured as a natural ecology, a geography where identity refused its disentanglement
from a dangerously miasmic and tropical environment. This project emerges out of
both literary studies and science studies. Moving from James Grainger and Thomas
Jefferson through Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Booker T. Washington, I explore how
a literary imaginary of the plantation pastoral, which continued to represent the
plantation as an unenclosed, pre-industrial and green geography in the face of extensive
industrialization and environmental degradation, contributed to an understanding of
the plantation as a "natural" space of scientific experimentation. The second half
of the project considers a perhaps surprising genealogy of plantation fiction from
authors such as Martin Delany and Jean Toomer who defamiliarized pastoral naturalizations
of plantation space at the same time as they played on the heterotopic spatiality
of the plantation to imagine a different, more global plantation South.</p>
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