Black Women's Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation
Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>This essay examines how several contemporary black women artists—Attica Locke,
Natalie Baszile, Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, and Kara Walker—interrogate the afterlives
of the sugar plantation in present day literature, performance, and visual art. Drawing
on Katherine McKittrick’s conceptualization of “black women’s geographies,” I show
how these artists turn to the landscape and built environment of the sugar plantation
and factory to restore black women and the US South to the global history of sugar.
Part one, “Plantation Pasts,” examines Locke’s 2012 novel, The Cutting Season, alongside
Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, as critiques
of the sugar plantation’s ongoing economic viability through plantation tourism and
modern agribusiness. By foregrounding a “logic of perishability” that insists on the
plantation’s dissolution and demise, Locke and Walker interrogate these sugar plantation
afterlives to exhume, expose, and ultimately revise buried histories of racial dispossession
and consumption in the US and global sugar industries. Part two, “Plantation Futures,”
examines how Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, its television adaptation
created by Ava DuVernay, and several of Beyoncé’s music videos—“Déjà Vu” (2006), “Formation”
(2016), and the visual album Lemonade (2016)—“return” to Louisiana’s sugar plantation
geographies to confront the violent histories of slavery and Jim Crow and to reconcile
African Americans’ contentious relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary
southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era. Given the limits of colonial and state
archives of slavery, I argue that these artists reestablish the landscape and architecture
of the sugar plantation and factory as counter-archives, wherein the slave cabin,
big house, refinery, and cane fields are figured as contested sites of official history
and memory. In doing so, they “respatialize” hegemonic geographies, exposing and indicting
the persisting legacies of racial-sexual dispossession and violence, on one hand,
and positing embodied practices of pleasure, mourning, and collectivity as modes of
“reterritorialization” on the other, imagining a new relationship to land, agriculture,
and the earth.</jats:p>
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25003Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1093/alh/ajz043Publication Info
Mcinnis, JC (2019). Black Women's Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation. American Literary History, 31(4). pp. 741-774. 10.1093/alh/ajz043. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25003.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Jarvis C McInnis
Cordelia and William Laverack Family Assistant Professor of English
Jarvis C. McInnis holds a BA in English from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi,
and a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University in the City
of New York. Jarvis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African
Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global
south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies,
and visual culture. He is

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