This dissertation examines the relationship between race and bodily health in the British West Indies and the Carolina/Georgia Lowcountry from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, planters often justified African slavery by claiming that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to labor in warm climates. Historians have tended to take these claims as evidence of a growing sense of biological race in plantation societies. Much of this work, though, relies on published sources. This dissertation examines these public sources, including medical manuals, natural histories, and political pamphlets, alongside private sources, particularly the personal correspondence of planters and slaveholders to uncover a different story of race and slavery. These two source types reveal significant discrepancies between planters’ public rhetoric and private beliefs about health, race, and the environment in plantation societies. First, correspondence between the Greater Caribbean and Britain demonstrates that health and disease did not contribute to the development of racial slavery in the Atlantic. Second, these sources show how and why planters manipulated public conceptions of climate and health to justify and maintain a system of racial slavery. Planters insisted on climate-based arguments for slavery in spite of their experiences in the Americas, rather than because of them. Slaveholders contributed to the construction of a biological concept of race by making arguments about health differences between Africans and Europeans that they neither experienced nor believed. Nevertheless, their arguments entered the public record and consciousness, and the resultant development of racial thinking had profound consequences that continue to the present day. This dissertation demonstrates the critical importance of the environment to the history of race.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 514-536).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-203).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 23, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-284).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 2002. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-77).

This dissertation presents an account of fugitivity in poetic form as well as political practice. In this account, fugitivity is an ecological strategy of resistance to enslavement, where ecology describes both the set of relations orchestrated between words on a page and the set of relations between species, including humans, on the plantation. In order to understand fugitivity as an ecological strategy, I examine the mutual imbrication of nascent theories of race and ecology in the long nineteenth century. I thus present two competing theories of race and ecology, each of which carries distinct poetic implications. The first, plantation poetics, is evident in poems written on and about plantations in the second half of the eighteenth-century. These poems, in their rigid poetic structures, reinforce the racial and ecological logics of the plantation, in which hierarchical relations between and within species are inherited from early natural histories, and are used to support both slavery and the monocultural cultivation of the plantation. In contrast to this system, I present a fugitive poetics that, sharing the theory of race and ecology as intertwined systems, turns that theory against the ends of the plantation and toward a poetics premised on shifting, porous relations, rather than hierarchies and containment. In so doing, I link fugitivity to a set of formal strategies that were fully operative in nineteenth-century poetics, ecological thought, and political resistance, and that remain relevant for political, ecological, and poetic thought to this day. Though this project follows a chronological trajectory, its aim is not to present a history of political resistance in the plantation era, nor even a history of poetic form in the nineteenth-century. Instead, it undertakes a strategic analysis of poetic form as necessarily linked to political resistance and to the long history of environmental racism. The first chapter establishes the colonialist poetic tradition I call plantation poetics, tied to maintenance of the ecological enclosure of the plantation. In the work of James Grainger, John Singleton, and Edward Rushton, I argue that the poetic line came to stand in for both the lines of the plantation and the delineation of racial hierarchy so yoked to the natural histories of the eighteenth century. The chapters that follow offer several different models of fugitive poetics, in the work of George Moses Horton and the editors of Freedom’s Journal, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Emily Dickinson, and Albery Allson Whitman. While each of these writers engages with ecology and political domination differently, all of them combine political and ecological investments to create a poetic project that resists the plantation poetics of colonization. The distinct strategies employed by each writer teach us what poetic strategies, and what fugitive practices, are best suited to our current moment of ecological and political crisis.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida State University, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-185).

Thesis (M. A.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Maxine D. Jones, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of History. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 27, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 84 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.