The American plantation system, far from an idiosyncrasy of the southern United States, was a transnational formation that spread across the US South, the Caribbean, and parts of Latin America, forming a cross-border cultural sphere often called “Plantation America.” How have US and Caribbean writers understood the United States’ relationship to this broader landscape through its most alienated region, the South? And how did the South’s ties to the plantation zone impact how writers imagined the United States as an emerging global empire in the twentieth century? “Plantation America: The US South and the Caribbean in the Literary Culture of Empire, 1898-1959,” explores works by white American, African American, and Black Caribbean writers produced during a period of heightened US colonial intervention in the Americas, from the Spanish-American War of 1898, to the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It contributes to recent US-based scholarship on the plantation origins of Western modernity and draws on an older Black and Caribbean critical discourse on the plantation as a prototypically modern institution. Building on this scholarship, this project demonstrates that US expansion southward prompted writers to reckon with the South’s highly ambivalent relationship with Plantation America, and that doing so served as a fault line for deeply held anxieties over the modern United States’ indebtedness to the plantation complex and its creolized cultural legacies. Its chapters thus show how US empire provoked modern writers to respond to the plantation as a driver of racial capitalism and industrialized labor systems, a blueprint for modern empires, a key site for the emergence and repression of cross-culturality, and a root source for traumatic forms of psychic and spiritual alienation associated with modern subjecthood. Through the lens of Caribbean critical theory, including work by Édouard Glissant, Fernando Ortiz, and C. L. R. James, I examine Richard Wright’s postplantation perspective in his little studied Haitian manuscript, transculturation in Ernest Hemingway’s Key West and Cuban works, the modern plantation empire in stories of the Panama Canal Zone by the Caribbean-born writer Eric Walrond, and William Faulkner’s transnational plantation economy in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43928 |
| Date | 24 February 2022 |
| Creators | Edmonstone, William |
| Contributors | Chude-Sokei , Louis |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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