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Chapter 7 - Plantation

Toward a Literary History of Race, Space, and Capital in the Anglo-world

from Part II - Developments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

By
Aaron Begg  and
Jared Hickman
Edited by
Elizabeth Evans
Elizabeth Evans
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit
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Summary

This chapter takes plantation as a rubric under which theorizations of race and space in Marxism and Black and Indigenous critical theory might be usefully coordinated for the sake not only of intersectional practicality but intellectual purchase for literary scholars in particular. Historically associated with the racializing regimes of both settler colonialism and enslavement that made what historian James Belich has called “the Anglo-world,” plantation comes into view as a key means through which capitalist social relations originating in late medieval southeastern England have been planted across the planet to the massive detriment of human and nonhuman life. Understood as sites at which the compulsion to expand set in motion by capital in the metropole confronts noncapital in its most resistant difference, white settler colonies in North America and Oceania are treated as experimental spaces for the satisfaction of that compulsion – that is, as not only spatial but phenomenological frontiers of real subsumption. This chapter focuses on one such experiment: the settler/master’s assumption of the role of the God of Genesis, specifically the power to bring worlds out of and into being through acts of signification, the whole-cloth fiction of race foremost among them.

Keywords

racespacesettler colonialismAtlantic slaverycapitalismplantationBlacknessIndigeneityAnna Brownell JamesonJane Johnston Schoolcraft
Type
Chapter
Information
Space and Literary Studies , pp. 120 - 139
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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