The speakers on this special panel session take up precisely these questions, working across three scholarly papers and remarks by respondent Leigh Anne Duck, journal editor for The Global South, to develop provisional approaches for coming to terms with what Haraway has called the “thick, ongoing presence” of living in a world that human activity has damaged. The papers approach the issue of human environmental agency from three methodological frameworks—cartography, a comparative analysis of neoplantation sites, and intertextual analysis—to develop speculative, environmentally uncanny (Tsing, et all), and environmental-transnational readings of the human’s effects at local and planetary scales. The papers focus on the hemispheric and global south, where histories of colonization and monoculture development under the plantation system still shape the land and intraspecies experience, as the most productive for examining life during the Anthropocene and Plantationocene.
Delia Byrnes’ paper, “Speculative Cartographies of the Petrochemical Plantation,” opens with an analysis of photographer Richard Misrach’s collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (2012), a text that delves into the ecologies, deep histories, and radical futures of the Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” This region, which spans the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, boasts the densest concentration of petrochemical plants in the Western hemisphere, and is predominantly populated by low-income African American communities, prompting Robert Bullard’s description of the region as an “environmental apartheid.” Delia’s paper considers Orff and Misrach’s aesthetic strategies for representing “Cancer Alley” as the spiritual—and literal—inheritor of the plantation regime, focusing on the ways in which the artists rescale US energy in/justice through this modern energy capital. Specifically, Orff’s “Ecological Atlas,” which layers richly visualized maps, data narratives, and eco-portraits onto Misrach’s images in an exploratory, scalar format, privileges alternative knowledges of the environment. As it subverts dominant conventions for representing the relationship between space and politics, Orff’s cartography remaps the plantationscapes of southeastern Louisiana to illuminate erased histories, imagine more just and habitable futures, and evince a speculative cartography that recasts space and time as it toggles between the regional, the global, the historical, and the futural.
Rebecca Evans’ paper, “Gothic Geo-memory and Plantation Afterlives,” compares three instances of environmental racism in the hemispheric south, each representative of Anthropocene/Plantationocene violence: “Cancer Alley” as exemplary of industrial and petrochemical exposure, hog farms in Eastern North Carolina as exemplary of agricultural necropolitics, and the Isle de Jean Charles off the Gulf Coast as exemplary of climate vulnerability. In each region, environmental violence is traced back to the plantation system, a legacy which presentist neoliberal accounts of the Anthropocene often occlude. Through this reading, Rebecca suggests that the way in which the plantation exerts its violence is Gothic. As agential capacity travels between humans and nonhuman matter, the world becomes menacing and uncanny, and legacies of slavery and genocide continue to manifest centuries after regimes of direct violence have concluded, rendering former plantation spaces haunted. Her paper shows how writers working within what Sheri Harrison calls the New Black Gothic teach audiences how to “read” the plantationocene so that this infrastructural violence becomes vividly present.
In “Plantation Legacies, Environmental Racism, and the Anthropocene in Jesmyn Ward’s Fiction,” Martyn Bone traces the history of racialized labor exploitation in Ward’s trilogy of Bois Sauvage novels set in Mississippi from plantation slavery to the precariousness of black life under the Anthropocene. The paper begins with a discussion of two Parchman Prison Farm scenes in Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) that together show how black southern life and death remain subject to the (neo)plantation’s carceral model. Jojo’s interactions with Richie, a black ghost from the 1940s, and the boy’s white father, Michael, who is convicted of dealing meth in the 2010s, become the vehicle for this ligature. Through Michael’s story, Ward links race, class, and environmental destruction in the Anthropocene since Michael turns to meth because he is traumatized by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which he witnessed while working on the BP oil rig. Michael’s encounter with what Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence (2011) calls “petro-despotism”—“whole pods of [dolphins] washed up on the beaches in Florida, in Louisiana, in Alabama and Mississippi”—generates the revelation that environmental racism poses a parallel threat to his own mixed-race son. Ward articulates what Nixon identifies as an environmental-transnational “ethics of place,” one that connects her themes of environmental destruction and environmental racism to the rest of the trilogy. Where the Line Bleeds (2008) uncovers a racialized politics of disposability, while Salvage the Bones maps the material history of the Batiste family homeplace as a microcosmic site that, when Hurricane Katrina hits, vividly reveals how poor black southerners have long been “subjected to disproportionate environmental immiseration” (Lawrence Buell).
To provide ample time for audience comments, papers will be fifteen minutes in length; the respondent’s and presider’s remarks combined will last thirteen minutes. All participants will be invited to submit articles for a special issue of The Global South on the Plantationocene in 2022.