We are indebted to thinkers like Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault for their reconceptualization of space as not simply an empty, immobile container to which meaning is ascribed by the actions and character of the subjects located within it but as a domain of power relations produced by an assemblage of multiple agents and factors. This session on “Spatial Afterlives” will explore the plantation matrix of the Black Atlantic through what Édouard Glissant, among others, has framed as a dominant chronotope in postslavery contexts haunted by the ruins of the plantation. Now that historical plantations refashion themselves as leisurely sites of tourism that repress what Paul Gilroy termed the “slave sublime” or as somber museums dedicated to making visible the varied and neglected lives of slaves, the panel is interested in examining the material and interpretive practices of recovery which invite contemporary visitors to participate in (re)constructing the memory of slavery. How does the plantation space (and its afterlives) cross the Atlantic to situate itself in specific yet linked histories of slavery? How does it resurrect itself in reanimations of the archive, here conceived broadly as a dynamic site of history rather than as a static space of documents to be retreived? Why are black diasporic writers preoccupied with the trope of cartography, in not just remapping imperial trajectories of mobility and visibility, but in contemporary envisioning of community, intimacy, and creolization?
Tanya Shields
“Linked: Women Plantation Owners on Tour”
This paper explores tours on the Rose Hall Estate, Montego Bay, Jamaica, and the Laura Plantation, Vacherie, Louisiana, to understand how narratives of the female planter travel and are linked across Atlantic geographies. These tour narratives provide insights into gendered and racialized plantation ideologies and a woman’s place in two colonial sites—one English and the other French. Using a plantation analytic that attends to notions of property, discipline, and racialized and gendered hierarchies, the paper interrogates the similarities and differences in the narration of White Women planters across Atlantic geographies that are linguistically, legally, and culturally different.
Supriya M. Nair
“Scenes of Subjection and Sites of Slavery in Louisiana”
This paper will discuss the narrative of Twelve Years a Slave in its many versions, as text, as film, and as a smartphone app that facilitates an “immersive” experience into Solomon Northup’s harrowing tale. I will connect this text to the Whitney Plantation museum in New Orleans, which invites visitors to take a self-guided tour of its exhibits and site and learn about this local history of African American slavery in contrast to the plantation tours sanitizing these locations as idylls of antebellum romance. Inspired by debates about the specific tensions of doing archival work in black studies, I will explore how selected texts and sites document and memorialize transatlantic slave history, focusing mainly on the US perspective here. What are the risks and potential of claims about “recovering” slave history in the archive and in physical sites? How do we locate ourselves in relation to these projects of memorialization and retrieval?
Nadia Ellis
“Immaterial Repair: Textual Mappings of Place and Knowledge in Jamaica & New Orleans”
This paper compares two recent and extraordinary works by Black diasporic writers who think deeply about the aesthetic possibilities of space-making in the wake of coloniality. Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries the Map a Way to Zion (2014) and Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House (2019) share an investment in puzzling out the conundrum of Black life carved out of the unreconstructed landscapes of slavery and coloniality. Both writers deploy metaphors related to the power and perils of the disciplines of mapping, urban planning, and geography to think with and against spatial epistemologies. And both writers employ subtle elements of the immaterial (religion; imaginative counterfactual; silence) to lay alongside and contest colonial edifices of supposed solidity. Enlivened by these resonances between the texts and prompted by Broom’s epigraphic citation of Miller’s work, the paper thinks about how these contemporary writers enable readings of spatial and aesthetic intimacy between New Orleans and Jamaica. Broom and Miller both demonstrate an investment in the rich traditions of Black space-making and the necessity for repair after catastrophe—even as they guide readers through provocations to think and feel into unusual textual capacities for sustenance absent state structures of care.
We are female scholars all from different institutions and although we all specialize in the Caribbean, our topics cross Black Atlantic interests.