Skip to main content

The Plantation Pull: Modernities and Genre in the Anglo-Hispanic-Dutch Caribbean-Atlantic, 1831-1935

View
@ University of Mississippi Libraries

Aikens, Natalie Magdalena

Description

Using Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities, The Plantation Pull: Modernities and Genre in the Anglo-Hispanic-Dutch Caribbean-Atlantic, 1831-1935 contrasts the idea of homogeneous national ideals with depictions in literature of stratified geopolitical regions deeply divided by issues of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status matching those ambivalent spaces described by Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration. The project demonstrates in literature the way that the values of the capitalist plantation machine based around mechanization and modernization, what I term the plantation pull, nevertheless thwarts one of the major iterations of modernity in the nineteenth century: nation formation. The plantation pull encompasses the way in which the sweeping and polarizing effects of power and money in a colonial schema of a European/American populace consuming the products and profits of slave labor influenced not only the commercial markets across the globe, but affected everyday social norms, consumerism, psychology and ethics from New Orleans to Havana and London. Conversely, I argue that systems that I term "micro-modernities," which counter the workings of macro-plantation economies, and engagements in such modernities, especially by women and people of color, forward a unifying national agenda far more. The project utilizes slave narratives, melodrama, fiction, as well as historical data about routes that created plantation cultures and economies worldwide. Chapter one, Caribbean-Atlantic Routes of Slave Writings: 'Resident / Alien' Circumnavigated analyzes the psychological and economic pull of West Indian slavery from the perspective of the doubly-colonized slave/colonial subject in Manzanos Autobiografa de un esclavo / Autobiography of a Slave and The History...
Type:
Text
Format:
Application/Pdf
Created Date:
2019 01 01 T08:00:00 Z
View Original At:

Record Contributed By

University of Mississippi Libraries