The burial ground tells us that the legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree both shape and are part of the environment we presently inhabit. […] [T]he plantations of transatlantic slavery underpinned a global economy; […] this plantation history […] lingered long after emancipation and independence movements […].
[T]he idea of the plantation is migratory. Thus, in agriculture, banking, and mining, in trade and tourism, and across other colonial and postcolonial spaces - the prison, the city, the resort - a plantation logic characteristic of (but not identical to) slavery emerges in the present both ideologically and materially.
With this, differential modes of survival emerge - […] the blues, marronage, revolution, and more - revealing that the plantation, in both slave and postslave contexts, must be understood alongside complex negotiations of time, space, and terror. […]
Past colonial encounters created material and imaginative geographies that reified global segregations through “damning” the spaces long occupied by Man’s human others. Here, damning can be understood in two interlocking ways: as a fencing in and as a condemnation of racial-sexual difference. The uninhabitable - in particular, the landmasses occupied by those who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were unimaginable, both spatially and corporeally - is the geographic (non)location through which the plantation emerged. From Caliban’s “uninhabited” island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to the regions within Africa identified as too hot to be livable, the landmasses deemed uninhabitable presented a geographic predicament upon “discovery.” […] [A] “new symbolic construct of race,” which coincided with post-1492 colonial arrangements, organized much of the world according to a racial logic. […]
The colonial enactment of geographic knowledge mapped “a normal way of life” through measuring different degrees of humanness and attaching different versions of the human to different places. […] [I]n the sites of toxicity, environmental decay, pollution […] inhabited by impoverished communities […] the [current] geographies of the racial other are emptied out of life precisely because the historical constitution of these geographies has cast them as lands of no one. So in our present moment, some live in the unlivable, and to live in the unlivable condemns the geographies of marginalized to death over and over again. Life, then, is extracted from particular regions […]. We can collectively think of several places that are considered lifeless […]: war-torn countries, reservations, ghettos, what is referred to as “the global South.” […] This suggests that the spaces of otherness have hardened through time […].
What if its practices of racial segregation, economic exploitation, and sexual violence mapped not a normal way of life but a different way of life?
What if we acknowledged that the plantation is, as Toni Morrison writes, a space that everybody runs from but nobody stops talking about, and thus that it is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our present spatial organization […]? […] In her 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Wynter explains that not only does the rise of the plantation correspond with the rise of the novel - which points to two new socioeconomic systems of world making - but the plantation itself was the contextual setting through which many fictional books revolved. She goes on to say that the market economy of the plantation, and the stories that explain the value of the economy of the plantation, unraveled into a justified and “official history of the superstructure” that hid - but did not erase - what she calls “secretive histories.” Secretive histories can be found in […] the plots of land that were given to some slaves so that they could grow food to nourish themselves and thus maximize profits [plantation managers wanted to save money, rather than paying to feed slaves, by encouraging slaves to grow their own subsistence food] - plots of land that also became the focus of resistance to the overriding system of the plantation economy [those food plots were sites where slaves could commune, practice growing food, and organize rebellion and escape]. In both cases, the plot illustrates a social order that is developed within the context of a dehumanizing system as it spatializes what would be considered impossible under slavery: the actual growth of narratives, food, and cultural practices that […] challenge systemic violence. […]
If we believe that the city is the commercial expression of the plantation and its marginalized masses, and that the plantation is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles, Wynter’s essay asks that we seek out secretive histories that are not invested in rehearsing lifelessness […]. The plantation that anticipates the city, then, does not necessarily posit that things have gotten better as racial violence haunts, but rather that the struggles we face, intellectually, are a continuation of plantation narratives that dichotomize geographies into us/them and hide secretive histories that undo the teleological […] underpinnings of spatiality.
All text above by: Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 3, November 2013 (No. 42), pages 1-15. At DOI: 10.1215/07990537-2378892 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]
