Frederick C. Knight
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814748183
- eISBN:
- 9780814749128
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814748183.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter examines cash crop production, particularly of cotton and tobacco. Though most closely associated with the antebellum South, cotton took root in colonial Virginia, South Carolina, ...
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This chapter examines cash crop production, particularly of cotton and tobacco. Though most closely associated with the antebellum South, cotton took root in colonial Virginia, South Carolina, Barbados, Jamaica, and other West Indian islands, and it was grown for either domestic use or export. Furthermore, tobacco, most well known as a Chesapeake crop, was also raised in Barbados and Jamaica during the seventeenth century. The chapter asserts that Africans adopted tobacco as a garden crop in Africa, arguing that Africans drew upon their experience with the crop to foster Anglo-American tobacco fields. This chapter also looks at cotton production in the British American colonies. It shows that cotton was a central fiber in West African material life and that West Africans drew on their experience with it to play an important role in raising cotton on British American plantations.Less
This chapter examines cash crop production, particularly of cotton and tobacco. Though most closely associated with the antebellum South, cotton took root in colonial Virginia, South Carolina, Barbados, Jamaica, and other West Indian islands, and it was grown for either domestic use or export. Furthermore, tobacco, most well known as a Chesapeake crop, was also raised in Barbados and Jamaica during the seventeenth century. The chapter asserts that Africans adopted tobacco as a garden crop in Africa, arguing that Africans drew upon their experience with the crop to foster Anglo-American tobacco fields. This chapter also looks at cotton production in the British American colonies. It shows that cotton was a central fiber in West African material life and that West Africans drew on their experience with it to play an important role in raising cotton on British American plantations.
Monique Allewaert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816677276
- eISBN:
- 9781452947747
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816677276.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, this book contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century ...
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What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, this book contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, the book explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. The book’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In this book’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”Less
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, this book contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, the book explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. The book’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In this book’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”
