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Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth examines the process of building ‘America’ out of partly African materials. Incest becomes a sign for the forced amalgamation of cultures that characterized plantation slavery, and the oedipal tropes of knowledge, parentage, desire, and narrative are made newly relevant by the particular racialized history of the United States. The politics of the Greek drama, whereby the hero is pitted against the community, are also interrogated by the various choices made by figures such as Augustus, the chorus and the conspirators. The issue of oedipally competing traditions is scrutinised via African-American tropes such as Esu, the talking book, and the tragic mulatto/a. Also examined is the cultural position of the dramatist herself, as a black woman writer and a member of the generation immediately after the Black Arts Movement.

French Guiana presents a unique context in which to explore Caribbean plantation slavery for several reasons. These include its circum-Caribbean position as a non-island space, the distinct experiences of enslavement within French Caribbean colonies (which included a brief period of emancipation and subsequent re-enslavement of the labor force) and the fact that sugar monoculture never dominated the economy as it did elsewhere in the region. While sugar was economically important for a short period in the early nineteenth century, plantations producing a variety of agricultural commodities including cotton, coffee, annatto, and spices were much more typical. In 2016, two nineteenth-century plantation slave villages were the subject of archaeological investigation; these villages were historically associated with annatto and clove production. This chapter presents a historical overview of nineteenth-century plantation slavery in the region as well as preliminary results from survey and excavation in 2016. Initial testing revealed intriguing details about architecture, material culture, and the use of space on nineteenth-century French Guianese plantations.

This chapter focuses on Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, arguing that his book modifies the basic emblematic techniques at the heart of Hans Sloane's Voyage to... Jamaica. The Natural History of Carolina charts the rapid expansion of the West Indian plantation into southern North America and shows a new and shifting geography of plantation slavery and tropical agriculture in the Americas. The book is also designed to prompt reflection on the implications of the natural and human history of the colony for the future intellectual advancement and refinement of manners.

This chapter situates William Earle’s 1800 novel Obi within a network of texts—including histories, natural histories, poems, and travel narratives—that surface the novel’s engagement with the profitable business of botanical transplantation which, at the turn into the nineteenth century, depended on connections between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Earle aligns human bodies with plants in order to represent the slave trade as a destructive form of transplantation and amputation. Drawing from Erasmus Darwin’s poem Botanic Garden, the novel Obi advances a “vegetable economy” in which revolution is a natural, botanical response to the violent transplantation project of the Atlantic slave trade. The surprisingly transoceanic and political life of plants during this period therefore forms the backdrop for the novel’s anti-slavery argument, which aligns human bodies with the bodies of plants and understands plantation slavery in terms of botanical transplantation.

This book explores how racialized relations were structured and represented at Sylvester Manor. To this end, it investigates the details of Sylvester Manor's early plantation community, comprised of colonizing Europeans, enslaved Africans, and indigenous Eastern Algonquians. It also examines broader national narratives of race relations, as well as the resistance of marginalized communities to them even to this day, by focusing on events and places beyond the confines of the Sylvester Manor estate. Through a study of Sylvester Manor's plantation, the book refutes the notion that slavery was never a true institution of the northern colonies, or that American Indians occupied no place in the history of plantation slavery and had little connection to colonial society as a whole.

This chapter traces the history of plantation slavery and sugar cane in Ponce. Before emancipation, libertos performed tasks related to the processing of sugar in the mills. From the point of view of hacendados, libertos were the most knowledgeable labor force and the most familiar with daily routines of sugar production. That placed them at a high position in the hierarchy of labor. As the sugarcane industry became more mechanized, the knowledge and skills of libertos became more indispensable. Consequently, after the abolition of slavery in 1873, hacendados adopted various methods to try to keep libertos working for them. One strategy consisted of offering libertos small plots of land on the grounds of the hacienda. Libertos could farm and grow animals for their family's subsistence in these plots. The ownership of land, albeit small, also gave libertos some degree of autonomy.

Smeathman arrives in the West Indies mid-1775, just as the American revolution begins. He makes numerous comparisons between tropical nature in its ‘rude’ (African) state and its ‘cultivated’ (West Indian) version, He also observes the various societies of the different islands and, appalled by the cruelty of plantation slavery, starts to reconsider Quaker Fothergill’s plans for ‘legitimate’ African commerce. The flogging of slaves in public places shocks him into sketching two of these scenes, one of which is particularly chilling because it is conducted by a white woman. Smeathman decides to return to England and compile his ‘Voyages and Travels’, a book which would reveal the truth about ‘those little known and much misrepresented people the Negroes’.

The chapter explores the connections and fractures in British America over the long eighteenth century, emphasizing the diverging sense of identity on the mainland and in the Caribbean islands. Focusing on cultural constructions of identity, the chapter considers the ways West Indian colonists failed to conform to perceived British norms, and thus became fixated on proving their true British nature and allegiance to skeptical elites in the metropole. While their counterparts on the mainland increasingly embraced their own distinct regional identities and tested the bonds to Britain, the Caribbean colonists proved unwilling and unable to match the levels of colonial resistance that ultimately produced the American Revolution. Caribbean loyalism offered a brief moment in which the West Indians hoped to cement their British standing, but the rising tide of abolitionism placed them on the defensive once again.

The final chapter describes the beginnings of John Audubon's Birds of America in his early career in lower Louisiana and New Orleans. Focusing on Audubon's unpublished journal of his early struggles in lower Louisiana, his published “ornithological biographies” from the region, and his later autobiographical sketch of his birth in and flight from revolutionary Saint-Domingue, the chapter casts new light on his environmental consciousness and visual aesthetics of violence. Read in conjunction with “Myself,” and alongside Audubon's images from Louisiana, the Mississippi River Journal depicts this formative phase in the composition of the Birds of America as a return to the Caribbean vortex—to a semitropical region shaped by plantation slavery and incipient slave revolution.

This chapter examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and Darkwater (1920) in order to chart a crucial phase of his evolution in the second decade of the twentieth century, when his focus shifted from U.S. problems escaping the legacy of plantation slavery to how to attack those problems by undertaking a global history of how colonialism has shaped modernity. The Quest of the Silver Fleece features confrontations between antagonists that allow Du Bois to anatomize how both whites and blacks, working class and elite, are trapped within a New South economy dependent upon transnational cotton markets. Darkwater> challenges the illusory coherence of the discourses of colonialism by assembling itself as a work acting out the unsolvable tensions in that rhetoric—its continual play of difference and contradiction.