Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics

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Synopsis
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert 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, Ariel&’s Ecology 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. Allewaert&’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 Allewaert&’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.&”
Copyright:
2013

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780816689019
Related ISBNs:
9780816677283
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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