Plantation Literatures of the Early Amer

Teaching “plantation literature” can mean many things. We could, for instance start with the Plymouth Plantation writings, and spend much of our time on US Southern plantations. But, because a Jamaican economist, George Beckford, has summed up a common understanding of it, throughout our class we will keep in mind his definition of “plantation America” as having its locus in the Caribbean: “this region,” Beckford posited, “is generally regarded as the classic plantation area. So much so that social anthropologists, have described the region as a culture sphere.” According to this understanding, “plantation America” is a cultural zone whose history is related to the establishment not of societies, but of plantation production units. As Sylvia Wynter famously put it, “the Caribbean area is the classic plantation area since many of its units were ‘planted’ with people, not in order to form societies, but to carry on plantations whose aim was to produce single crops for the market.” Due to the centrality of this region, our class will focus mostly on early Caribbean plantation writing. In the 17th and 18th centuries – the time span our course will cover – these writings were produced mostly by planters/slave owners, such as Aphra Benn, James Granger or Matthew Gregory Lewis. However, in these early Caribbean archives we will try to hear voices that differ from those of the planters; cultivating an archival eye for what these texts may tell us about the enslaved, their habitats and ecosystems, their cosmologies, epistemic practices, medical archives and novel worldviews as they changed and emerged in the syncretic space of the plantation system. In addition to looking closely into the writings of the “plantation zone” in this strict sense, we will expand our understanding of plantation to include attempts at establishing plantations (de Vaca), as well as writing on cultural zones where the “plantation” was organized not around the vegetal, but around the mineral and the metallic (mining gold and silver in Latin America and the Caribbean). And because plantation/mining zones were also based on a certain state of mind (on a certain philosophy and its fictions) we will look in new ways at the founding plantation fiction, Robinson Crusoe. And finally, since the people “planted” on plantations in these early times rarely had an occasion to write their minds – their worldviews