Ariel's ecology : plantations, personhood, and colonialism in the American tropics / Monique Allewaert.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allewaert, Monique.

Contributor:

George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human ecology--Southern States--History--18th century.

Human ecology.

Human ecology--Caribbean Area--History--18th century.

Human beings--Effect of environment on--Southern States--History--18th century.

Human beings.

Human beings--Effect of environment on--Caribbean Area--History--18th century.

Human beings--Effect of environment on--Psychological aspects.

Plantation life--Southern States--History--18th century.

Plantation life.

Plantation life--Caribbean Area--History--18th century.

Human beings--Effect of environment on.

History.

Psychological aspects.

Caribbean Area.

Southern States.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

254 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2013]

Summary:

What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? Monique Allewaert contends that this is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated people 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 to Jamaica and Haiti, 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 people 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. In Allewaert's interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; rather, it is a mode of existence that was, until now, only glimmering in Che Guevara's dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with "perfect knowledge of the ground." Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : tempest in the plantation zone

Swamp sublime : ecology and resistance in the American plantation zone

Plant life : tropical vegetation, agencied matter, and cosmopolitical form

On parahumanity : Creole stories and the suspension of the human

Persons without objects : Afro-American materialisms from fetishes to personhood

Involving the universe in ruins : Sansay's Haitian anabiography

Epilogue : afterlives of Ariel's ecology.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780816677276

0816677271

9780816677283

081667728X

OCLC:

816563764

Publisher Number:

99954821247