The plantation in the postslavery imagination
By: Elizabeth Christine Russ.
Series: Imagining the Americas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 212
ISBN-13: 9780195377156
Subjects: Plantations in literature; Spanish American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Caribbean fiction (Spanish) -- 20th century -- History and criticism; American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Description: In a provocative approach toward understanding transnational literary cultures, this study examines the specter of the plantation, that physical place most vividly associated with slavery in the Americas. For Elizabeth Russ, the plantation is not merely a literal location, but also a rhetorical, ideological, and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told. Through a series of in-depth readings, Russ analyzes the discourse of the plantation through a number of suggestive pairings: male and female perspectives; U.S. and Spanish American traditions; and continental alongside island societies. To chart comparative elements in the development of the postslavery imagination in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, Russ distinguishes between a modern and a postmodern imaginary. The former privileges a familiar plot of modernity: the traumatic transition from a local, largely agrarian order to an increasingly anonymous industrialized society. The latter, abandoning nostalgia toward the past, suggests a new history using the strategies of performance, such as witnessing, reticency, and traversal. Authors examined include The Twelve Southerners, Fernando Ortiz, Teresa de la Parra, Eudora Welty, Antonio Benitez Rojo, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Mayra Santos-Febres, among others. Applying analyses across a broad range of texts, Russ reveals how the language used to imagine communities influenced by the plantation has been gendered, racialized, and eroticized in ways that oppose the domination of an ever-shifting "North" while often reproducing the fundamental power divide.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the paradoxical plantation; title: Modern plantation imaginaries: I'll take my stand & Cuban counterpoint; title: Race and romance in the Americas: Iphigenia & The sheltered life; title: Women, nation, and the problematic of space: Garden & Delta wedding; title: Postmodern plantation imaginaries: The repeating island & Faulkner, Mississippi; title: New world silences, new world songs: Stairway for Electra & Corregidora; title: Redressing the big house: Paradise & Sirena Selena.