Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Faculty Convener
This seminar examines the multiple iterations of the plantation, and to draw from Katherine McKittrick, the kinds of futures it brings forth for us now. The plantation might be, to paraphrase Krista Thompson and Huey Copeland an “afrotrope” – a “recurrent visual form” that has played a key role in the formation of Black Diaspora identity and culture. We will consider its various representational formats, along with its various lives, and afterlives. As an ecological, material and economic intervention in the landscape, the plantations is a site of labor and knowledge production. It is both a form of enclosure and an extremely mobile form, a space where human and commodity flows converged, and an ecology formed through interspecies interaction. By considering these histories of the plantation – an ideological and spatial apparatus – we will think through its implications for practices of labor, experiences of the natural world, the organization of vision and, constructions of freedom as they have been formulated in African American Studies. Furthermore, across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, the plantation remains a site where alternative constructions of freedom, and otherworldly economies of knowledge, resilience and resistance formed. We will also consider how the transformations wrought by the plantation across the globe create possibilities to imagine the intimacies and particularities of time and space differently that can help us better understand the politics of race, representation and labor in our contemporary moment. Invited presenters for this seminar include scholars, writers and artists working in the fields, and intersecting geographies of Art History, History, Literary Studies, African American Studies, Creative Writing, Anthropology, Geography and the Environmental Humanities.
(This resource is representative of Dana Byrd's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Byrd, Dana E. “Motive Power: Fans, Punkahs, and Fly Brushes in the Antebellum South.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, vol. 23, no. 1, 2016, pp. 29–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/buildland.23.1.0029.
(This resource is representative of Annalee Davis's artistic practice and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource is related to the work-in-progress Deborah Thomas presented during the seminar.)
(This resource is representative of Tao Leigh Goffe's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource is related to the scholarship Andil Gosine presented during the seminar.)
(This resource is representative of Sarah Haley's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource is representative of Rana Hogarth's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource is representative of Mythri Jegathesan's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource includes information about Jasmine Togo-Brisby's artistic practice and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource is representative of Imelda Miller's curatorial practice and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource is representative of Charmaine Nelson's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource is representative of J.T. Roane's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
(This resource is representative of Krista Thompson's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)