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Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of Resistance in the American Plantation Zone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

M. Allewaert
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Abstract

I propose that William Bartram's Travels yields an ecological conception of revolution that alters theorizations of resistance in the eighteenth-century plantation zone. The entanglements that proliferated in the plantation zone disabled taxonomies distinguishing the human from the animal from the vegetable from the atmospheric, giving rise to an awareness of ecology. This ecological orientation departs from an eighteenth-century political and aesthetic tradition distinguishing persons—in particular white colonial subjects—from the objects and terrains they surveyed. In fact, Bartram's increasingly ecological orientation compromised his ability to function as a citizen-subject of print culture. Focusing on Anglo-European travelers and on African resistance, I argue that instead of simply producing subjects who gained power through an abstract and abstracting print culture, the plantation zone witnessed the emergence of agents who gained power from combining with ecological forces.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 2 , March 2008 , pp. 340 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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