UC San Diego

In "Plantation States," I analyze cultural representations of plantation formations from the first half of the twentieth century, a period when "the South" operated as an imagined social landscape that galvanized post-Civil War national reconciliation and expansion as well as resistant social movements. I argue that the plantation, and the region it often symbolizes, served as a powerful site of identification that animated collective memories and provoked competing visions of progress. Consequently, I consider how imagined plantation pasts inevitably invoked a "neoplantation" present and a cultural geography that had both temporal and spatial mobility. To reconstruct how the neoplantation served as a contested cultural landscape, I necessarily draw from a wide range of cultural texts, including turn-of-the-century Atlanta newspapers, unpublished play scripts, canonical modernist novels, and prisoner-produced journalism. Throughout I am concerned with cultural texts that represent continuities and ruptures in the transition from plantation slave cultures to emergent cultures of empire and incarceration. I look at three different contexts in which the plantation is re-imagined and adapted for the twentieth century in neoplantation forms, namely: the Atlanta white riot of 1906, the U.S. imperial occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), and the evolution and reform of the twentieth-century Southern penitentiary. I consider these decades of "Jim Crow Empire" as an era of collusion among white supremacist projects, state delimitation of citizenship, and U.S. imperial expansion. I examine discourses of race and sexuality, in particular, as integral to technologies that furthered segregation, racial/sexual terror, and unfree labor structures. I therefore highlight the tensions between the neoplantation's development of capital, on the one hand, and the formations of "plantation state" subjectivity on the other. I suggest that racialized and sexualized neoplantation subjects were often characterized as deviant or criminal by those who sought to advance systems of social control, while those who opposed structures of inequality made the modernized plantation their target. I formulate the neoplantation as a cultural institution, a social structure, and a hierarchy of labor that produced dangerous subjects who troubled the boundaries of race, sexuality, region, and nation