|
|
|
|
![]() |
Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics
University of Minnesota Press, 2013 Paper: 978-0-8166-7728-3 | Cloth: 978-0-8166-7727-6 Library of Congress Classification GF504.S68A55 2013 Dewey Decimal Classification 304.209750903
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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 through Jamaica to Haiti and 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 persons 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. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.” See other books on: Caribbean Area | Colonial Period (1600-1775) | Colonialism | Human beings | Plantation life See other titles from University of Minnesota Press |
Nearby on shelf for Human ecology. Anthropogeography / By region or country:
| |