front cover of The Plantation, the Postplantation, and the Afterlives of Slavery
The Plantation, the Postplantation, and the Afterlives of Slavery
Gwen Bergner and Zita Nunes, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This special issue interrogates the plantation as a form, logic, and technology that continues to produce inequalities. Attending to the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, contributors follow the evolution of plantation slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through its subsequent iterations in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and into the neoliberal present, where the carceral state props up fantasies of postracialism. The contributors rethink the necro- and biopolitics of plantation slavery, uncovering laborers' strategies of self-determination, affiliation, and communication in spite of the plantation's mechanisms of control.

Essay topics include the circulation of a weekly newspaper published by black tenant farmers in the 1920s, a nineteenth-century trial of an enslaved woman, and the fetish-making of Haitian revolutionary François Makandal. Reconsidering the time and space of the plantation, contributors analyze Western processes of racialization and uncover the experience and agency of the oppressed. This search for modes of being within the plantation structure offers one way to rewrite histories of slavery.

Contributors. Monique Allewaert, Gwen Bergner, Benjamin Child, Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Julius B. Fleming Jr., Jarvis C. McInnis, Zita Nunes, Roberta Wolfson
[more]
front cover of Taboo Subjects
Taboo Subjects
Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis
Gwen Bergner
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In American literature, a traumatic scene of racial and sexual awakening - frequently involving photographs, mirrors, or acts of witnessing - often precipitates a character's "discovery" of racial identity. Similarly, in the annals of psychoanalysis, notions of self and sexual identity often arise from visual trauma such as the mirror stage and primal scene. Noting this parallel between specular births of racial and sexual subjectivity, Gwen Bergner uses a comparative analysis of psychoanalytic theory and American literature to develop a theory of racialization - the process through which individuals assume an identity as black or white. Examining the primal scenes of double consciousness in works by Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison, among others, alongside the formative visual traumas of psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Freud, Taboo Subjects reveals how literature disrupts psychoanalysis's conventional models of race and gender identification, forcing a reconfiguration of many foundational psychoanalytic texts. And from psychoanalysis Bergner derives a critical vocabulary for theorizing racialization as it intersects with sex and gender, for both black and white Americans.
[more]

Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter