BiblioVault - Books about Plantation

From Frontier to Plantation In Tennessee

A Study in Frontier Democracy

Thomas Perkins Abernethy

University of Alabama Press, 1967

A reprint of Abernethy's excellent historical study of the state of Tennesse from its founding through the antebellum years. In documenting the development of an agrarian society on the frontier, Abernethy develops important and controversial theses on the relation between frontier life and the development of American democracy, calling into question the mythology and motives previously associated with leaders such as William Blount, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.

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From Plantation to Paradise?

Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789

David M. Powers

Michigan State University Press, 2014

In 1764 the first printing press was established in the French Caribbean colonies, launching the official documentation of operas and plays performed there, and marking the inauguration of the first theatre in the colonies. A rigorous study of pre–French Revolution performance practices in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Powers’s book examines the elaborate system of social casting in these colonies; the environments in which nonwhite artists emerged; and both negative and positive contributions of the Catholic Church and the military to operas and concerts produced in the colonies. The author also explores the level of participation of nonwhites in these productions, as well as theatre architecture, décor, repertoire, seating arrangements, and types of audiences. The status of nonwhite artists in colonial society; the range of operas in which they performed; their accomplishments, praise, criticism; and the use of créole texts and white actors/singers à visage noirs (with blackened faces) present a clear picture of French operatic culture in these colonies. Approaching the French Revolution, the study concludes with an examination of the ways in which colonial opera was affected by slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the emergence of “patriotic theatres,” and their role in fostering support for the king, as well as the impact on subsequent operas produced in the colonies and in the United States.

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From Plantation to Prison

The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration

Adaner Usmani

Harvard University Press

The History of Belle Meade

Mansion, Plantation, and Stud

Ridley Wills

Vanderbilt University Press, 1991

Winner of the Tennessee History Book Award.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Belle Meade became probably the most important nursery for Thoroughbred race horses in America. Since that time, virtually every Kentucky Derby winner can trace its lineage back to Belle Meade. Belle Meade also holds a place in American history as a stage for the comings and goings of great people and events. Weaving together family and regional history, Wills provides his reader with a fascinating account of the land, people, buildings, and horses that for a century made Belle Meade a significant focal point for Tennessee and the South.

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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

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Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation

Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair

Deborah A. Thomas

Duke University Press, 2019

In 2010, Jamaican police and military forces entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on gun and drug-running charges. By the time Coke was detained, somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred civilians had been killed. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Deborah A. Thomas uses the incursion as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability. In tying theories of politics, colonialism, race, and affect together with Jamaica's history, Thomas presents a robust framework for understanding what it means to be human in the plantation's wake.

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Romances of the White Man's Burden

Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature, 1880-1936

Jeremy Wells

Vanderbilt University Press, 2011

"Take up the white man's burden!" So wrote the English writer Rudyard Kipling in 1899, in a poem aimed at Americans at a time when colonial ambitions were particularly high. The poem proved especially popular among white southern men, who saw in its vision of America's imperial future an image that appeared to reflect and even redeem the South's plantation past.

Romances of the White Man's Burden takes on works in American literature in which the proverbial "old plantation" is made to seem not a relic but a harbinger, a sign that the South had arrived at a multiracial modernity and harmony before the rest of the United States. Focusing on writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Henry W. Grady, Thomas Dixon, and William Faulkner, Jeremy Wells reveals their shared fixation on the figure of the white southern man as specially burdened by history. Each of these writers, in his own way, presented the plantation South as an emblem, not an aberration, of America.

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Shadow of the Plantation

Charles Spurgeon Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 1934