ABSTRACT
For many scholars and readers, particularly those in North America, “plantation literature” refers exclusively to writing by white novelists from the U.S. South who aspired to create an idyllic literary world, set on antebellum plantations. Unlike the “slave narrative” (→ III/20) – autobiographical non-fiction told from the first-person point of view of an enslaved or formerly enslaved person who struggles to escape the horrors of the plantation (→ Slavery, I/18), conventional plantation literature was rooted in romance and presents the racial, class, and gender roles of the pre-Civil War era in the U.S. as clear, commendable, and unchanging (→ Social Inequality, II/20; Gender, I/9; Race, I/39). This entry seeks to expand that concept, looking at some of the ways that the U.S. “plantation tradition” in literature changed over time, how different groups – especially U.S. African Americans and anti-colonial Caribbean writers – challenged the alleged serenity of the plantation space, and how Latin American plantation literature and film (→ Cinema, III/25) varied in their presentation of the trope. This complex web of negotiations reveals the necessity for exploring particular bodies of work from not only multiple time periods, but from a range of genres and from a comparative inter-American perspective. Like Paula Connolly’s Slavery in American Children’s Literature (2013), this entry examines both how literature – not only novels and short fiction, but film, poetry, essays, and drama – presented and re-presented life on plantations, and “how historical memory is reshaped [in literature] to express contemporaneous” – and contemporary – “racial politics” (2). In line with Elizabeth Christine Russ’s The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination, this work strives to show how the plantation transforms from a physical site and geographical space to “an insidious ideological and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told and retold” (Russ 2009, 3). The body of writing interrogated here, gathered from throughout the Americas, enables us to consider what an “American” identity is – both within and outside the geographical borders of the United States – and especially “in terms of who is or is not literarily enfranchised, as object and/or subject, and intra- and/or extranarratively” (Connolly 2013, 2).
