On Friday, October 20th, Clemson will host a symposium on Plantation Modernity, the topic of a recent special issue of a journal, _Global South_ (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/391). Clemson English colleague Jonathan Beecher Field seems to know nearly everyone who contributed to the volume. (NB: it’s been my experience that he will deny this. Hint: Don’t believe him!)
Readers might wonder what the phrase “Plantation Modernity” means. Without claiming I know all that it might entail I want to consider it here as an intervention in the familiar associations that surround plantations. Often, if not usually, the southern plantation is seen as a relic, something from the past, something antiquated, and, of course, something superseded. This is true even when the plantation is considered in its historical context. In this reading, the plantation is feudal–the lords, ladies, and slaves of the antebellum period mimic a mode of production and political relation then centuries outdated in Europe, or the US north, when at its peak in the US south. We are likely familiar with all the images that flow from this image of the plantation as feudal, e.g., the preservation, for some, of the medieval chivalric codes regarding, for example, the related topics of gender and honor.
However, for a few decades historians have reimagined this image of the plantation as an anachronistic throw-back to the middle ages pulling the modern era backwards. I am thinking of Eric Williams, historian, and Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, whose 1970 book, _From Columbus to Castro_, features a chapter on “Capitalism and Slavery” which speaks to the book’s argument about the Caribbean and modernity. More recently, academics such as Sven Beckert (who spoke at Clemson a couple of years ago) and Edward E. Baptist have resituated plantation slavery as part of the making of American capitalism (as the subtitle of Baptist’s book _The Half has Never Been Told_ puts it). In this reading, the productive plantation has always been a feature of the modern economy, and contributing raw materials need not make the producer of those materials pre-modern. Indeed, it could make the plantation a defining feature of modernity. In that case, then, the off-plantation processors of the raw materials would by extension be implicated in the modernity of the plantation system.
Or, in other words, the question is how to think about a linked global system, when we are accustomed to think of uneven development and differences in production, temporality, and culture (understood broadly, e.g., as habitus). My own sense is that there _is_ a difference between the mode of production in locales that received the plantation’s raw materials and those that produced them, even if both raw materials producer and raw materials processor might be part of the same modern system. Moreover, even if we were to accept that the plantation is part of modernity, a productive cog in a processing machine, we are still left with the question of where the plantation ideal comes from. I have my own ideas about that, but I suspect that the participants in Plantation Modernity: A Global South Symposium will be discussing all this, and more, on Friday (October 20).
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I hope to see you there.
