Introduction: Plantation Modernity

Introduction:Plantation Modernity Amy Clukey (bio) and Jeremy Wells (bio) When Samuel Johnson first published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, "plantation" meant something different than it does now, denoting process as much as place, an activity as much as a socioeconomic institution. In Johnson's Dictionary, plantation was "the act or practice of planting" or "the place planted." Its third definition—"a colony"—comes closer to the modern sense of the word, though "plantations" of this sort (New England's Providence Plantation, for example) did not by definition involve the salient features of later ones, namely monoculture, slave labor, and mass production. Writing about his 1615 expedition to New France, Samuel de Champlain described "l'honneur […] de planter la foy [faith] Chrestienne en un pays incognu et bar-bare" (97). Writing about preparations for his own voyage to the New World in Of Plymouth Plantation (1651/1856), William Bradford noted that "the Spaniards […] had not yet planted" in Guiana, a rival site for Dissenter settlement (29). Champlain and Bradford's words are indicative of early modern usage, but they also point to Johnson's fourth, final, and most broadly metaphorical definition of plantation: "introduction; establishment." That this sense of the word has disappeared is probably for the best; we are not tempted to say that we are writing the "plantation" to this special issue of The Global South. Yet its existence two and a half centuries ago may suggest why plantation has proved one of the more durable signifiers of modernity: why it possesses cognates in more than thirty languages and why, in some of them, at least, it keeps acquiring additional significance. This issue of The Global South is devoted to the concept of "plantation." Its focus is on the word paired with the definitive article: the plantation. Most of the places mentioned in the essays that follow fit the definition of the "classic plantation" set forth by Sidney W. Mintz in 1968: a politico-economic invention, a colonial frontier institution, combining non-European slaves and European capital, technology, and managerial skill with territorial control of free or cheap subtropical lands in the mass, mono-crop production of agricultural commodities for European markets. (311) [End Page 1] Crucially, however, not all of the "plantations" explored in this issue (or in recent scholarship) fit Mintz's definition exactly. In Amy King's essay on exploitation films, the word applies to a fantasized Filipino women's prison that reminds one character, an Alabama-born black woman, of "back home." This "plantation" is reminiscent in turn of one Lisa Hinrichsen has discerned in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and its representation of US school systems, which "institutionaliz[e] […] certain narratives about being, having, and owning that reflect plantation logic […]" (176). Hinrichsen's understanding of the word closely resembles the one Billy Hawkins develops in The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions (2010) as well as the one Craig Steven Wilder utilizes in Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities (2014). All of these "plantations," meanwhile, are suggestive of others explored in recent scholarship, most notably the prisons and criminal justice systems written about by Bryan Wagner, Jessica Adams, Tara T. Green, and Houston A. Baker, Jr. as well as the regional US political economies examined by Clyde Woods and Nan Elizabeth Woodruff. In such studies as these, "plantation" hovers between metaphor and metonym. It represents metaphorically a system of power in which marginalized (and more often than not racialized) subjects labor for the benefit of others—more specifically, for those who guard the privilege of not having to work so hard for so little themselves. This is what was implied when the punk rock guitarist and independent music producer Brett Gurewitz referred to the US record industry as a "plantation system" in an interview published in 2013, or when Hillary Clinton—at the time a US senator from New York—explained the Republican-led House of Representatives as having been "run like a plantation" in 2006.1 Yet sometimes the connections require less imagination to comprehend. There are universities that owe portions of their existences to slavery...