Plantation Modernism: Irish, Caribbean, and U.S. Fiction 1890-1950
Open Access
- Author:
- Clukey, Amy
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 18, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Janet Wynne Lyon, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Janet Wynne Lyon, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Deborah Clarke, Committee Member
Mark Stewart Morrisson, Committee Member
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Committee Member
Sean X Goudie, Committee Member - Keywords:
- plantation fiction
modernism - Abstract:
- Although the plantation is most often associated with the antebellum U.S. south, the modern plantation complex was first introduced as a system of economic and cultural domination in sixteenth-century Ireland. This model of settler colonialism was soon exported to the New World and spawned a range of social institutions and cultural artifacts, including a genre of literature. While plantation fiction seemed to reach the height of its popularity in the United States after emancipation, the genre was revived in the twentieth century by Irish, Caribbean, and American writers. Indeed, the genre was revised with surprising frequency by modernists from a wide variety of national and cultural backgrounds, including Elizabeth Bowen, Liam O’Flaherty, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, Arna Bontemps, and of course, William Faulkner. Serving as an important device of cultural linkage, plantation fiction offers a way of understanding the reverberations of empire in transatlantic modernity. While writers of nineteenth-century plantation romance sought its origins in feudalism, the plantation in fact emerged out of the capitalist-imperial ventures of the maritime bourgeoisie of early modern Europe. Plantation ideology derived not from steadfast traditions, but rather from the demands of the market and the defense of property, often human. My project concentrates on Anglophone plantation culture from roughly 1890 through 1950. I track the vast changes in the plantation complex that took place during the modern period, including the transformations that occurred after emancipation, the shift from traditional colonial-settler (family owned) plantations to corporate ventures and state owned plantations, and the simultaneous rise of British decolonization and American imperial expansion. The modernist era marks a shift in global production patterns, as the plantation complex adumbrates transnational agribusiness, and the literature of this period attempts to grapple with the clash between these residual and emergent capitalist agricultural forms. Although the plantation complex is an institution of empire, it would be wrong to expect that all plantation fiction simply serves the ideological imperatives of empire (as it might when the archive is limited to nineteenth-century American writers). Broadening the definition of “plantation fiction” beyond the narrow confines of plantation romance reveals more ideologically diverse and critical representations of the plantation’s role in producing and sustaining empire. Modernist plantation fiction underscores the plantation’s global socio-economic reach by tracing the flow of capital and people to the metropole from plantation cultures. I argue that plantation modernism uses modernist techniques to focus narrative through perspectives from postlapsarian plantation cultures: octoroon mistresses, exploited field hands, disaffected and dishonored planters’ daughters, and other characters burdened by the legacies of the plantation past. Works like Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! experiment with the generic conventions established by plantation romance in order to reveal the local manifestations of global capitalism and mediate between imperial centers and peripheralized regions. Plantation modernism’s cosmopolitan style embraces epistemological and political uncertainty, and foregrounds the forms of cosmopolitanism that emerge among plantation modernity’s voluntary and involuntary diasporas.