We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Plantation Ecologies: The Experimental Plantation in and against James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane.
- Authors
RUSERT, BRITT
- Abstract
This essay examines the Scottish poet and physician James Grainger's 1764 ''West-India georgic,'' The Sugar-Cane, to chronicle the transformation of the plantation into an ecologically unique site for experimentation, produced through material processes and imaginaries of British enclosure in the West Indies. Through its cataloging of Caribbean diseases and natural remedies, and its oblique references to medical experiments on the enslaved, The Sugar-Cane offers a powerful articulation of what I call the ''experimental plantation,'' an enclosed site from which empirical knowledge is produced, extracted, and transplanted from tropicalized lands and bodies. While the poem registers the enclosure of human and nonhuman life within the experimental plantation, it also belies an anxiety about the disordering, tropicalizing forces of various ''fugitive'' species in the Caribbean, including tropical diseases, wild animals, and maroon communities, all of which threatened to dissolve and overtake the enclosed borders of the plantation. In The Sugar-Cane, the image of the plantation as an ecologically enclosed, protected space of British cultivation and experimentation is revealed to be a fragile colonial fantasy, always on the verge of being ''infected'' and creolized by indigenous plants, animals, and diseases, as well as by Africans both within and outside the enclosures of the plantation.
- Subjects
GRAINGER, James; SUGAR-Cane, The (Poem); PLANTATIONS in literature; ENVIRONMENTAL history; CARIBBEAN history, to 1810; 18TH century English poetry; HISTORY; EUROPEAN civilization; CIVILIZATION; ECONOMIC history
- Publication
Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2015, Vol 13, Issue 2, p341
- ISSN
1543-4273
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1353/eam.2015.0015