TY - JOUR
AU1 - McInnis, Jarvis, C
AB - Abstract This essay examines how several contemporary black women artists—Attica Locke, Natalie Baszile, Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, and Kara Walker—interrogate the afterlives of the sugar plantation in present day literature, performance, and visual art. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s conceptualization of “black women’s geographies,” I show how these artists turn to the landscape and built environment of the sugar plantation and factory to restore black women and the US South to the global history of sugar. Part one, “Plantation Pasts,” examines Locke’s 2012 novel, The Cutting Season, alongside Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, as critiques of the sugar plantation’s ongoing economic viability through plantation tourism and modern agribusiness. By foregrounding a “logic of perishability” that insists on the plantation’s dissolution and demise, Locke and Walker interrogate these sugar plantation afterlives to exhume, expose, and ultimately revise buried histories of racial dispossession and consumption in the US and global sugar industries. Part two, “Plantation Futures,” examines how Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, its television adaptation created by Ava DuVernay, and several of Beyoncé’s music videos—“Déjà Vu” (2006), “Formation” (2016), and the visual album Lemonade (2016)—“return” to Louisiana’s sugar plantation geographies to confront the violent histories of slavery and Jim Crow and to reconcile African Americans’ contentious relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era. Given the limits of colonial and state archives of slavery, I argue that these artists reestablish the landscape and architecture of the sugar plantation and factory as counter-archives, wherein the slave cabin, big house, refinery, and cane fields are figured as contested sites of official history and memory. In doing so, they “respatialize” hegemonic geographies, exposing and indicting the persisting legacies of racial-sexual dispossession and violence, on one hand, and positing embodied practices of pleasure, mourning, and collectivity as modes of “reterritorialization” on the other, imagining a new relationship to land, agriculture, and the earth. Recent debates about the enduring material legacies of slavery and the confederacy in US media and popular culture have primarily focused on symbols emblazoned on state flags or monuments and buildings erected on city plazas and university campuses. Scholars and commentators have paid less attention, however, to two of the primary geographies of slavery’s most significant “crimes against the flesh” (emphasis in original): the plantation and its coconspirator, the factory (Spillers 67). Across the US South, antebellum plantations have been revived as tourist attractions where visitors pay to gawk at the architectural grandeur of the “big house,” or plantation mansion, and to be regaled with tales of the Old South and Civil War: some sites have even been converted into bed and breakfasts and event spaces, where guests can enjoy a pastoral respite or host lavish weddings that attempt to replicate the ill-gotten wealth of the southern aristocracy. In the northern US, the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York, once the largest in the world, is currently being redeveloped into modern offices and an “11-acre park and waterfront esplanade” (Schulz). The enslaved black people once forced to perform the backbreaking labor in the fields adjoining these antebellum plantation mansions, and who cultivated the sugar cane processed in Domino’s refinery for national consumption, are often obscured or altogether erased from these gentrified landscapes and built environments. Beginning in the mid-to-late twentieth century, African American writers deployed the neo-slave narrative genre to counter the persistent flattening and erasure of black subjectivity within the history and popular memory of slavery. They invented characters and plots that humanized enslaved black people as multidimensional, sentient, and (quasi-)agential—imaginatively exploring their psychologies, sexual desires, spiritualities, moral failures, idiosyncrasies, and contradictions. More recently, several contemporary black women artists have taken up slavery’s enduring material and geographic legacies by interrogating what I call the afterlife of the sugar plantation in fiction, visual art, and popular culture. Extending Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the “afterlife of slavery” (Lose 6), the afterlife of the plantation encompasses the institutions, logics, and cultural practices that emerged in the wake of emancipation, yet were specifically tied to the physical spaces and biopolitical functions of the plantation as a mode of labor organization and large-scale commodity production for global markets. In this essay, I explore how these artists mine the geography of the plantation tour (that is, the big house, slave cabins, and sugar cane fields) and the industrial infrastructure of the factory as a material archive embedded in the landscape of the rural US South and the urban, industrial US North, respectively—reading, creating, and performing against its hegemonic grain. Divided into two parts, each section of the essay juxtaposes a contemporary novel with a visual artwork or performance to analyze how these artists confront the political and libidinal economies of the sugar plantation in the present day. Part one, entitled “Plantation Pasts,” examines Attica Locke’s 2012 novel, The Cutting Season, alongside Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, as critiques of the sugar plantation’s ongoing economic viability through plantation tourism and modern agribusiness. By foregrounding a “logic of perishability” that insists on the plantation’s dissolution and demise, Locke and Walker interrogate these sugar plantation afterlives to exhume, expose, and ultimately revise buried histories of racial dispossession and consumption in the US and global sugar industries. Part two, entitled “Plantation Futures,” examines how Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, its television adaptation created by Ava DuVernay, and several of Beyoncé’s music videos—“Déjà Vu” (2006), “Formation” (2016), and the visual album Lemonade (2016)— “return” to Louisiana’s sugar plantation geographies to confront the violent histories of slavery and Jim Crow and to reconcile African Americans’ contentious relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era. What, this section asks, is the good of (Queen Bey’s) lemonade without (queen) sugar? To navigate the intricate yet oft-obscured terrain of the intersections of race, gender, and geography that these works portray, I draw on Stephanie Camp’s notion of “rival geographies” (7) and Katherine McKittrick’s conceptualization of “black women’s geographies” as critical analytics for disrupting and reworking “geographies of domination” like the plantation and factory (Demonic xxxi). Camp, following Edward Said, defines rival geographies as enslaved people’s “alternative ways of knowing and using plantation and southern space that conflicted with planters’ ideals and demands… . [including] quarters, outbuildings, woods, swamps and neighboring farms” (7). By foregrounding landscape and architecture as sites of contestation, I argue, these artists are recuperating the ways their enslaved ancestors renegotiated violent and hegemonic spaces. Similarly, McKittrick contends that “black women’s geographies (such as their knowledges, negotiations, and experiences)” and their “histories, lives, and spaces must be understood as enmeshing with traditional geographic arrangements in order to identify a different way of knowing and writing the social world and to expand how the production of space is achieved across terrains of domination” (x, xiv; emphasis added). For McKittrick, black women’s geographies are both material and experiential, physical and psychological, and corporeal and affective. She continues: if practices of subjugation are also spatial acts, then the ways in which black women think, write, and negotiate their surroundings are intermingled with place-based critiques, or, respatializations. I suggest, then, that one way to contend with unjust and uneven human/inhuman categorizations is to think about, and perhaps employ, the alternative geographic formulations that subaltern communities advance. Geographies of domination, from transatlantic slavery and beyond, hold in them both the marking and the contestation of old and new social hierarchies. If these hierarchies are spatial expressions of racism and sexism, the interrogations and remappings provided by black diaspora populations can incite new, or different, and perhaps more just, geographic stories. (xix; emphasis added) Building on McKittrick’s provocative invitation to prioritize the “alternative geographic formulations that subaltern communities advance,” I examine how these contemporary black women artists offer “place-based critiques, or, respatializations” of geographies of domination, from Louisiana sugar plantations to a Brooklyn sugar factory, and from the US South to the Global South. Especially persuasive is McKittrick’s claim that “space is socially produced and alterable,” which, in my reading, gestures toward the possibility of appropriating and transforming geographies of domination to contest and disrupt racial-sexual hierarchies embedded in the landscape (14, xii). Thinking at the intersection of black women and geography, she contends, “opens up a conceptual arena through which more humanly workable geographies can be and are imagined” (xii). I argue, in turn, that this is precisely the question that the black women artists assembled here are confronting in their contemporary revisitings of the sugar plantation and factory: whether one can indeed imbue geographies of domination with new meanings and indexical possibilities, and whether “racial-sexual geographies are [indeed] alterable sites of struggle” (Demonic 69; emphasis added). How should we contend with the plantation’s material and economic legacies in the present, they inquire. What are the untold histories that buildings and landscapes hold? In light of the atrocities committed on plantations, should they be sacred for black people and thus preserved for posterity. Or should they be burned and destroyed? Can they be a place of recovery, resuturing, reconciliation, or are they simply sites of rewounding? Given the limits of colonial and state archives of slavery, these artists reestablish the landscape and architecture of the sugar plantation and factory as counter-archives, wherein the slave cabin, big house, refinery, and cane fields are figured as contested sites of official history and memory. In doing so, they “respatialize” hegemonic geographies, exposing and indicting the persisting legacies of racial-sexual dispossession and violence, on one hand, and positing embodied practices of pleasure, mourning, and “collective agency and community resilience” (White 6–11) as modes of reterritorialization of the other. I define reterritorialization as the process by which African Americans attempt to reconcile and imagine a new relationship to land, agriculture, and the earth, outside of and directly opposed to the exploitative racial capitalist regimes engendered by the plantation, sharecropping, and debt peonage. Thus, in part two of the essay especially, gardens, family farms, and practices of economic cooperation contrast with the plantation’s and factory’s coterminous degradation of the black body and the earth alike. Within this counter geo-archive lies an alternative grammar and ethics for interrogating the material legacy of the plantation in the present that, unlike most plantation tours, takes seriously the lives of the people once forced to labor there. Since King Cotton reigned supreme in the antebellum US South’s plantation economy, I am especially interested in why these women artists are so preoccupied with sugar. While most scholarship rightly focuses on the Caribbean and Latin America as the historic epicenter of the world’s sugar economy, all of the works examined here are set in the US, and three of the four are set in southern Louisiana, in particular. Though Louisiana arrived relatively late on the world sugar stage, this other (perhaps original) “white gold” transformed the state’s political economy. According to historian Richard Follett, the number of sugar plantations in Louisiana increased from 193 in 1824 to 1,500 by midcentury (“Rise” 67, 71). “The number of slaves cultivating sugar rose sharply from 21,000 in 1827 to 65,000 in 1844, before surpassing 125,000 by midcentury. The average plantation workforce increased from 52 in 1830 to 85 in 1850, although many of the biggest estates featured slave workforces 150 strong” (72). “By the close of the antebellum era,” Follett continues, “large sugar planters owned on average 110 slaves, 1,600 acres of land, and produced 500–600 hogsheads of sugar per estate” (71). To suggest the domestic demand alone for sugar, consider that “By 1831, every American consumed thirteen pounds of sugar per annum… . [and] [b]y midcentury, consumption surpassed thirty pounds” (68). Indeed, “[w]ithin five decades, Louisiana planters were producing a quarter of the world’s cane-sugar supply” (Muhammad). By focusing on Louisiana, I maintain that in their various works, Baszile, DuVernay, Locke, and Beyoncé restore southern African Americans to the domestic and global history of sugar production, and thus illuminate the plantation as a geography of domination that spans the US and Global South alike. By setting her exhibit in Brooklyn, Walker further extends this cartographic intervention by indicting the US and Global North as equally complicit in sugar’s global reign of terror. Finally, I propose that these women artists take a distinctly feminist approach to their contemporary revisitings of sugar plantations and factories to redress what McKittrick calls the “absented presence of black womanhood” within the history of the US sugar industry (Demonic xxv). As Jennifer Morgan maintains, in colonial Barbados, Britain’s premier sugar colony, enslaved women were quite numerous as field workers on cane plantations. They “frequently outnumbered men on the larger plantations” and did the majority of the “backbreaking labor” in the field (147). By the early nineteenth century, however, when Louisiana arrived as a leading provider for the US market, sugar planters began to prioritize men over women as field workers, believing cane cultivation required tall, strong men. This created a vast gender disparity on Louisiana’s sugar plantations, where enslaved women were often fewer in number and typically relegated to their reproductive labors and capacities. As Follett observes, “Women were conspicuous by their relative absence, but those that entered Louisiana’s slave communities often proved younger than their fellow bondsmen and were pregnant more often than their bondswomen elsewhere” (Sugar 88–89). Despite their low numbers, enslaved women’s reproductive and culinary labors undoubtedly repopulated and nourished the workforce, and were thus integral to the sugar plantation machine. By centering black women’s experiences within the afterlife of the sugar plantation, I argue, these artists rematerialize the black female body against its relative “absence,” silence, and “historical spatial [and economic] unrepresentability”—depicting what I call a “black feminist insurgency” that disassembles heteropatriarchal gender norms through strategies and practices of respatialization and reterritorialization (Demonic xxv). Significantly, even as I incorporate historical and economic data to quantify enslaved people’s contributions to the nineteenth-century US economy, I acknowledge the limits of such quantification and the inability of statistics to fully capture the dynamism and intricacies of individual human experiences. So I mine literature, visual art, and performance as counter-archives that rematerialize those who have been evacuated from the landscape and factory floor and rendered as mere commodities in the plantation ledger. By centering black women’s experiences within the afterlife of the sugar plantation, I argue, these artists rematerialize the black female body against its relative “absence,” silence, and “historical spatial [and economic] unrepresentability”—depicting what I call a “black feminist insurgency” that disassembles heteropatriarchal gender norms through strategies and practices of respatialization and reterritorialization (Demonic xxv). 1. Plantation Pasts Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season is a murder mystery set in present-day southern Louisiana on the border between Groveland Corporation, a corporate sugar cane farm, and Belle Vie, an antebellum sugar plantation-turned-tourist attraction. Belle Vie’s “beauty, was not to be trusted,” Locke writes. “[B]eneath its loamy topsoil, the manicured grounds and gardens, two centuries of breathtaking wealth and spectacle, lay a land both black and bitter, soft to the touch, but pressing in its power” (4). Belle Vie, which means “beautiful view,” captures the inherent contradictions of many present-day plantation geographies: astonishingly beautiful vistas haunted by the fugitive cries and “rememories” of the formerly enslaved millions who labored and often perished there. Caren Gray, the novel’s protagonist, has grown up on Belle Vie, where her mother served as head cook and her ancestors were once enslaved and worked as sharecroppers after emancipation. Forced to drop out of Tulane Law School because of financial difficulties, Caren returns to Belle Vie with her young daughter, Morgan. Hired as the plantation manager, she oversees its daily round of historical tours and weddings. Caren resides on the second floor of the former “overseer’s residence—which also housed the plantation’s historical records” and “still carried a heavy scent of burnt pipe tobacco,” and her office is located in the big house (7). She is acutely aware of her paradoxical position. Whereas her ancestors, “for generations, had stayed clear of the main house, either by fate or by choice… . now, six days out of the week, Caren sat comfortably at her desk, looking out over fields where her ancestors had cut sugar cane by hand, both before and after the Civil War” (17). The irony of Caren’s position as a modern-day overseer who lives amongst the plantation’s archive is the mechanism by which Locke leverages a black feminist critique that lays bare the myriad afterlives of the sugar plantation embedded in Louisiana’s landscape and built environment: namely, plantation tourism, corporate farming, and the wedding industry. This “new plantation economy” demonstrates how the plantation, and the racial capitalist logics that at once produced and were produced by it, persists well into the twenty-first century (Adams 59). Considering the racial capitalist violence wrought by sharecropping, debt peonage, the prison-industrial complex, and various other carceral modalities that emerged in the wake of emancipation to undermine and circumscribe black freedom, plantation tourism seems a rather mild afterlife of the plantation. Yet, as Hartman reminds us, often the quotidian enactments of violence are the farthest-reaching and most insidious (Scenes). As popular tourist attractions and wedding venues, plantation tours represent the nation’s selective memory about slavery and racial violence. By fetishizing the Old South and often obscuring and even erasing the history of slavery, these tours aim to sanitize and empty the plantation of its immense brutality. The sign leading to Belle Vie’s slave quarters, for instance, dubs it as a once “thriving village of plantation workers” (11). This historical revisionism—rendering enslaved people as workers, when they were, in fact, property akin to real estate and livestock—is commonplace in the plantation tourism industry. For instance, the website for Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation, the largest extant antebellum mansion in the US, touts that the home has been “stunningly restored” to her days of “architectural” glory, but mentions nothing about the 155 enslaved people forced to perform the majority of the labor to construct the palatial structure (“Home”).1 Through such practices, plantation tourism emerges as the contemporary and material manifestation of the plantation romance tradition, in which writers as politically diverse as George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page memorialized the antebellum South in the local color fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The best-known example of this tradition is perhaps Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) and the cult following it engendered. If plantation tourism is a kind of twenty-first-century analogue to the plantation novel tradition, then The Cutting Season compares to turn-of-the-century black literary works such as Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), both of which sought to deform the genre and its ideological hegemony. Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, Du Bois’s “anti-plantation romance” attempts to revaluate the relationship between blackness and cotton while underscoring the violence and inequality of sharecropping and debt peonage as insidious afterlives of the plantation regime (“Behold”). Writing a century later when African Americans no longer primarily work in agriculture, Locke holds no such recuperative aims for the relationship between blackness and sugar. Rather, she merges the deformational goals of the “anti-plantation romance” with crime fiction and the southern gothic tradition to subvert plantation tourism’s flagrant distortion of history and memory.2 Specifically, she names slavery as one of the country’s originary crimes against humanity, and, consistent with the southern gothic tradition, mines the region’s haunted landscape and built environment to illuminate and indict social ills. The central attraction of most plantation tours is the plantation mansion, with its grand neoclassical, Greek revival, or Italianate architecture. The Cutting Season, however, shifts readers’ attention to the remnants of the slave quarters in order to recover the disappeared histories of the peculiar institution. As the material evidence of slavery, the slave quarters is often the most uncomfortable, contentious stop on plantation tours for black and white visitors alike. Raymond Clancy, Caren’s boss whose family owns Belle Vie, despises the plantation, the slave cabins in particular. He is seemingly as haunted by the legacy of slavery and the plantation as Caren is. For he hates “every damn thing” the cabins stand for. Clancy more than once made a fervent pitch to tear them down completely, fairly begging, knowing that this was one curatorial decision he’d have to run by his father, Leland, a man beloved in the parish for preserving an important piece of history, for Louisianans, and black folks, in particular. Raymond had tried to rope Caren in once, asking her to author a memo on company letterhead stating all the ways it would boost the plantation’s bottom line if the unsightly cabins were done away with. They could build a second reception hall, he’d said, or expand parking. It was the only instance, in all the time Caren had worked for Raymond, that she ever told him no. (12) Caren’s refusal to comply with erasing the material evidence of slavery for a mere reception hall or parking lot evinces the paradox of plantation tourism for African Americans. A site of tremendous pain and trauma, the plantation is also a sacred space and an origin of black culture in the Americas. According to black feminist archaeologist Whitney Battle-Baptiste, slave quarters were “zones of domestic production dominated by women, and it was there that food preparation, child care, clothing repair and adornment, recreational storytelling, and music making served as the focal point of enslaved domestic life and provided avenues for strengthening social relationships” (233–34). To raze or disappear Belle Vie’s slave cabins, then, in an effort to assuage white guilt or palliate black pain only exacerbates the violence of irreparable cultural loss and rupture that slavery inaugurated. As Gayl Jones intimates in her neo-slave narrative, Corregidora (1975), memory can simultaneously serve as a counter-archive of resistance and a modality of reinjury. Mirroring the racial distribution of labor on antebellum plantations, Belle Vie is owned by a white family and staffed by African Americans, many of whom are members of the “Belle Vie Players,” a historical reenactment group that performs The Olden Days of Belle Vie. “[W]ritten by a state senator’s wife” 25 years earlier, the play is “as soapy as Gone with the Wind, full of belles and balls and star-crossed lovers, noble Confederates, and happy darkies and more dirty Yankees than you could count. And the tourists loved it” (emphasis in original) (Locke 19). Fed up with the play’s shameless fabrication and sanitation of history, Donovan Isaacs, a student and Belle Vie player, pens an overcorrective history, entitled, Truth and Consequences: The Straight Story of the South, that seeks to redress “‘this cracker-ass bullshit’ [that] fell short of the real history of plantation life across Louisiana” (19). Donovan’s version of events is replete with “a slave revolt [that] took out half the French Creoles in Ascension Parish. There were three beheadings in a single paragraph. The whole thing read like bad comic-book fan fiction,” Caren decides. “[S]laves firing weapons without any gunpowder in sight, Yankee soldiers making telephone calls in the middle of the Civil War, and there was at least one musical interlude” (20). When, against her better judgment, Caren pitches the play to Raymond Clancy, “[h]is instructions could not have been more explicit: the play, and Belle Vie itself, his family homestead, would stay the way they had always been” (20). Ultimately, Raymond’s thwarted efforts to raze the slave cabins and Donovan’s failed attempt to (over)correct the history of slavery and the Civil War brings into stark relief the actual burden of history and memory in the afterlife of the plantation for both black and white people. There are no easy answers to this racial drama, Locke intimates: neither forgetting nor remembering; neither erasure nor redaction. Alongside plantation tourism, The Cutting Season explores corporate farming and agribusiness as another afterlife of the plantation, effectively linking the history of slavery with the contemporary condition of Latinx migrant laborers, and thus the US South to the Global South.3 The novel opens with the discovery of the dead body of a Mexican laborer on the border between Belle Vie and Groveland Corporation, a corporate sugar cane farm that was once a part of Belle Vie’s property. Following the murder, Caren discovers that a cane knife is missing from a slave cabin—the one that once belonged to her great-great-great-grandfather, Jason, who mysteriously disappeared from Belle Vie shortly after emancipation and whose fate the family never learned. As Caren and the local police piece together the details of the woman’s death, it becomes clear that Jason’s missing cane knife is indeed the murder weapon. The victim is eventually identified as Inés Avalo, an undocumented Mexican migrant laborer and a loving wife and mother. In the course of the murder investigation, Caren suspects that there is a connection between Inés’s death and the Clancy family’s sudden eagerness to sell the plantation. The discovery that Inés had unearthed a human bone in Groveland’s cane fields shortly before her death leads Caren back to the unsolved mystery of her ancestor, Jason, whom her mother believed “had likely met trouble here on the plantation; that he’d died at Belle Vie, and his soul never left the grounds” (13). During a confrontation with Bobby Clancy, the youngest Clancy brother, Caren learns that William Tynan, Belle Vie’s former overseer and the Clancy family’s ancestor, had murdered Jason over a land dispute and buried his body in the cane fields shortly after the Civil War. Upon discovering that the deed to Belle Vie lists Jason as its rightful owner, the Clancy brothers suspect that Tynan was responsible for Jason’s murder and promptly destroy the deed. When Inés stumbles upon Jason’s skeletal remains in the cane field, inadvertently unearthing evidence of Tynan’s crime, Bobby murders her to protect their family’s darkest secret: that Caren’s family is Belle Vie’s rightful owner and the Clancys only came to possess the property upon Jason’s heinous murder. By intertwining these murders at the Clancys’ hands, The Cutting Season leads readers to ponder the continuities between the condition of enslaved African Americans and that of present-day undocumented Latinx sugar workers. Both groups share a precarious status outside of or with limited recourse to, the law and are treated as the fodder of racial capitalism. Jason’s murder and the Clancys’ subsequent destruction of his deed, for instance, demonstrate the precarity of the juridical archive as an effective mode of redress for African Americans, cementing their status as second-class citizens. Despite the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, bestowing citizenship upon the formerly enslaved, the fungibility of black life dispossesses Jason and his descendants of their property and effectively renders them undocumented too. Thus, Jason and Inés share a similar fate of being “undocumented,” albeit under different conditions and more than a century apart. Under a white supremacist, racial capitalist labor regime, Locke intimates, black and brown lives are similarly perishable with little or no legal protection. Furthermore, as a corporate farm once part of Belle Vie, Groveland represents the ongoing economic viability of antebellum sugar cane fields and another material link between Jason and Inés, as they literally labored on the same land. In effect, Locke deploys the materiality of plantation labor and landscape—Jason’s cane knife and Groveland’s fields, where Inés cut cane and discovered Jason’s remains—as constituting a counter-archive that elucidates how dispossession and labor exploitation continue to animate the contemporary sugar industry and links the region to the fate and futures of people in the Global South as well. Finally, the novel’s respatializations intimate how the political economy of plantation tourism traffics in the libidinal economy of slavery. Belle Vie served as a popular wedding venue and event space to help cover the cost of maintaining the property and preserving it for posterity. Yet Caren “once found a used condom on the dirt floor of one of the slave cottages. Drunken wedding guests, she had learned, were by far the horniest, most unscrupulous people on the planet: neither a sense of the macabre nor common decency would stop them once they got their minds set on something, or someone” (8). To host a wedding—the pinnacle of heteronormative domesticity—in such a paradoxical space, where physical beauty is so inextricably tethered to racial terror, is reminiscent of how racial-sexual violence was constitutive to maintaining the white plantation household. Furthermore, the wedding guests’ utter lack of reverence for this sacred site of black ancestral memory—arguably equivalent to a cemetery or a slave castle on the shores of West Africa—reflects how the enslaved black body was considered a tabula rasa: always available, exploitable, penetrable, inscribable, and consumable for their master’s and mistress’s sexual fantasies. The black body, like the slave cabin, is deemed fungible and expendable, a site upon which both planters and wedding guests, respectively, could project and fulfill their perverted sexual desires. Locke’s subtle treatment of the conjunction of the political and libidinal economies of slavery and the plantation is taken up more explicitly in Kara Walker’s exhibit, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, installed in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Refinery (Figure 1). By the end of the Civil War, “[this] factory had become the largest sugar refinery in the world, employing over 4,000 workers and processing three million pounds of sugar a day—more than half of the sugar consumed in the entire country” (“Creative Time”). Walker’s exhibit was commissioned on the occasion of the factory’s imminent demolition. Whereas The Cutting Season subtly hints at the libidinal economy of plantation tourism by shaming lascivious wedding guests for sexing it up in the slave cabins, Walker’s ironically titled exhibit, A Subtlety, confronts this history in the least subtle way one might imagine: a 75.5-foot-long, 35.5-foot-tall, and 26-foot-wide sphinx coated in 40 tons of refined white sugar, with the hands and face of an enslaved black woman wearing a headscarf (a nod to the infamous mammy stereotype), replete with bare breasts in front and exposed butt and vagina in back (Figures 2 and 3). Small statues of enslaved children, or “sugar babies,” made from dark brown molasses approximately three feet in height and carrying workbaskets of varying sizes, were placed indiscriminately throughout the exhibit (Figure 4). They presented a striking visual contrast to the enormity and stark whiteness of the sphinx coated with purified sugar, perhaps reminding viewers that black children, too, can be small, innocent, and in need of protection. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Sign at the entrance of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York depicting the title of Walker's exhibit on the side of the building. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Sign at the entrance of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York depicting the title of Walker's exhibit on the side of the building. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Two children viewing the front of Walker's sphinx inside the Domino refinery. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Two children viewing the front of Walker's sphinx inside the Domino refinery. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The back of Walker's sphinx depicting a woman's bare buttocks, vagina, and feet. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The back of Walker's sphinx depicting a woman's bare buttocks, vagina, and feet. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide A statue of one of Walker's molasses sugar babies carrying a workbasket; its face is disfigured and its body has begun to melt onto the factory floor. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide A statue of one of Walker's molasses sugar babies carrying a workbasket; its face is disfigured and its body has begun to melt onto the factory floor. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. In much the same way that Locke shifts readers’ focus from the big house to the slave quarters, Walker’s hypersexualized spectacle of the naked black female body as part human, part animal, part mythological creature, and wholly consumable commodity—sugar—brings the silences, erasures, and dispossessions of slavery and the plantation into full view. We may even think of A Subtlety as a sort of northern plantation tour, a respatialization that shifts the locus of slavery from the plantation to the factory, thus exposing the genealogical and economic ties between them. When I visited the exhibit in the summer of 2014, visitor-tourists lined up outside to consume this spectacle of the black female body and children (Figure 5). Its sheer size towered over spectators as an indictment of sugar’s centrality to New World slavery, an act of defiance against the factory’s demolition and the historical erasure that would undoubtedly ensue, and a homage to the history of slave resistance. Though I suspect that there were no weddings at the Domino factory, there were countless reports of visitors taking lewd selfies that simulated groping and/or penetrating the sphinx’s various sexual parts, thereby collapsing the presumed distance—geographical, temporal, and ideological—between the libidinal economy of the southern plantation and the political economy of the northern sugar factory. Indeed, where the afterlife of slavery and the plantation is concerned, A Subtlety suggests that the US North is far more proximate to the US South than is typically acknowledged. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Visitor-tourists lined up outside of the Domino refinery preparing to enter Walker's exhibit. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Visitor-tourists lined up outside of the Domino refinery preparing to enter Walker's exhibit. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. If the sphinx exposed enslaved women’s susceptibility to sexual violence and exploitation, the molasses-covered sugar babies further signified the distinctiveness of enslaved women’s experiences, namely the reproductive labor of peopling the plantation’s work force. Though enslaved children followed the condition of the mother, enslaved women had little control over their children’s fates. They were the property of their slave owners, alienated at birth from their maternal and paternal relations alike.4 Thus, the sugar babies carrying workbaskets indicate how childhood innocence and protection were never bestowed upon enslaved children. Rather, they too were property whose labor fueled the plantation machine and whose bodies were reduced to appreciable assets in the plantation ledger. Walker’s provocative subtitle—“an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant”—links her visual spectacle to the politics of racial consumption and situates the geopolitical economy of the US sugar industry within a broader hemispheric context. The mammy archetype, upon which Walker’s sphinx is based, often worked as both a caretaker for white children and the household cook. Thus, even if black women were less numerous on nineteenth-century sugar plantations as fieldworkers, they played a crucial role, as cooks in the “Kitchens of the New World,” in transforming the very sugar their fellow slaves and sharecroppers cultivated for the vast consumption that Follett documents. This northern plantation tour, then, grapples with racial cannibalism, consuming blackness not only through sight, as in the visual spectacle of the sphinx, but through taste as well. As Domino was once the largest sugar refinery in the US, its industrial machinery routinely consumed black bodies—both their labor and the sugar they produced—and redistributed those lives across the country in neat packages of refined white sugar. Walker’s emphasis on racial consumption indicates a logic of perishability, one that asks viewers to ruminate on the relationship between sugar cane and blackness. Sugar cane is a highly perishable crop that must be milled and processed within hours of being cut lest it decay. In A Subtlety, Walker also renders the black body as perishable, intimating how sugar production leads to laborers’ routine dismemberment and mutilation both on the plantation and in the factory alike. For example, due to the heat and humidity of New York summers, the sphinx and sugar babies began to melt and dissolve soon after they were erected. As they melted, the sugar babies’ arms and other extremities fell to the floor and were placed in their workbaskets, their limbs reduced to detritus and their workbaskets doubling as wastebaskets (Figures 6 and 7). Their perishability mirrored conditions in actual nineteenth-century Louisiana sugar mills, where “children toiled like factory workers with assembly-line precision and discipline under the constant threat of boiling hot kettles, open furnaces and grinding rollers” (Muhammad). Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide The “decapitated”/melted head of a sugar baby placed inside of another sugar baby's work basket. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide The “decapitated”/melted head of a sugar baby placed inside of another sugar baby's work basket. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide A statue of a disfigured sugar baby whose arm melted and fell to the factory floor. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide A statue of a disfigured sugar baby whose arm melted and fell to the factory floor. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph taken by author. In “The Price of Sugar,” an essay responding to the exhibit, Edwidge Danticat ruminates on the present-day disfigurement of Haitian sugar cane workers lured to plantations in the Dominican Republic. “We do not have to travel to the distant past to find fingerless, armless or legless people on sugar plantations,” she contends. “There are hundreds of them nearby”: Recruited under false pretenses and sometimes trafficked from Haiti, many of these men and women (and children too) work in Dominican sugar cane villages, or bateyes, in conditions that barely differ from those of their 18th-century forebears. During the zafra, or cane harvest season, they work from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week. Yet they are barely able to pay for the food they eat. Some have their identity papers taken from them and fall into such bottomless debt that it becomes impossible for them to leave. Their children cannot go to school or learn a trade. That the US “imports more than 200,000 tons of sugar from the Dominican Republic each year” and is that country’s “largest sugar partner,” implicates US complicity in disfiguring and ingesting the black body. Indeed, A Subtlety illuminates the eco-ontological continuities between the precarity of black life and the perishability of sugar cane. Moreover, Danticat suggests that the geographic scale that Walker’s subtitle intimates—“from the cane fields to the kitchens of the New World”—collapses the space-time of sugar production. The sugar and molasses used to construct A Subtlety could as easily have been cultivated in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or Louisiana, and at virtually any time from the sixteenth century to the present. Like Locke, then, Walker’s place-based critique that restores Brooklyn to the geography of the sugar industry also dislodges it from a specific time or space, mapping a sugar plantation cartography both domestic and global, southern and northern, one that has remained continuous (though not static) since the inception of the modern world. Ultimately, both A Subtlety and The Cutting Season deploy a logic of perishability to expose the sundry, insidious ways the violence of the sugar plantation and factory lingers in the present. Specifically, Walker and Locke respatialize the plantation tour, shifting readers’/viewers’ attention away from the big house to the slave cabins, corporate farm, sugar cane fields, and factory to underscore the precarity of the black and Latinx laboring body. On the one hand, by using perishable commodities, Walker intimates that sugar production is always already alloyed with human and agricultural consumption, decay, and death. Her decision to install an already perishable exhibit in a soon-to-be-demolished factory insists that destroying the site of racial-sexual violence is the only alternative to the impossibility of justice and repair. The Cutting Season similarly concludes with Belle Vie’s dissolution: the Clancys sell the property to Groveland Corporation, and Caren and her daughter, Morgan, relocate to Washington, D.C., parting with south Louisiana altogether.5 The irony of Caren’s role as a black woman overseer where her mother had been head cook and her ancestors had been enslaved and then “employed” as sharecroppers is ultimately insufficient and unsatisfying, insofar as it keeps her entangled in the tentacles of the plantation’s afterlife. Instead, moving with Morgan to Washington, D.C. is the ultimate respatializing act, as it dislodges mother and daughter from Belle Vie’s oppressive geography and redirects their matrilineage from the kitchen and overseer’s cabin toward a more promising black feminist future. (This is not to suggest, however, that the US South is incompatible with black futures, as we will see in part two.) When Raymond inquires if Caren will “try to block the Groveland deal, [and] lay some claim to the land,” she replies: “‘I don’t want it… . Any more than you do’” (370). Both Caren and Raymond are the collateral damage of this racial drama, albeit in unequal measure, and must depart from Belle Vie to extricate themselves from its generational trauma. Read together, Belle Vie’s sale is akin to the Domino Refinery’s leveling: each site must be dissolved or destroyed, respectively, to terminate the seemingly endless cycle of violence and perishability that the plantation and factory have set in motion. 2. Plantation Futures Locke’s and Walker’s works expose how the violent legacies of sugar and the plantation persist in the present. Their emphasis on perishability, dissolution, and departure renders these geographies of domination as zones of social death that persist in threatening black and brown life, both in the US South and the broader Global South. But what of history and cultural memory if the material evidence of slavery and the plantation is demolished? After all, Belle Vie’s slave cabins constitute a scene equally important for its African American visitors; hence Caren’s decision to maintain them, painful and haunting though they are. In “Plantation Futures,” McKittrick provocatively queries: “If the plantation, at least in part, ushered in how and where we live now, and thus contributes to the racial contours of uneven geographies, how might we give it a different future?” (4) I take this to mean, is it possible to imbue these sites of violence with an ethic that does not perpetuate racial capitalism but that honors the lives that perished there instead? This, I propose, is the objective of the other contemporary black women artists examined here, whose work transforms the afterlife of the sugar plantation into a geography of racial healing, feminist insurgency, and self-determination. In doing so, they give the sugar plantation an alternative future, and reclaim the US South for African Americans as well. Beyoncé’s music videos—“Déjà Vu” (2006), “Formation” (2016), and especially her visual album Lemonade (2016)—along with Baszile’s novel, Queen Sugar (2014), and its television adaptation created by DuVernay, turn to Louisiana’s sugar plantation geographies to elucidate the violence of slavery and dispossession, on one hand, and to repair African Americans’ fraught relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary southern identity, on the other. Through respatialization and reterritorialization, they render the plantation as alterable, even as they, too, struggle against its ongoing economic viability and the antiblack narrative violence perpetuated there. In “Landscapes, Memories, and History in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” LaKisha Simmons examines the “history of slavery—and its remnants” in the critically acclaimed visual album. Simmons insightfully calls viewers’ attention to its setting on the Destrehan and Madewood Plantations—former Louisiana sugar estates along the Mississippi River—and their histories of violence, dispossession, and resistance. While Lemonade represents Beyoncé’s most sustained and overtly political engagement with the afterlife of the plantation, she first experimented with plantation iconography in the video for her 2006 single, “Déjà Vu,” from her second solo album, B’Day, filmed, in part, on the Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana. According to its website, “The enslaved community at Oak Alley . . . fluctuated between roughly 110 and 120 men, women, and children,” who worked “for up to 18 hours at a time, turning sweet cane juice into molasses and sugar” during the harvest season (“The Enslaved”). This history of slavery is absent from “Déjà Vu,” however. In the video, Beyoncé is bedecked in haute couture, Victorian-era dresses and gowns, as she runs through sugar fields and twirls in front of the big house, singing about being madly in love. Featuring her then-boyfriend and rapper, Jay-Z, the video depicts them in a series of sexually suggestive scenarios. The visual of crazy-in-love Beyoncé singing and dancing with utter sexual abandon in sugar fields and in front of Oak Alley’s big house contrasts significantly with the experiences of the enslaved women who would have labored there. “At Oak Alley, women performed the majority of heavier maintenance work. Repairing roads and levees was ‘women’s work[,]’ while their more expensive male counterparts were organized around tasks immediately related to sugar cane cultivation, such as cutting wood, irrigation, and machinery repair” (“The Enslaved”). As a contemporary black woman performer, Beyoncé transforms the plantation into a seemingly innocuous backdrop for her artwork, perhaps in ways not dissimilar from the tourism industry’s tendency to evacuate the plantation of its violent past. Beyoncé, however, received no backlash for her decision to film “Déjà Vu” at Oak Alley without even a nod to its slave past (unlike Ani DiFranco, a white woman folk artist, who was roundly criticized in 2013 for planning an artists’ retreat on Nottoway Plantation, another Louisiana sugar estate).6 As a black woman from the US South, perhaps Beyoncé’s body is always already marked with the history of slavery, such that her presence at Oak Alley was viewed as insurgent rather than insensitive. Still, the utter lack of acknowledgment of the site’s history is troubling, especially since she would have paid to shoot the video there, effectively contributing to the plantation’s ongoing economic viability. Though viewers did not take issue with the video’s historical and geographical limitations, they challenged the singer for a seemingly more trivial reason. Shortly after its release, discontented fans sent a petition to Columbia Records objecting to, among other things, Beyoncé’s dancing as “erratic, confusing and alarming at times” and requesting that “an alternative video be shot featuring; [sic] more choreographed & less spontaneous dancing . . . less gyrating, less scenes of non-existant [sic] sexual chemistry between Mr. Carter and Ms. Knowles… .” (“Will Beyoncé Reshoot”). The petitioners’ audacity in challenging Beyoncé’s artistic freedom signifies on the plantation’s historical function as a technology of domination over black people’s labor and sexuality. The complaint about Beyoncé’s choreography is of particular interest, because one of the closing routines is performed with a sugar cane field in the background and calls to mind the aesthetics of Josephine Baker. One of the foremost black women performers of the early twentieth century, Baker’s performances were often set on stages depicting southern plantations and African “jungles.” Her ludic choreography and gestures, though virtuosic, explicitly trafficked in racial and gender stereotypes, reinforcing minstrelsy’s and primitivism's vice grip on early twentieth-century black performance (see, for instance, her performance in the 1927 French film, La Revue des Revues, where she dances as a kind of Topsy figure on a southern plantation). In one of the final shots of “Déjà Vu,” Beyoncé is dressed in only a brown and green sequined halter-top and a green tutu, ostensibly citing Baker’s infamous and taboo banana skirt. Yet, instead of the happy-go-lucky gestures of minstrelsy, Beyoncé channels Baker’s brazen sexuality and virtuosic performance style into a routine inspired by contemporary African dance. What is the significance of restoring African dance—and by extension, black women’s leisure, pleasure, sexuality, romance, and virtuosity—to the plantation, one of the originary sites of cultural loss and erasure in the Americas, and to the sugar cane field in particular, the very locus of racial capitalist production, consumption, and exploitation? How might dance function as an embodied performance of respatialization and reterritorialization that attempts to reconcile the land with the very peoples once forced to exploit it? Beyoncé returns to the theme of the plantation to pursue these questions 10 years later in the music video for her single, “Formation,” and visual album, Lemonade, released in February and March of 2016, respectively. Infused with her own feminist and black nationalist aesthetics, however much contested, these recent projects are more overtly political in their treatment of the racial logics of the plantation south and its legacies. Many commentators focused on Hurricane Katrina imagery in “Formation” and its critique of police brutality as perhaps the most explicitly pro-black political statement in Beyoncé’s body of work to date. Filmed entirely in Los Angeles, the video for “Formation” is figuratively set in a gothic Louisiana plantation mansion. Its appropriation of the plantation house is especially notable. According to Patrick Sisson, “Director Melina Matsoukas . . . wanted paintings of black women and families on the walls, done in a colonial style” to convey the idea that “‘this is not a house the slaves are working in, this is a house where the slaves are the masters.’” When the crew realized that images of “aristocratic [black] people” from that era did not exist, “They scanned paintings of white people and painted black people over them.” This politics of insurgency, of racial role reversal, pervades the video: black women perform bourgeois femininity in the parlor and dance defiantly in the hallway, while young black girls—including the singer’s young daughter, Blue Ivy—are seen running, playing, and laughing throughout the home. In effect, these black women have reclaimed the plantation house for themselves. According to Thavolia Glymph, the plantation household was both a workplace and a “field of power relations and political practices” between white mistresses and enslaved black women (2). Thus, Beyoncé and her dancers advance a black feminist critique from within the very space that relegated enslaved women outside of the category of womanhood. Yet, as Audre Lorde famously maintains, the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house. So simply rendering black people as masters and mistresses will not fully deconstruct the plantation household as a geography of domination. Rather, the video’s images invoke the memory of Marie Thérèse Coincoin, the formerly enslaved black woman in Louisiana who, upon manumission, owned a plantation and slaves of her own. Obviously, Beyoncé would never endorse slavery; still, her pronouncement at the video’s end to “Just stay gracious / best revenge is your paper” was roundly criticized as a procapitalist sentiment that, for some, undermined the video’s radical ambitions. Simply inverting the racial hierarchy does nothing to uproot the system that enabled such horrific crimes against humanity. Despite its seemingly procapitalist message, “Formation” builds on the use of black vernacular dance in “Déjà Vu” as a radical mode of resistance.7 In addition to Beyoncé and her tribe of black women and girls dancing in the big house, the video portrays a young black boy, no more than 10 years old, dancing in the street before a barricade of policemen wearing helmets, shields, and bulletproof vests and armed with military-grade weapons. Such an image represents how the increasing hypermilitarization of the police routinely leads to the murder of unarmed black men, women, and children, such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and so many others. Significantly, the black boy’s dancing disarms the police officers. When he raises his hands to show that he is unarmed and thus does not pose a threat to them, they raise their hands in an act of surrender too. The shot then shifts to a graffitied wall with “Stop shooting us” scrawled in black spray paint, a plea to end the senseless killing of unarmed black people (0:04:22–3). In “Formation,” then, black vernacular dance is figured as a mode of pleasure, sociality, and resistance to racial violences both past and present, from the big house to the police state. The visual album Lemonade fittingly marks Beyoncé’s return to and most thorough engagement with the specter of Louisiana’s sugar cane industry. It was filmed, in part, on the Destrehan Plantation, where “by 1804 … 56 enslaved workers, produced over 203,000 pound[s] of sugar” (Destrehan Plantation). Destrehan is also significant for its history of black resistance: in 1811, a group of enslaved black people rose up against their masters and marched to New Orleans, slaughtering white people, burning plantations, and freeing enslaved people along the way. It was the largest slave revolt in US history (Follett, “Rise and Fall” 66). At Destrehan, owners and white elites successfully put down the rebellion, decapitating the insurgents and prominently displaying their heads on sticks (Simmons). Against this historical backdrop of labor exploitation and racial capitalism that, as recent scholarship on slavery and the history of capitalism demonstrates, formed the basis of the US economy, Lemonade channels and signifies on Destrehan’s history of slave resistance.8 Like “Déjà Vu” and “Formation,” the film posits black vernacular dance as a mode of subversion. For instance, the video for the single “Sorry,” filmed on the Madewood Plantation, portrays Serena Williams, perhaps the world’s greatest athlete, twerking in the big house, “the very same place where an enslaved girl’s job was to carry the whip of torture,” as Beyoncé sings about spurning a lover (Simmons). Madewood was constructed in 1846, during the height of slavery and Louisiana’s sugar industry, yet the plantation website says nothing about the people once enslaved there who would have almost certainly constructed it. By twerking in the big house—the crucible of southern white femininity and domesticity—Williams’s titillating performance of pleasure and sexual agency restores black people, and black women in particular, to Madewood’s sanitized history and geography. Further, her body and dance performance function similarly to her (unfortunately) disruptive role in professional tennis, a sport with its own complicated racial, class, and gender politics, wherein both Serena and her sister Venus have endured no shortage of antiblack discrimination and misogyny. Through Serena, Lemonade figures black women’s virtuosic performance as a respatializing modality that counteracts the imbalance of power to which they have historically been subjected, whether in the plantation household or on the tennis court. By staging her videos on former sugar cane plantations, Beyoncé foregrounds black women’s physical and affective geographies—love, sexuality, feminism, maternity, and sisterhood—within the afterlife of the plantation. Collectively, her plantation performances bear witness to past abuses, both personal and collective, and insist on the need for reconciliation and repair. For instance, in Lemonade, Beyoncé’s healing from Jay-Z’s infidelity is situated against the backdrop of the originary racial injury of slavery. As she notes in a 2018 interview in Vogue: I come from a lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power, and mistrust. Only when I saw that clearly was I able to resolve those conflicts in my own relationship. Connecting to the past and knowing our history makes us both bruised and beautiful. I researched my ancestry recently and learned that I come from a slave owner who fell in love with and married a slave. I had to process that revelation over time. I questioned what it meant and tried to put it into perspective. I now believe it’s why God blessed me with my twins. Male and female energy was able to coexist and grow in my blood for the first time. I pray that I am able to break the generational curses in my family and that my children will have less complicated lives. Beyoncé’s return to the plantation past attempts to repair the originary violence of fractured relations that, for her, slavery inaugurated. Reckoning with the past through dance and visual art will help her craft a “less complicated” future for her children, in particular, and for African Americans more generally. Beyoncé’s plantation performances attempt to come to terms with the slave past, even as they also signal how racial inequalities persist in the present. To that end, she stages a plantation-dinner-cum-conjure-ceremony, featuring the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and other victims of police brutality, mourning their children’s murders. Their presence reminds viewers that in the face of ongoing state violence against black people, they can still rely on ancestral resources such as cooking and conjure to enact personal and collective healing while still pursuing justice. In an attempt to envision black futurity, Lemonade exchanges “Déjà Vu”’s sugar cane fields for images of black women gardening on the provision ground, what Sylvia Wynter describes as a place of black resistance to the plantation’s market logics. Following the intertitle, “Resurrection,” these women, dressed in flowing, white Victorian-era gowns and seated at a formal dining table in front of the Madewood Plantation’s towering oak trees, create “their own radical, futuristic community, by collecting vegetables together, cooking and caring for one another. And then Beyoncé begins singing of ‘freedom’ and ‘breaking chains’” (Simmons). In contrast to the crudeness and monstrosity of Walker’s sphinx, and the ways that it signifies on black women’s roles as domestics and cooks in “white folks’ kitchens,” Beyoncé depicts black women cooking for and communing among themselves as a feminist practice of self-care. Rather than sugar cane cultivation in the fields, dismemberment in the factory, or consumption through acts of sexual violence, they cultivate, cook, and consume vegetables from their own garden. (Given that African Americans are disproportionately diagnosed with diabetes—colloquially referred to as “sugar”— resulting from diets high in processed sugars, the film indirectly names poverty, food insecurity, and health disparities as other afterlives of slavery and the plantation as well.) In this way, the women perform reterritorialization by portraying a more ethical relationship to agriculture and the earth. Significantly, the locus of this “futuristic community” is within Destrehan’s extant slave quarters and slave cabins, the very spaces where the women’s enslaved ancestors tried to create a semblance of black social and domestic life under the most impossible conditions. Reclaiming the South as home, these women suggest, hinges on reckoning with the originary site of violence and rupture. If “Formation” inverts the racial hierarchy of plantations, the black women of Lemonade create community and perform self-care as Beyoncé and rapper Kendrick Lamar sing about freedom. In doing so, they cite, perhaps unknowingly, past efforts to transform Destrehan into a futuristic site of black self-determination. According to Destrehan’s website, “During the Civil War, the Union Army seized the plantation and established the Rost Home Colony where newly freed slaves learned trades enabling them to transition into a life of freedom.” Like their ancestors, then, Beyoncé, Lamar, and their dinner guests attempt to give Destrehan a different future, transforming it from a carceral landscape to a liberatory one. Furthermore, Beyoncé hails black maternity by contrasting shots of black mothers of young men killed by police violence with that of a swaddled newborn child, intimating a future pregnant with hope and possibility. Motherhood is sacred labor, Beyoncé implies, unlike Walker’s grotesque of the mammy figure as the wet nurse of the New World. If “Déjà Vu” and “Formation” feature black diasporic vernacular dance, “Freedom” portrays a young black ballerina as an embodied performance of resistance and as another instance of black women’s virtuosity in fields where they are often marginalized and excluded. This futuristic enactment of black women’s worldmaking is almost identical to the conclusion of The Cutting Season. On their last night at Belle Vie, the black employees commune “out of sight of the goings-on in the big house. The scene was Jason’s funeral,” Locke writes. “It started to feel like a party instead of a funeral—a proper send-off with food and drink and good music, blues and some zydeco, and when it got really late, Earth, Wind, & Fire. They danced, some of them; they sat and talked and laughed” (372). Jason’s wake and Beyoncé’s plantation-dinner-cum-conjure-ceremony both seek to mourn the plantation past. Yet, whereas Belle Vie is sold off and Caren seeks a fresh start in Washington, D. C., Beyoncé reclaims the plantation as a space for contemporary black women to, at least temporarily, nurture each other and begin healing from the legacy of racial-sexual violence sewn into the land and institutions born there. By analyzing “Déjà Vu” alongside “Formation” and Lemonade, I argue that Beyoncé’s experimentations with south Louisiana’s sugar plantation landscapes visualize and perform repair. Alone, “Déjà Vu” may be read as an act of cultural forgetting that vividly resembles the plantation tourism industry’s practice of erasure and disappearance. Alternatively, Beyoncé’s alleged erratic dancing in a sugar cane field transfigures “the broken and ravenous body [of the peoples once enslaved there] into a site of pleasure,” an essential component of what Hartman calls “redressive action” (Scenes 77). As Beyoncé has continued to experiment with plantation iconography in “Formation” and Lemonade, she has more effectively critiqued its history of violence, though she does not linger on it (or grapple with her own complicity in its ongoing economic viability by renting and shooting her videos there). Rather, she displaces or writes over the plantation past with images of black women reclaiming their bodies and sexualities and performing virtuosity, pleasure, self-care, and worldmaking. In this way, these visual artworks pay homage to the formerly enslaved black women who, as Glymph asserts, transformed the plantation household in the postemancipation era. As the film concludes, Beyoncé finally gives viewer-listeners the recipe (or incantation) for its eponymous southern drink, lemonade: “Take one pint of water, add half-pound of sugar, the juice of eight lemons, the zest of half lemon. Pour the water from one jug then into the other several times. Strain through a clean napkin” (0:50:25–48). I want to linger with the “half-pound of sugar” in Queen Bey’s recipe by turning, finally, to Natalie Baszile’s novel, Queen Sugar. Set in present-day Louisiana, it explores the intersections of race, gender, and region by juxtaposing the political economy of the contemporary sugar industry with the history of black land ownership and farming. Following her husband’s murder and father’s death, Charley Bordelon and her daughter, Micah, embark on a return migration from Los Angeles to Saint Josephine Parish, Louisiana, where her father, Ernest, has willed her an 800-acre sugar cane farm. “Charley wondered what her father had been thinking to leave her a sugar cane farm in south bumfuck Louisiana” (8). And yet “[S]he needed this farm, wherever it was. She needed a second chance. She needed momentum. And a good shove” (8). The novel details Charley’s struggles to learn the business side of sugar cane farming, even as she also learns to navigate the racial politics of the post-Civil Rights, rural South, with its vestiges of Jim Crow social arrangements. Sugar cane farming is largely the domain of men, and white men at that. So as a black woman and an “outsider,” Charley is triply marginalized and faces a series of challenges getting the farm back up and running as a result. Despite its dark history of racial violence, the South still symbolizes home for Charley and Micah, a space of healing and regeneration, achieved, in part, through sugar cane farming. However, Charley’s farm is not the garden that Alice Walker identifies as the site of southern black women’s artistry or Wynter’s plot/provision ground that Beyoncé portrays in Lemonade. Rather, it is the material legacy of racial capitalism and its persistent violence against black people. While working on a cane farm as a 13-year-old boy, Ernest, Charley’s father, was struck in the head with a shovel for getting in line for water ahead of his white coworkers and thus failing to observe the racial hierarchy and disciplinary logics of the Jim Crow South. This experience shaped Ernest profoundly, and, by extension, Charley. Years later, when that same farm was up for sale, he purchased it and planned to cultivate it to vindicate his childhood assault and the longer legacy of antiblack racism it represented. Like Caren Gray’s formerly enslaved ancestor, Jason, in The Cutting Season and generations of African Americans since then, land and property ownership symbolize the possibility of self-determination and a rebuke to the system that once reduced them to property and symbols of white wealth. To be propertied was no longer to be property. Similarly, when Charley was younger, Ernest purchased a statue by Richmond Barthé called The Cane Cutter. “The figure—a black man, naked to the waist—swung a cane knife. He was only eighteen inches tall,” but with “broad shoulders,” “knots of muscle in his arms, the burnished slabs of his pecs and back flexed with the face of his swing,” “his power took Charley’s breath away” (82). Charley’s mother found the statue repulsive, but Ernest insisted on keeping it. “‘I love the way he stands,’” Charley told her father. “‘What else?’ her father had asked… . ‘A quiet confidence.’ He seemed to approve. She went on. ‘And a defiance’” (83–84). The physical prowess, confidence, and defiance of The Cane Cutter signify Ernest’s determination to make his way as a sugar cane farmer, despite the historically fraught relationship between black people and sugar cultivation. The statue also represents how cane knives were used as tools of slave resistance, such as in the aforementioned 1811 slave revolt wherein 500 rebels were armed with cane knives as they burned plantations and beheaded planters (Follett, “Rise and Fall” 66). Ernest pursued a subtler mode of defiance, however, becoming a successful cane farmer and thus subverting the racial capitalist regime that aimed to bar black people from the industry. In her television adaptation of Baszile’s novel, Ava DuVernay more explicitly links the history of plantation slavery and black farming to contemporary racial and gender politics. A family drama, the show follows the lives of three siblings: Charley Bordelon, manager of her husband’s professional basketball career; Nova Bordelon, a New Orleans-based journalist and activist; and Ralph Angel Bordelon, a formerly incarcerated young father struggling to get his life back on track and raise his son, Blue. The Bordelon siblings come together on the occasion of their father’s death to devise a plan for his 800-acre farm, now fallen into debt and disrepair. As they struggle to revive the farm, they encounter resistance from the Landrys, the white family who have monopolized the town’s sugar industry since slavery and who once owned the Bordelons’ ancestors and their land. Guided by Charley’s business acumen and her (sometimes) blind ambition, the Bordelon siblings resuscitate the farm, establish their own sugar mill, and spearhead a campaign to encourage black farmers to mill with them instead of the Landrys, who have routinely cheated them out of their profits. In this way, the show extends the novel’s efforts to undermine the political and gendered economies of the sugar industry by promoting black economic cooperation as a strategy of “collective agency and community resilience” (White 6–11) that can destabilize racial capitalist exploitation. Beyond agriculture, the TV show maps a black feminist geography that links the afterlife of the plantation to the prison-industrial complex (a decision no doubt reflecting DuVernay’s own political commitments to prison and criminal justice reform) and that seeks to create employment opportunities for women directors on network TV.9 Nova (who is not a character in the novel) is portrayed as a dedicated prison reform activist in nearby New Orleans, and the show sympathetically portrays Ralph Angel in his struggles with parole officers, employment, and the myriad, insidious ways the for-profit prison system strategically erects barriers to obstruct the formerly incarcerated. Through Nova and Ralph Angel, the show prompts a larger conversation about recidivism, along with prison and criminal justice reform. The show also does important activist work behind the scenes. For each of its three seasons, DuVernay has employed women directors to shoot each episode. “‘If Game of Thrones can have three seasons of all-male directors,’ DuVernay reasons, ‘why can’t we have three seasons of all-women directors?’” (qtd. in Branigin) Each episode also features a behind-the-scenes discussion with the director, in which she details the cinematographic techniques—angles, shots, lighting, etc.—used to animate the script. By employing other women directors and giving them a platform to articulate the technical dimensions of their craft, DuVernay hopes to respatialize the landscape of network TV into a (black) feminist geography as well. Taken together, the novel and its TV adaptation imagine a different future for the racial and gendered economies of south Louisiana’s sugar industry. They interrupt the plantation-to-prison pipeline by depicting contemporary black farmers who cultivate their own sugar cane farms and who organize to establish a sugar mill (no doubt a critique of Louisiana’s Angola prison, where mostly black inmates pick cotton and cut cane by hand to this very day). By taking control of sugar manufacturing, they mobilize cooperative economics to challenge the industry’s history of racial capitalist exploitation and dispossession. Though they do not imagine an alternative to capitalist agriculture, they do promote a more equitable vision of the sugar industry, one that deconstructs racial barriers and thus marks a more definitive break with the plantation.10 Moreover, both Baszile and DuVernay imagine farming as a viable enterprise for black women. Unlike Marie Thérèse Coincoin, who owned slaves and a sugar plantation, or even Walker’s monstrous sphinx and its emphasis on black women’s sexual vulnerability, Charley represents a feminist critique of the plantation’s history of racial and sexual violence and economic exploitation. Queen Sugar is thus a regicide, dethroning patriarchy and racial capitalism in south Louisiana’s sugar industry and bringing a feminist insurgency to television, both on- and off-screen. Collectively, these contemporary black women artists chart a black feminist geography that lays bare the ways in which the afterlife of the sugar plantation obscures and therefore reproduces historical violences, on one hand, and imagines a more ethical way to engage these sites to pursue personal and cultural healing and regeneration, on the other. While Locke and Walker insist on a break with the plantation past through a logic of perishability, Beyoncé, Baszile, and DuVernay view it as a sacred, familial site, imbuing ownership and inhabitation with the possibility of an insurgent, alternative plantation future. Despite their varying approaches to the plantation past, ultimately, they share a feminist sensibility that rematerializes the disappeared black female body and lived experience to the history of the sugar plantation in the Americas, and especially in the US South. If, by the nineteenth century, black women were indeed less numerous as field laborers on the hemisphere’s sugar plantations, they remained crucial to its daily operations through their domestic, culinary, and reproductive labors. Through Locke’s black woman overseer, Walker’s defiant sphinx, Beyoncé’s plantation performances, and Baszile’s and DuVernay’s black woman sugar cane farmer and mill owner, respectively, these artists rescue their foremothers from obscurity, even as they sometimes spectacularize the violence they endured and find themselves still entangled in the tentacles of the plantation’s persistent economic viability. Finally, they remind us that sites and symbols can perpetuate historical injuries, and thus their meanings must be struggled over. By reading against the archival grain of sugar plantation landscapes and factory buildings, they contest and revise the discursive, epistemological, and eco-ontological violence of plantation history. In so doing, they alter plantation geographies by refashioning the landscape and built environment into a counter-archive and developing a new semiotics with which to interpret its holdings. In their hands, the putative beauty and architectural grandeur of the big house and the wealth of the cane fields and refinery are inextricably linked to an acknowledgment and indictment of black subjection and thus an ethical and sacred commitment to an antiracist and black feminist future. Footnotes 1 See also Joanne Sasvari, “Nottoway Is a White House with a Dark Past.” Culture Locker: Travel for Enlightenment, 2014. Web. 2 The Cutting Season is also in dialogue with Ernest J. Gaines’s fiction, some of which is set on Louisiana sugar plantations. See, for example, “Parishes & Prisons: Ernest Gaines’s Louisiana & Its North Carolina Kin Space,” Chapter 5 in Thadious M. Davis’s Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (2011). I argue that Locke’s novel can also be viewed as a literary analog to the Whitney Plantation in southern Louisiana, which opened in 2014 as the only plantation museum in the state, and one of the only in the country entirely dedicated to the memory of enslaved peoples and their descendants. 3 On the corporate plantation as a distinct afterlife of the plantation, see Jarvis C. McInnis, “A Corporate Plantation Reading Public: Labor, Literacy, and Diaspora in the Global Black South.” American Literature, vol. 91, no. 3, 2019, pp. 523–555. 4 On “natal alienation,” see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (1982), pp. 5–6. 5 By selling Belle Vie to Groveland, the plantation does not necessarily perish but rather takes on a new form as a corporate farm. Still, the novel marks the dissolution of the plantation tour as a mechanism of possible historical erasure. 6 Anderson, Stacy. “Ani DiFranco Cancels Artist Retreat at Former Slave Plantation.” Rolling Stone, 30 Dec. 2013. Web. 7 Beyoncé’s use of black vernacular dance as resistance also cites New Orleans’s black queer community, though not unproblematically. The opening sequences of “Formation” feature several young, queer black men twirling, twerking, and bouncing their asses, and sound clips of two of the city’s queer icons, Messy Mya and Big Freedia. By framing the video with black queer performance, Beyoncé seemingly embraces nonheteronormative constructions of gender and sexuality. However, Messy Mya’s family has launched a legal suit against Beyoncé for allegedly using the slain YouTube star’s voice without permission. Viewers have also questioned why Beyoncé samples Big Freedia’s voice without their body, lamenting the missed opportunity to include a visual representation of a trans woman to complicate the video’s seemingly cisgendered refrain, “OK ladies, now let’s get in formation” (emphasis added). So while “Formation” no doubt incorporates black queer performance, viewer-listeners remain critical of its limitations and possibly unauthorized use. 8 See, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935) and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). More recently, scholars such as Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013); and Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014), have generally argued that slavery is constitutive to American capitalism. 10 Like The Cutting Season, DuVernay’s Queen Sugar grapples with the relationship between African Americans and Latinxs in Louisiana’s sugar industry. Soon after the Bordelons hire Latinx workers to plant their cane fields, they learn that a hurricane is brewing; yet, Charley insists that the workers finish planting before leaving for safety. After the storm, two workers’ bodies are discovered in the fields. Though it appears they were murdered, the Bordelons still suspect that had Charley let them leave earlier, perhaps they would have avoided such a tragic fate. Importantly, the Bordelons question if, as landowners, they are essentially behaving like slave masters or other agrocapitalists in this new sugar plantation economy, simply replacing black bodies with brown ones. Thus, the show interrogates how even the descendants of slaves must remain vigilant in pursuing an outside to racial capitalism to prevent reproducing the very violence their ancestors endured. Works Cited Adams Jessica. Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation . U of North Carolina P , 2007 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Baker Josephine , performer. La Revue des Revues. Directed by Joe Francys, 1927 . Baszile Natalie. Queen Sugar . Viking , 2014 . 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TI - Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajz043
DA - 2019-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/black-women-s-geographies-and-the-afterlives-of-the-sugar-plantation-QPOSMU7LTR
SP - 741
VL - 31
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -