1.
Eldar, Doron, et al.
(author)
Europe as a big house – examining plantation logics in contemporary Europe
2023
In: Social Identities. - : Routledge. - 1350-4630 .- 1363-0296. ; 29:3, s. 281-299
Journal article (peer-reviewed) abstract
As a way to address the current postcolonial moment, characteristic of ongoing relations of resource extraction and border control, we turn to the metaphor of the plantation, offering an interpretation of Katherine McKittrick’s idea of plantation logics. Plantation museums, centered on former planters’ mansions (the ‘big house’) in the U.S., are important vehicles for narrating the historical period of slavery. However, such historical sites have traditionally steered away from addressing the role of enslavement in the production of the space of the big house. This erasure of the enslaved obscures the spatial and social relationality of the plantation. While continental Europe lacks these plantation houses and thus museums, it is no less important for the former colonial states in Europe to narrate their own historical involvement in slavery and, equally important, its contemporary legacies. In both contexts, we see a selective remembering of the past that is grounded in a spatial and temporal distancing of the plantation that renders the centrality of slavery to the production and reproduction of Europe invisible. In this article, we use the metaphor of the big house to illustrate how the logic of the plantation is replicated across scales of time and space. We argue that a failure to recognize the ongoing reality of the plantation logic as embodied by the European big house enables its reproduction, including in the environmental catastrophe of the Plantationocence. A consideration of Maroon geographies explores narrations of the plantation that point to a way forward to alternative futures.
2.
Eldar, Doron, et al.
(author)
Southering and the politics of heritage : the psychogeography of narrating slavery at plantation museums
2022
In: International Journal of Heritage Studies (IJHS). - : Informa UK Limited. - 1352-7258 .- 1470-3610. ; 28:3, s. 341-357
Journal article (peer-reviewed) abstract
This paper argues that an appreciation of the effects of ‘southering’, or the identity discourse of internal orientalism in the U.S., is key to understanding the historical interpretation provided at plantation museums and the challenges associated with narrative transformation at these heritage sites. An analysis of two plantation museums in Louisiana shows that efforts to transform the whitewashed narratives that fail to account for the psychogeography of southering (as reflected in the ‘Southern’ deep story) might prove counterproductive. One solution to this problem is the spatial contextualisation of plantation slavery as not only a regional but also a national and global institution – a contextualisation that is both historically accurate and also has the potential to disarm ‘Southern’ defensiveness through its explicit acknowledgement of the ‘guilt’ and participation of whites in the system of slavery throughout the U.S. (and even globally). What we ultimately argue for is the need to transcend southering, a binary discourse that creates a moral landscape of uneven racism (racist ‘South’/enlightened ‘North’) while at the same time privileging the agency of whites and occluding African American history and agency.
