A Plantation Illogic: Narrating Proslavery’s Imagined Futures

Abstract

This essay explores the temporal and narrative dimensions of speculative proslavery thought, considering proslavery political economy in particular as a genre that articulates a vision of capitalist modernity unbound by liberal accounts of national futurity. This defense of slavery has its formal correlate in an ambivalent embrace of the speculative novel as a means for imagining slavery’s extension through time and space. Taking as its literary examples Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s The Partisan Leader (1836), and Edmund Ruffin’s Anticipations of the Future (1860), the essay argues that proslavery’s imagined futures are characterized by exhaustion, both of narrative and social reproduction. Considering exhaustion as the temporality that characterizes slavery’s modernity leads us to question the idea that the latter is best articulated in terms of the institution’s disavowed centrality to capitalism.Proslavery theorists made slavery central to capital by tying capital to the conditions of its hinterland; imagining the world the slaveholders could make, they got stuck in the one the plantation made.