{"title":"Europe as a big house – examining plantation logics in contemporary Europe","authors":"Doron Eldar, David Jansson","doi":"10.1080/13504630.2023.2227576","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":46853,"journal":{"name":"Social Identities","volume":"29 1","pages":"281 - 299"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Identities","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2023.2227576","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ETHNIC STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍:
Recent years have witnessed considerable worldwide changes concerning social identities such as race, nation and ethnicity, as well as the emergence of new forms of racism and nationalism as discriminatory exclusions. Social Identities aims to furnish an interdisciplinary and international focal point for theorizing issues at the interface of social identities. The journal is especially concerned to address these issues in the context of the transforming political economies and cultures of postmodern and postcolonial conditions. Social Identities is intended as a forum for contesting ideas and debates concerning the formations of, and transformations in, socially significant identities, their attendant forms of material exclusion and power.