Indian Removal and the Plantation South: Cherokee Present-Absence in Three Neo-Slave Narratives

This article contends that we must understand a constitutive, interactive ontogenesis between modern Indigenous Americans and African Americans that is irreversibly shaped by the dominance of racialized slavery and the plantation economy. Building on the work of Gina Caison and Kevin Bruyneel, I argue that the present-absence of the Cherokee in prominent African American neo-slave narratives—Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016)—illustrates the imaginative function of Removal in the South. I slightly modify Bruyneel’s “absent/present dynamics” to show how the Cherokee persist as a constitutive Other used by these Black authors to expose the racial logic of the Plantationocene. I assert that the three novels imagine Black and Cherokee characters not where they are “supposed” to be in order to authorize Black fugitivity, demonstrating a triangulation of the power and racial formations of Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity in relation to the plantation.