“Heavy with Plenty”: Writing Abundance in the Plantationocene

Abstract:This essay engages with the work of Margaret Walker and Richard Wright alongside and against the dominant archives of plantation research and development in the United States South. As their work vividly illustrates, Black Southern laborers of the land were not just passive subjects serving the grand design of the landowner. They carved out spaces of radical possibility on the land against the wishes of White property owners. Black Southern writers, working at the intersection of history and historical fiction, read and wrote against the grain of dominant archives to represent Black ecological agency. Their work provides not just a counterpoint to logics of racial and ecological control characteristic of what many scholars now term the “Plantationocene,” but holds seeds of resistance and abundance within and against plantation ecologies.