Remembering bodies: Subject formation in the neo -plantation narrative

"Remembering Bodies" interrogates the material and psychic reach of the plantation: its rapid expansion from islands off the coast of Africa to the islands of the Pacific, and its persistent influence in the lives of its laborers and their descendents. By examining the historical plantation through the frameworks of narrative and memory, my project seeks to define a new sub-genre that I call the neo-plantation narrative. Like the neo-slave narrative, this genre focuses on the culture, community, and subjectivity of laborers and their descendents. By orienting these narratives around the plantation's effect on the sites and psyches that it sought to shape, this genre attempts to offer a systematic explanation of how the plantation moved vast numbers of raced bodies across the globe to press them into laboring machines. Uniting novels around a shared plantation experience enables me to analyze a wider range of works and include the narratives of indentured laborers as well as that of slaves.;The plantation haunts each of the novels that I analyze in my dissertation: William Faulkner' Absalom, Absalom!, Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging. This collection of novels traverses ethno-geographic boundaries to demonstrate the trans-national, cross-cultural span of the plantation, an economic system of organization that brought territories and people under profitable control and drove the economies of the Caribbean, Brazil, the American South, and Hawaii. Despite the diversity represented by these texts, each reveals how the internalization of the plantation's political economy, which conceals the relationship between the laborer and production, manifests itself in stories, told by women, that feature trans-generational trauma, obsessive preservation of memory, and sexual abuse.;This dissertation bridges Marxism and psychoanalysis through the rubrics of race and gender to show how the plantation's political economy is transformed into a psychic economy at the site of the raced, female body. The study of the plantation charts the life of the laborer's value: from the inception of the body's value on the plantation, to its internalization after the plantation's demise, and finally to its dissipation.