The Free Plantation: Slavery's Institution in America, 1865--1910

"You can be," Billie Holiday declared in her autobiography, recalling midtown New York around 1940, "in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation." Readers regarding her claim as so much metaphor ought instead to take Holiday at her word, since she testifies to a historical reality. This dissertation excavates the plantation's enduring structures in American law, culture, and political economy, which withstood slavery's formal abolition. Anchored in a diverse archive of legal decisions, economic theories, and ex-slave testimonies, as well as novels, performances, and paintings, "The Free Plantation" reveals the modes and methods of slavery's institutional persistence in America through an array of historically situated readings. This interdisciplinary project exposes the plantation's affiliations as promiscuous and far-flung in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, implicating the United States in its entirety rather than any single national region. Tenacious well after 1865 and well beyond the South, the plantation described in this account revises ingrained historical notions that consider it a zone sequestered in space and time---as intensely local and isolated, as well as outmoded and obsolescent. Thematically, then, "The Free Plantation" ranges far and wide, out of necessity, in order to illuminate slavery's institution in its eccentric transformations after 1865 as at once a specific territorial formation and as a disparate set of practices and ideas.;"The Free Plantation" expands emerging scholarship on slavery's afterlife in America. This dissertation explains how slavery's deep-seated political economy and its flawed categories of political belonging were left intact in the United States. Put somewhat differently, "The Free Plantation" re-centers critical inquiry on the structures, institutions, and forms of slavery that outlasted its formal abolition. Deeming abolition to have been incomplete, this project asks where and how the plantation and the logic of slavery's institution endured in American society. Methodologically, this study of the plantation breaks new ground in its radically interdisciplinary stance, refusing to focus solely on either cultural representation or on archival history, but integrating both. Situating the plantation at the hidden heart of national endeavors after 1865, this dissertation contributes, through its expanded scope and its interdisciplinary engagements, to work in American literature, critical race theory, visual culture, Black Studies, and American cultural history.;Chapter One, "Financial Accounts: Freedom, Accumulation, and the Laws of Credit," surveys the economic and historical foundations of the plantation's resurgence after 1865, considering its corporate restructuring and the joint effects of credit laws and legal discourses of personhood and protection applied to the freed. Alongside these, the first chapter considers "financial accounts"---first-person testimonies from whites and blacks that expose the mundane violence of credit in the South. Chapter Two, "Portrait, Spectacle, Production," dissects the aesthetic character of the plantation's late nineteenth-century cultural representation. Behind the self-proclaimed "realism" of this chapter's two texts lurks the political economy of spectacle and a commodity logic sutured to blackness. Exploring questions of anonymity and publicity, of subjecthood and objecthood, that plague the ex-slave and that determine these texts' formal conventions, the second chapter argues that the represented plantation itself functions as a mode of production and of black subjection. Paired, Chapters Three and Four comprise a concluding section on frontiers. Chapter Three, "The Joke-Work of Cowboy Capitalism: The Plantation and the Corporate Origins of the Western," reveals the plantation's animating influence at the beginnings of the Western genre, exposing a hidden alliance between the plantation South and the Western frontier through an entirely new reading of Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902). Deeply invested in turn-of-the-century marginalist economics, the Western becomes a form through which Wister redeems the plantation toward the ends of corporate capitalism. Chapter Four, "How to Tell the Story of the Plantation in California: Fields of Wheat, The Times of Industrialism, and the Writing of Natural History," argues that the disguised presence of the plantation within the California wheat ranches of Frank Norris' The Octopus (1901) requires a reconsideration of nature in the literary genre of naturalism. A meditation on the uses and abuses of historical periodization both in Norris and Carey McWilliams' Factories in the Field (1939), this chapter critiques the trenchant historical practice of assigning the plantation to the agrarian prehistory of industrial capitalism.