Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation (New Directions in Southern Studies) - Softcover

Adams, Jessica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807858013 ISBN 13: 9780807858011

Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

From Storyville brothels and narratives of turn-of-the-century New Orleans to plantation tours, Bette Davis films, Elvis memorials, Willa Cather’s fiction, and the annual prison rodeo held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Jessica Adams considers spatial and ideological evolutions of southern plantations after slavery. In Wounds of Returning, Adams shows that the slave past returns to inhabit plantation landscapes that have been radically transformed by tourism, consumer culture, and modern modes of punishment — even those landscapes from which slavery has supposedly been banished completely. Adams explores how the commodification of black bodies during slavery did not disappear with abolition — rather, the same principle was transformed into modern consumer capitalism. As Adams demonstrates, however, counternarratives and unexpected cultural hybrids erupt out of attempts to re-create the plantation as an uncomplicated scene of racial relationships or a signifier of national unity. Peeling back the layers of plantation landscapes, Adams reveals connections between seemingly disparate features of modern culture, suggesting that they remain haunted by the force of the unnatural equation of people as property.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessica Adams is lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is coeditor of Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the Southern United States.

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Adams explores how the commodification of black bodies during slavery did not disappear with abolition?rather, the same principle was transformed into modern consumer capitalism. From Storyville brothels and narratives of turn-of-the-century New Orleans to plantation tours, Bette Davis films, Elvis memorials, Willa Cather's fiction, and the annual prison rodeo held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Jessica Adams considers spatial and ideological evolutions of southern plantations after slavery. Peeling back the layers of plantation landscapes, Adams reveals connections between seemingly disparate features of modern culture, suggesting that they remain haunted by the force of the unnatural equation of people as property.

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Wounds of Returning

RACE, MEMORY, and PROPERTY on the POSTSLAVERY PLANTATIONBy Jessica Adams

The University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2007 The University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-5801-1

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................ixPrologue..........................................xiIntroduction......................................11. Sex and Segregation............................212. Plantations without Slaves.....................543. Roadside Attractions...........................864. Southern Frontiers.............................1085. Stars and Stripes..............................135Epilogue..........................................159Notes.............................................161Bibliography......................................195Index.............................................217

Chapter One

Sex and Segregation

Ownership is the most intimate relation one can have to objects. Walter Benjamin

"New Orleans is paved with Negro skulls," said one American author. He would have done better to say that New Orleans is paved with beautiful women, although this would not disqualify the first observation. Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein

It was the end of the nineteenth century. Consumer culture was emerging as a force to be reckoned with in the United States, and the mechanisms of production were poised to outstrip demand, with advertising about to step into the breach to inspire fresh desires. Segregation was congealing as social practice even as everyday life was inevitably more complicated than an overview of the laws would suggest. And the southern plantation was being renewed as myth. White culture invoked evidence of the Old South as a bulwark against encroachments of blackness into post-Emancipation "mainstream" culture-encroachments that, in fact, white culture found very seductive. Women of color were still serving as cooks, nannies, and maids in white southern households, and white men still wanted to sleep with them. In nineteenth-century Louisiana, the taboo against sex and intimate relationships across the color line grew stronger as segregation grew more entrenched. The social difficulties involved in white men's cross-racial desires could be managed, and the fulfillment of these desires facilitated, however, through their confinement to certain spaces and geographies: brothels and, later, the officially sanctioned environment of Storyville, the red-light district for which New Orleans would become famous.

Because female sexuality was critical to the exercise of power on the plantation, the reinvention of the plantation system necessarily involved women's bodies. In the antebellum South, wives and slaves were quite openly and deliberately entangled. Historian Stephanie McCurry writes that

in the lexicon of metaphors for slavery, marriage took pride of place, a discursive construction historians have rarely recognized. No other relation was more universally embraced as both natural and divine, and none so readily evoked the stake of enfranchised white men, yeomen and planters alike, in the defense of slave society. By equating the subordination of women with that of slaves, proslavery ministers and politicians attempted to endow slavery with the legitimacy of the family and especially marriage and, not incidentally, to invest the defense of slavery with the survival of customary gender relations. In this sense, the subordination of women bore a great deal of the ideological weight of slavery.

As McCurry's research demonstrates, this justification of slavery via white marriage also operated among whites who did not own slaves. Freedom and authority as essential qualities of whiteness were reflected in the inverted mirror of those whom whites could legally own-both slaves and white wives-whether or not they actually owned them. Because the apparent naturalness of the subordination of white women had been a critical justification for the naturalness of black slavery, Emancipation compelled a recalculation of social value in the South along gender as well as racial lines. But the fact that white women could still be unfree servants became a challenge to concepts of whiteness. Both the historic value of a white wife as measure of her husband's social status and the ideological force of paternalism, which regained momentum during the Lost Cause era as whites across the nation espoused increasingly extreme notions of white supremacy, continued to link the subjectivities of white and black women. Thus white women were in the position of upholding white masculinity by defining an aspect of post-Emancipation whiteness as linked to slavery.

The city of New Orleans has long been associated with transgressive sexuality. In part because of the lack of white women on the Louisiana frontier, European men had sexual relationships with Native American and African women, and the practice of plaage was eventually institutionalized as a unique white Creole rite during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Under this system certain light-skinned women of color, called places, were groomed as suitable consorts for men who would support them and the couple's children. Some Creole men had two families, one with a place, the other with a white woman. (This is the arrangement by which Faulkner is fascinated/repulsed in Absalom, Absalom!; the otherworldly visit of Charles Bon's "black" "wife" to the Sutpens' Mississippi plantation sums up Faulkner's vision of New Orleans's difference from the rest of the South.) With the Civil War, however, racial tensions made plaage less feasible. In the social climate of post-Reconstruction Louisiana an acknowledged intimate connection between a white man and a woman of color became problematic, and white men's legal acknowledgment of their mixed-race children became more difficult. But interracial intimacy persisted. As Alecia Long writes, "There was a range of historical situations and contexts in which sex across the color line occurred in New Orleans between 1865 and 1920. For the city's women of color, those situations could include unwanted sexual advances or violent rape, exchanging sex for money or other favors on an intermittent or ongoing basis, being a mistress to one or a series of men, marrying across the color line, which was legal in Louisiana between 1870 and 1894, or living with a man in a committed relationship without the benefit of marriage." As law created fictions of racial identity as it mandated the meaning of blood, fiction helped generate attitudes about race and race relations that shaped the practice of everyday life. Local color writers played a key role in the evolution of public perceptions of slavery and the Civil War, and national interest in southern domestic and social scenes created a forum for women's writing. In detailed descriptions of southern society, women interrogated the consequences of plantation life, including unstable postslavery relationships among property, gender, and sexuality.

Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening reveals the enduring problematic of paternalism embedded in late-nineteenth-century attitudes toward white marriage; it addresses white fears about a slippery slope from "racial equality" to miscegenation, fears related to the contemporary increase in lynchings. Yet the argument that in killing black men whites were protecting white womanhood served as...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807858013
• ISBN 13: 9780807858011
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland