October 15-18, 2020
Princeton University
Virtual Symposium
Plantations were and are sites for labor and production. As physical, economic and material interventions in a landscape, they also exist powerfully in people’s imaginations. As our title suggests we are also interested in the plantation’s iterations across temporal and spatial geographies, for we wonder if the transformations they wrought across the globe might also create possibilities to imagine the intimacies and particularities of time and space differently.
We want to ask: how and where have plantations been imagined and represented and why? If the plantation is a site of convergence, of interspecies interaction and of human and commodity flows, what has been lost or occluded in the enduring representation of plantations as the opposite of industrial and “modern” sites of labor and production? What are the implications of a term like plantationocene? And while historically a site of unfree labor and enslavement in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, what alternative constructions of freedom, and other-worldly economies of knowledge, resilience and resistance might we find within its various constructions?
Finally, how might we construct or explain a visual vocabulary of plantations and their afterlives in ways that help us to understand the politics of race, representation and labor in our contemporary moment?
This symposium will bring together scholars and artists from around the world to interrogate representations of plantations across a range of geographic locales as well as disciplinary and aesthetic modes.
The symposium organizers acknowledge we are on the unceded lands of Indigenous people. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging.
Symposium Organizers
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an art historian and writer, who is jointly appointed as an Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora Art in the departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She has lived and studied in Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and England and prior to completing her Ph.D. in African American Studies and Art History in the United States, Anna was a Registered Nurse. This personal and professional background inflect her academic and curatorial work which focuses on the relationship of vision and visuality to histories of race, empire, and migration. Her first book Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World will be published in Spring 2021 by Duke University Press. She is currently working on a co-authored book with Mia Bagneris (Tulane University), supported by an ACLS Research Collaboration Fellowship, on pre-20th century Black Diaspora art and her second book project examines the relationship of disease, landscape and image-making in the nineteenth-century British Empire.
Clare Corbould is an associate professor of History at Deakin University. She is a historian of the United States with expertise in African American politics and culture and is is the author of Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 (Harvard UP, 2009). Clare’s two current book projects share an interest in the role that historical consciousness plays in identity formation and political activism. The first brings to life the process by which elderly African American men and women were interviewed in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Clare’s second major project is a book co-authored with Michael McDonnell at the University of Sydney that surveys African Americans’ involvement in the American Revolution and their accounts of that service in the time since. The working title is To Choose Our Better History: African Americans and the American Revolution from Independence to Today.
Jarvis C. McInnis is the Cordelia & William Laverack Family Assistant Professor of English at Duke University. He is a proud graduate of Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he earned a BA in English, and Columbia University in the City of New York, where he earned a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature. McInnis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies, visual culture, and the archive. He is currently (2019-2020) a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, completing his first book manuscript, tentatively titled, “Afterlives of the Plantation: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora in the Global Black South.” This study aims to reorient the geographic contours of black transnationalism and diaspora by interrogating the hemispheric linkages between southern African American and Caribbean writers, intellectuals, and cultures in the early twentieth century. McInnis’s research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies postdoctoral fellowship, the Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement, and the First Book Institute. His work appears in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, The Global South, American Literature, and American Literary History. At Duke, McInnis serves as a co-convener of the Representing Migration Humanities Lab, where he trains undergraduate and graduate students on the theory and praxis of the archive using the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association collection.
Jessica Womack is a Ph.D. candidate in the Departments of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies modern and contemporary art from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States with a focus on African Diasporic religions and their iconography and visual culture in postcolonial and post-revolutionary contexts. Her dissertation focuses on Jamaican art after independence in 1962 and examines the connections and negotiations between artists, arts institutions, and Jamaican, British, U.S., and Cuban government officials; her work has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Social Sciences Research Council. She received her A.B. in art history from Dartmouth College in 2014 where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and her M.A. from Princeton University in 2019. Before starting her graduate work, she held curatorial and programming positions at the Hood Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and she recently participated in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum.