The South has never been a real space in the imaginations of authors from colonization-forward. From early works from the colonial era to the wave of Afrofuturist texts of the past several decades, the South has been a space of alternative realities, a site of speculation upon which authors projected imagined presents and futures. The “otherness” of the South has always lent the region a speculative bent in the United States and global imagination. This essay examines literature from the antebellum South itself, the supposedly geographically fixed monolith of plantation culture. Written by a majority white, proslavery authorship, southern imaginative writing before the Civil War always speculated on the “South” and shaped it as a cultural identity. To understand the endurance and widespread influence of the dominant versions of “South,” it is necessary to examine their literary origin point and not just the aftershocks and reverberations. Like writing about the South, writing from the South during the nineteenth century was always a speculative exercise, made especially evident when focusing on works by those invested in continuing an idea of “South” that lay the foundation for ideologies circulating long after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War.

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

The Epilogue traces the influence and afterlife of Villa Pisani in domestic architecture of the southern colonies of British North America, as transmitted by eighteenth-century English translations of Palladio’s treatise.

Particularly from 1638 to 1653, John Milton was deeply engaged in Ireland, although his relationship with Ireland is less well known than Edmund Spenser’s. The 1641 Ulster Rising in Ireland informs Milton’s political development, culminating in his service to Cromwell’s republican government. As the Introduction details, the 1641 Rising follows decades of strife in Ireland, following on the 1541 acceptance of Henry VIII as king of Ireland, Counter-Reformation changes in the Roman Catholic Church, and successive English plantation attempts at reforming Ireland, including the Ulster Plantation (which started the year after Milton was born).

We explore and document the joint evolution of domesticated cereal production and highly hierarchical social structures in deep history and then trace the similar structures thorough to the plantation system. All of this history points to the gradual evolution of the monocultural system, today very prevalent but highly criticized on both social and ecological grounds. This is followed by a detailed examination of what it means to convert from the monocultural ideology to a polycultural system and all the details that emerge from such a move. We note that agriculture did not start with the idea of monoculture, the latter situated in particular historical moments, but that early agriculture and today’s more advanced agroecological systems are more accurately characterized as diversified farming systems.

Long arrived in Jamaica in 1758 hoping to make money and to be able to return to England soon. The plantation would be the source of his wealth, and a settlement with his older brother Robert secured him in the ownership of Lucky Valley. Having speedily made a propitious marriage into the white elite, he devoted himself for the next eleven years to every aspect of the management of a sugar plantation, all of which he subsequently described in his History. He represents the planter’s life as one of constant work and anxiety, yet ‘smoothed by the allurements of profit’. He saw himself as the head of the enterprise, responsible at every level, and disavowed the skills of the enslaved. He acquired new enslaved labour, organized the plantation on the basis of gendered and racialized practices, bought new land and built new works, greatly increasing the production of sugar and rum. Foreseeing the likelihood of an end to the slave trade, he worried about the failure of enslaved women to reproduce themselves, which he blamed on them, thus threatening future prosperity. He proposed new practices to improve what was conceptualized as ‘breeding’.

The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.

This chapter provides a close reading of Faulkner’s first depiction of the plantation manor and argues that it provides the prototype for a spatial pattern that will be repeated so often and in so many variable forms as to constitute the foundational archetype of networked space and information flow throughout the whole of the Yoknapatawpha fiction. In Flags in the Dust, Faulkner visualizes a vertically-oriented spatial symbolism in which a violent ideology is embedded in the artifacts and aesthetic objects of the Sartoris planter network so that this ideology is capable of replicating its content in individuals who inhabit this space. This predicament is most fully realized in Colonel Sartoris’s statue, for while the man himself is dead, the ideological information of his mimetic print circulates through the financial and technological infrastructure of bank and rail, using the innovations of modernity to disseminate itself even while reinforcing the racial and class suppositions of the slave system that preceded it.

Southern modernism, including later incarnations precipitously labeled postmodern, has been broadly characterized by two often contradictory streams: the pastoral, beginning with the plantation fiction of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, and the racial surreal, beginning with Charles Chesnutt’s sly ripostes in his conjure tales. Both respond to the region’s long history of racialized labor exploitation, running from the plantation through Walmart and FedEx, from Parchman through the nation’s current carceral system. As labor sociologists, the new historians of capitalism, and literary scholars such as Michael North have shown, these literary traditions and the history to which they respond do not constitute some quaint exception within ongoing American modernism and modernity but remain central to it, from the plantation house to the Westin Bonaventure and from Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Du Bois, Hurston, and Welty to William Styron, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown.

Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.

“Slavery and the Anthropocene” argues for putting US chattel slavery – including both the suffering of enslaved people and the role of the “master” – and not just the steam engine or measurements of spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, at the center of how we understand the Anthropocene. It does so, in part, as a corrective to a tendency in contemporary theoretical work on the Anthropocene to stress the apocalyptic novelty of the problem, a focus on the immediate present and emerging future that, however understandable, nevertheless risks obscuring the profound historical embeddedness of our environmental crises in white supremacy and racial oppression. Drawing on examples from narratives of enslaved people, the chapter asserts that the racialized hierarchies of the plantation continue to shape the very different ways humans understand and experience the Anthropocene.

In Chapter Four, I watch as South Carolina colonists adapted another, much older set of legal categories and procedures, transforming their local Chancery Court into a slave court. Analyzing unstudied manuscript litigation records reveals that colonists routinely asked Chancellors to recognize property interests in people and to facilitate the transfer of familial wealth in the form of slaves. In doing so, they relied upon procedures common to English equity courts, and they invoked familiar descriptions of equity as a concept. Whereas at common law complainants were constrained by traditional forms of action, Chancery procedures gave South Carolina colonists an opportunity to claim enslaved people when evidence had been destroyed, when relatives conspired to conceal slaves, or when witnesses could not be located. Using the relative openness of Chancery bill procedure to tell their complicated stories, they asked the Court to intervene and adjudicate the space between the customary and legal. In doing so, they lay bare the dense web of arrangements and assumptions involving human property that made their plantation economy work, and the Court’s role in perpetuating those arrangements. In a place where peopled were deemed objects at law, equity – a law rooted in notions of justice and fairness – ironically opened up space for litigants to articulate claims to human beings.

Chapter Two examines the specific legal consequences of colonists’ decision to categorize slaves as chattels at law. Properly fit into an English law rubric, colonists in South Carolina and throughout plantation America transformed human beings into a dynamic form of capital that could be bought, sold, and financed with ease. As a practical matter, classifying slaves as chattel gave colonists access to a set a commercial forms and procedures that had coalesced to facilitate long-distance trading. Conditional bonds were among the most important of these, and I follow this legal form of debt as it became part of an expanding Atlantic commercial system. Originating in the Middle Ages, conditional bonds coalesced into a distinctive form that was easier to enforce in common law than other forms of debt. The enforceability of conditional bonds made them surprisingly portable as they travelled across the globe. Although this instrument had originated to suit the needs of an agrarian society, the conditional bond easily accommodated commercial ventures that assumed people could be property. The power of conditional bonds to hold debtors to account in colonial courts made them particularly useful in shoring up a trade that was built entirely upon credit. Ultimately, bonds became an unremarkable feature of commercial life in plantation societies like South Carolina and Jamaica, where creditors relied upon this much older instrument to secure a wide variety of commercial transactions.

Despite the centrality of place to H. P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction, weird regionalisms have largely been ignored in literary criticism. This essay not only reads The Southern Reach trilogy through the lens of region, but also reads region through the lens of The Southern Reach trilogy. It contrasts Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” with VanderMeer’s trilogy to highlight how they both develop a weird aesthetics of the Plantationocene. The chapter argues that weird fiction in the U.S. has always been underwritten by racialized and regionalized ideologies that derive from slavery and the plantation. The New England exceptionalism Lovecraft endorses is founded on concepts of personhood, nature, and region that legitimate the dehumanization of African Americans and other people of color. In contrast, VanderMeer presents the indisputably southern terrain of the Gulf Coast in a way that does not rely on “the South” as a significant framework. The Southern Reach portrays a sparsely populated Gulf Coast that is not so much post-southern as it is post-Earth: VanderMeerian Florida camouflages something very different, and much more weird, than region as southern studies scholars often think of it.

This essay presents a historical and critical overview of the antebellum plantation romance, or novels written by southerners and those sympathetic to the slaveholding South that deliberately manage the representation of the plantation space for a broader reading public. These representations, in their attempts to shape the image of the U.S. South around the idea of a unified, pastoral community, are reliant on the networks that made plantation culture possible in the first place: global trading, the rise of industrialism, and, of course, slavery. As such, the plantation in works such as John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832), George Tucker’s The Valley of Shenandoah (1824), Maria J. McIntosh’s The Lofty and the Lowly (1852), and William Gilmore Simms’s Woodcraft (1852/54) emerges as a heterogeneous entity. With these dynamic elements at play, despite its perceived regional limitations, the genre of the southern plantation romance reveals the conflicting forces that were the main currents in nineteenth-century culture and society.

This essay revises traditional notions of the plantation as antithetical to modernity by linking foundational Anglo-American writings about the plantation to English Enlightenment thought. By examining writings about the American plantation enterprise ranging from Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588/1590) to John Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), this essay establishes a clear relationship between practical considerations of settlement and epistemological and ethical questions central to Enlightenment thinking. Harriot’s text, for instance, performs a shift from deductive to inductive reasoning when considering plantation settlement, thereby anticipating the modern scientific method. Locke’s contribution, however, presages a more dissonant relationship between evolving Enlightenment ideals and the American plantation system as notions such as climatic determinism and the immorality of enslavement became more pervasive.

Modern understanding of the institution of slavery and the experience of slave themselves has been largely defined and dominated by a template drawn from the modern plantation slavery of the Americas. Images of slave agency and of abolitionism have been derived from the same template in which slave agency is equated with unambiguous resistance to slavery as such, and abolitionism attributed to a moral response originating within the slave-owning society and possessing a strong redemptive dimension. The weakness of an elite abolitionism regarding ‘Islamic’ slavery in the states of the eastern Mediterranean has often been noted and contrasted with the moral force and redemptive power of Western abolitionism. This chapter argues, firstly, that the ascription of a uniquely Islamic character to Middle Eastern and North African slavery, which in fact shares its key characteristics with practices and notions common to medieval and early modern southern Europe, is a survival of nineteenth century Orientalism. It argues, secondly, that the relative weakness of an abolitionist sentiment can best be explained not by the power of an Islamic discourse but by the structures of slavery in the region and especially the forms of agency to which those structures gave rise.