Defining the Plantation as Diagram
Index
Oscar Oliver-Didier (2021) The Caribbean as Inaugural Imaginary: Comparison and Contingency Professor Ana Dopico
Sylvia Wynter: Novel and History, Plot and Plantation (1971) Edward Kamau Brathwaite: Caribbean Man in Space and Time (1975) Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation (1990) Antonio Benítez-Rojo: The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992) Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant: In Praise of Creoleness (1993)
Novel and History, Plot and Plantation (1971) Sylvia Wynter
For if the history of Caribbean society is that of a dual relation between plantation and plot, the two poles which originate in a single historical process, the ambivalence between the two has been and is the distinguishing characteristic of the Caribbean response. This ambivalence is at once the root cause of our alienation; and the possibility of our salvation. [‌] This culture recreated traditional values – use values. This folk culture became a source of cultural guerilla resistance to the plantation system [‌] After the abolition of slavery the slave-turned-peasant, grew crops both to feed himself, and to sell on the market. The plantation, dependent on mass-labour, was determined to use their ownership of the land to compel him back to work; and to his role in the structure of exchange value. The plantation was the superstructure of civilization; and the plot was the roots of culture. But there was a rupture between them, the superstructure was not related to its base, did not respond to the needs of the base, but rather to the demands of external shareholders and the metropolitan market. The plantation was run by the manager class, the colon class. This class and the labouring indigenous class faced each other across barricades that are in-built in the very system which created them.
1
Caribbean Man in Space and Time (1975) Edward Kamau Brathwaite
With regard to the plantation model, we shall have to allow for interaction of unit structures: plantation/hinterland vs. Metropole; but we shall also have to introduce the concept of inter-structure; that is, the interaction between inner and outer plantation, inner and outer metropole, and the laterals and diagonal relationships between these. With this kind of multi-dimensional model, our assumptions about ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, and certainly the usual dialectical assumption that there is a natural progression from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ may well have to be modified.
3
Poetics of Relation (1990) Édouard Glissant
Let us, nonetheless, consult the ruins with their uncertain evidence, their extreme fragile monuments, their frequently incomplete, obliterated, or ambiguous archives. You can guess already what we are to discover: that the Plantation is one of the focal points for the development of present-day modes of Relation. Within this universe of domination and oppression, of silent or professed dehumanization, forms of humanity stubbornly persisted. In this outmoded spot, on the margins of every dynamic, the tendencies of our modernity begin to be detectable. Our first attempt must be to locate just such contradictions. One of these contradictions contrasts the tidy composition of such a universe—in which social hierarchy corresponds in maniacal, minute detail to a mercilessly maintained racial hierarchy—with the ambiguous complexities otherwise proceeding from it. […] A second contradiction contrasts the Plantation’s will to autarky with its dependence, in reality, in relation to the external world. The transactions it fostered with this world took place in the elementary form of the exchange of goods, usually at a loss. Payment was in kind, or as an equivalent exchange value, which led to accumulation neither of experience nor of capital. Nowhere did the Planters manage to set up organisms that were sufficiently solid and autonomous to allow them to have access to the control of a market, mean of international transportation, an independent system of money, or an efficient and specific representation in foreign markets. The Plantations, entities turned in upon themselves, paradoxically, have all the symptoms of extroversion. They are dependent, by nature, on someplace elsewhere. In their practice of importing and exporting, the established politics is not decided from within. One could say, in fact, that, socially, the Plantation is not the product of a politics but the emanation of a fantasy. 5
The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992) Antonio Benítez-Rojo
We can speak, nevertheless, of a Caribbean machine as important or more so than fleet machine. This machine, this extraordinary machine, exists today, that is, it repeats continuously. It’s called: the plantation. Its prototypes were born in the Near East, just after the times of the crusades, and moved toward the West. In the fifteenth century the Portuguese installed their own model in the Cape Verde Islands and on Madeira, with astonishing success. There were certain entrepreneurs—like the Jew Cristóbal de Ponte and the Sharif of Berbery—who tried to construct machines of the family in the Canaries and on the Moroccan coast, but the venture was too big for any single man. It turned out that an entire kingdom, a mercantilist monarchy, would be needed to get the big machine going with its gears, its wheels, and its mills. I want to insist that Europeans finally controlled the construction, maintenance, technology, and proliferation of the plantation machines, especially those that produced sugar. (This family of machines almost always makes cane sugar, coffee, cacao, cotton, indigo, tea, bananas, pineapples, fibers, and other goods whose cultivation is impossible or too expensive in the temperate zones; furthermore, it usually produces the Plantation, capitalized to indicate not just the presence of plantations but also the type of society that results from their use and abuse.)
7
In Praise of Creoleness (1993)
Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant Let us, nonetheless, consult the ruins with their uncertain evidence, their extreme fragile monuments, their frequently incomplete, obliterated, or ambiguous archives. You can guess already what we are to discover: that the Plantation is one of the focal points for the development of present-day modes of Relation. Within this universe of domination and oppression, of silent or professed dehumanization, forms of humanity stubbornly persisted. In this outmoded spot, on the margins of every dynamic, the tendencies of our modernity begin to be detectable. Our first attempt must be to locate just such contradictions. One of these contradictions contrasts the tidy composition of such a universe—in which social hierarchy corresponds in maniacal, minute detail to a mercilessly maintained racial hierarchy—with the ambiguous complexities otherwise proceeding from it. […] A second contradiction contrasts the Plantation’s will to autarky with its dependence, in reality, in relation to the external world. The transactions it fostered with this world took place in the elementary form of the exchange of goods, usually at a loss. Payment was in kind, or as an equivalent exchange value, which led to accumulation neither of experience nor of capital. Nowhere did the Planters manage to set up organisms that were sufficiently solid and autonomous to allow them to have access to the control of a market, mean of international transportation, an independent system of money, or an efficient and specific representation in foreign markets. The Plantations, entities turned in upon themselves, paradoxically, have all the symptoms of extroversion. They are dependent, by nature, on someplace elsewhere. In their practice of importing and exporting, the established politics is not decided from within. One could say, in fact, that, socially, the Plantation is not the product of a politics but the emanation of a fantasy. 9