Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Timely, provocative, and incisive, Ariel’s Ecology builds an impressive case for the emergence in the revolutionary Atlantic world of an ‘ecological’ personhood in writings from and about plantation ‘zones,’ variously authorized texts where ‘vitality’ and ‘agency’ heretofore thought by critics to have been abrogated from the enslaved and colonized emerge as byproducts of an ‘assemblage’ of relations with the natural world. Monique Allewaert’s important study will be of great interest to scholars working within and across multiple fields."—Sean X. Goudie, Penn State University
"The book brims with theoretical and aesthetic insights on every page...With its inclusion of delightful botanical plates, rare archival documents, maps, engravings, and paintings, Ariel's Ecology will not only attract an interdisciplinary audience of scholars, educators, and students, but will also speak to a broader audience curious about subject formation in the American tropics."—Southern Spaces
"With capacious readings across a wide range of print, manuscript, and oral texts both from the colonial period and beyond, Allewaert makes a methodological argument for the use of extra-generic sources in early American criticisms. A crucial intervention not only in materialist and postcolonial ecocriticisms, but also in political theory, diasporic American studies, and early American studies generally."—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
"Ariel’s Ecology provides a valuable, thought-provoking guide to this environment and those histories, and it will undoubtedly spur further thinking and writing in its wake."—Clio
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Tempest in the Plantation Zone
I
1. Swamp Sublime: Ecology and Resistance in the American Plantation Zone
2. Plant Life: Tropical Vegetation, Agencied Matter, and Cosmopolitical Form
II
3. On Parahumanity: Creole Stories and the Suspension of the Human
4. Persons without Objects: Afro-American Materialisms from Fetishes to Personhood
III
5. Involving the Universe in Ruins: Sansay’s Haitian Anabiography
Epilogue: Afterlives of Ariel’s Ecology
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
