Visuality,rhetoric,and reality in the Second Slavery

This extremely useful text, having already won an award, is an exceptional achievement. It encompasses four careers’ worth of interpretive and analytic work by preeminent scholars of New World slavery in the 19^th century at its most important nodes. Throughout their various research trajectories, the authors have zeroed in on some overall commonalities of the “Second Slavery” as a unique time and space within the longer history of plantation capitalism in the New World. The variants of the plantation which emerged in central-south Brazil, central Cuba, and the southwestern United States shared a penchant for intensive and extensive monoculture, deep ecological transformation, intensified labor exploitation and surveillance, botanical innovation, and transport revolutions. The batch of shared traits refracted into local variations to create “distinctive working plantation landscapes“ in each node. Therefore each case gets its own chapter, all of them adding up to a cohesive system of slavery at the height of its powers, facing off against increasingly anti-slavery imperial forces. That this volume has been authored by four scholars is most appropriate. The Second Slavery group has always eschewed the competitive model of single-authored academic works, prioritizing collaboration across national and linguistic boundaries. The productivity of this collective approach and the generosity that has long been part of it is on display here. I myself was welcomed in to the group and mentored as a graduate student about 15 years ago.

The book is in a long line of works attempting to define and characterize the strange, world-making place of the plantation: a combination of panopticon, chemical laboratory, and leveraged agro-business enterprise. The uniqueness of the contribution here lies firstly in the authors’ concrete descriptions of agriculture and manufacturing technologies and how they all fit together in a broader system of production. Also unique is their focus on the role of visuality and image in the constitution of new working landscapes on the “commodity frontiers” that were the loci of the Second Slavery. Some of the images from the book are well-known, but others were dug out of various archives in Brazil, Cuba, the US, and Spain. They appear in this volume as high-quality prints. The authors claim to differentiate themselves from more conventional scholars of the visual image, whose thinking is often formalistic and limited to the content and semiotics of the image itself. The authors focus on the interplay between the content of images and the world outside (of which the image is but a partial and interested representation). After all, images like elevated maps of plantation boundaries and distributions of slave quarters did not merely represent the plantation landscape – they helped constitute it as a calculable, transparent, and profit-generating terrain.

Seeking to displace bourgeois representations of landscape, which adopt the Archimedean perspective of the planter surveying a static monument to his power, they take a Marxist dialectical approach, reading landscapes as active processes wrought by human hands working under compulsion. The authors briefly remind us that there were lots of different kinds of lookers transforming everyday space and making clashing meanings out of it. At times, they seem to want to replace the planter’s eye view of the world with a counter-Archimedean perspective: that of the world-system. In previous publications, the authors have expertly broken down the ways in which large-scale dynamics of empire and capitalism informed the local structures of plantation life, but in this briefer text, they more proclaim than explain the ways in which these new commodity frontiers “became key poles of the new industrial world division of labor.” Nevertheless, their critical approach to landscape paintings and maps is generative. They encourage fellow scholars to think of visual practices as an additional lens through which to understand the plantation’s history.

While they understandably spend much of the text analyzing local dynamics with only suggestive nods to the world economy that informed those changes, their framework is also productive in the sense that it allows us to see the different iterations of 19^th century plantations of the Second Slavery in both their unity and their difference. They are arguing against an older literature influenced by “staple theory,” which suggested that the form of the plantation replicated itself across space and time. They see instead a shared “spatial grammar [that] constructs a modular response to distinct tropical and semi-tropical environments of the colonized world.” In such a view, “the plantation appears not as a static template that is simply the continual repetition of the same thing but instead may be understood as a fluid and dynamic grammar of space.” One cannot help but see here the influence of Mintz and Price’s notion of an “underlying grammar” that structured the varieties of Afro-diasporic culture in the Americas. In place of traditional anthropologists’ notion of static “African continuities” that could be detected anywhere Black people lived in the Americas, Mintz and Price detected the presence of shared general rules and guidelines that could yield quite distinct surface manifestations while maintaining their identity.

When it comes to understanding plantation landscapes, however, the reader craves a genealogical excavation (a historicizing) of this “flexible and dynamic grammar.” How did the shared patterns of plantation landscapes come together into a common landscape of the Second Slavery? Was it simply unsullied notions of short-term profitability, efficiency and best practices (from the view of the planter and manager) that left these scars on the land? Or was something messier at work? The laser-focus on the historical novelty of the Second Slavery can sometimes blur the longer-term dynamics of the plantation’s history.

In spite of such cautions, the notion of an underlying grammar remains useful. It makes clear that planters, or any abstract wielder of “power,” whether capital, empires, the state, or elites, do not act in a vacuum. Their actions were constrained by local geological, climatic, and social specificities that they ignored at their peril. Particularities of labor, nature, and markets rubbed up against planters’ audacious projects. The resulting friction “transformed the land and created distinctive landscapes.” Cotton plantations, for example, remained considerably smaller than sugar and coffee plantations. They were hived off in a sort of mitosis rather than swelling in size and remaining a single unit. The Cuban sugar mill definitely stands out from the other sites in terms of its factory scale and technological complexity, perhaps challenging the claim of a shared underlying grammar, or on the contrary affirming the authors’ point of there being wide variation within the type.

The authors’ attention to these kinds of frictions wanders. For the most part, they train their gaze on “the instrumental uses of perspective” on the part of planters and managers. They focus on how plantation spaces aided the “quantification and calculation of spatial relations,” even asserting early in the book that experiences of the plantation landscape “are not governed by aesthetics” (10). But aesthetics, I would say, especially pastoral and monumentalist ones, did structure the landscape. For example, the aesthetic design of coffee hulling machines were self-consciously meant to impose a visual spectacle on the viewer (144). The same could be said of the early sugar-milling technologies in Cuba. Their elaborate gothic lines were a self-conscious form of industrial design meant to evoke aesthetic responses in the purchaser.

More importantly, the counter-landscapes which enslaved communities and individuals constructed within the planter’s space (paths, burial grounds, provision grounds, etc.) were never just practical but always aesthetic. From their previous work we know the authors are certainly aware of this, but in this text they leave the multi-focal, conflicted, and non-consensual construction of plantation landscapes to one side, focusing their view on elite plantations that “most fully expressed the forces that formed the new commodity frontiers.” Even when focusing on the elite plantations, laborers below the level of overseer don’t get a lot of attention here. Nor do cane cutters, skilled plowmen, moonlight gardeners, healers, sugar masters, or drivers. The broader kinds of systemic expertise possessed by planters and managers intersected with the mental labor of skilled slaves actually knowing how to do things in the soil, or on a hillside, at this level of the labor hierarchy. They re-shaped the landscape, sometimes in collaboration with masters and overseers, and sometimes in spite of them. One exception to this absence in the book is the description of how hillside clearing was carried out and how much woodsmen’s skills were required in the Paraíba valley (135). We could have used more of this.

The new zones of slavery, the authors remind us, were made possible by nearly unlimited land. The authors characterize the grounds of the 19^th century commodity frontiers as largely unoccupied, but in the case of the United States at least they could have given more emphasis to the expulsion of southern Native American nations that made the cotton boom possible. The book reduces the long-term consolidation of US territorial sovereignty in the southwest to a mention of the Louisiana Purchase and the Battle of New Orleans. These were merely moments (the latter a relatively minor one) in a longer history of aggression and resistance whose true lowlights were the Creek and Seminole Wars, and Indian Removal in the 1830s (30). Visual historians in particular would benefit from a fuller accounting of the provisional, conflicted character of territorial control. The new plantation order in formerly unsettled spaces ushered into being a fever of boundary mapping, land commodification, and place (re)naming which left colorful traces in the archives of the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. The visual history of the plantation landscape, in other words, left such bold marks on the historical record precisely because the acquisition of such spaces was tortured and unfinished.

That plantations were designed to be cost-of-production-reducing machines is a key contribution of the Second Slavery collective of scholars. From the selection of the most “pickable” varieties of boll, to the spread of dangerously powerful riverboat motors, short staple cotton was made and marketed with allegiance to the cardinal values of cheapness and speed (75). Planters’ and merchants’ focus on engineering a low-quality, low-cost, fast-moving agro-industrial periphery abetted consumer revolutions in the United States and Western Europe. A free trade in slaves, whether transatlantic or domestic, facilitated the growth of export monoculture, as well as the ecological destruction that accompanied it. Broader infrastructural reforms accompanied plantation booms in the commodity frontiers. The authors treat port cities and systems of canals, mule paths and railroads as part of the working landscapes of the plantation since they would not have existed in the same way except as to serve those plantations. This idea makes one think how much farther geographically one could extend this idea of a working plantation landscape. Cotton planters’ insatiable demand for horses and mules, for example, created a particular farm, meadow, and ranch landscape in Kentucky and Missouri that was entirely a product of cotton planters’ buying power and particular demands. The Border South supplied and fed cotton’s commodity frontier as an auxiliary semi-periphery of the core plantation zone. One could even extend the “working landscapes” of the Cotton South to the factory districts of Lancashire, with its own textile-driven architectural revolutions and ecological destruction. Against a long tradition of economistic thinking tracing back to HJ Habbakuk, the authors argue that technology could be improved for reasons other than to save on labor. I wonder, however, if labor-saving was a critical incentive during the Second Slavery, as the prices of enslaved pople soared amid a tightening supply of new captives from Africa. Elite planters and policymakers in Cuba certainly spilled plenty of ink worrying over the “escasez de brazos,” even importing tens of thousands of indentured workers from China to make up for the perceived lack of African laborers. While new technologies transformed production processes on the commodity frontiers, the authors note, most productivity gains came from economies of scale, from new divisions of labor, and most importantly from a re-ordering of the plantation landscape for maximum efficiency. In each commodity frontier, the plantations’ internal spatial economies were re-organized to maximize the internal flow of materials, natural resources like water and dung, and laborers. This “design for flow,” as one might call it, was carried out within the constraints of particular crops and local landscapes. Surveillance, regulation, accounting, and punishment of enslaved people were central. All of this was made possible by a surplus of land as well as the flexibility of the slave labor regime.

Yet this whole process is spoken of in the passive voice throughout the text. We are not sure what living, specific, flawed humans are controlling these transformations. The tone is social scientific and the prose one of industrial management, which can feel a bit bloodless after a while. In a discussion of the demographic structure of the domestic slave trade in the US, for example, they note that young people predominated, including teenage girls. This group was, according to the authors, at the “prime age for work and sexual reproduction” (78). Although the authors do acknowledge that these boys and girls “were uprooted from their kin and communities,” the previous sentence too closely cleaves to the mindsets of masters and traders. The very category of “prime-ness” is ripped from advertisements of slave auctions and echoes masters’ fantasies about the sexual availability, unending fecundity and profitable toil of children. I would argue against re-using it in our own historical prose without critical comment. In a close reading of a plantation painting from 1858, the authors note: “the [slave] cabins are arranged in parallel rows forming an alley that facilitates the control of the circulation of the slaves” (85). While this is certainly true in the barest sense, why fall back on the language of the market that enabled the commodification of enslaved people in the first place? Capital circulates. Individuals and communities in the quarters pray, gossip, mourn, warn, scrub, groan, and squint at a rising sun. The terminology of “prime-ness” and “circulation” casts this complicated human drama further into the shadows. I think the broader goal of the authors (the deconstruction of a broader economic, geographic, and ecological landscape) can be pursued while also cultivating a critical distance from enslavers’ plans, which requires an interrogation – not a parroting - of their rhetoric.

In their conclusion, the authors say, “when the plantation landscape conformed to the map, the map served as an invaluable instrument for managing land and labor throughout the crop cycle.” That’s a very crucial “when.” Usually, the lived reality did not conform either to the plantation landscape or to the map. We don’t get much of a sense, from this study, of how enslaved people remade the landscapes of elite plantations by blazing alternate pathways, carving out gardens, planning escape routes, and concealing their fellowshipping in hush arbors. These acts re-wrote on the ground the plans and maps obsessively produced and lovingly conserved by elite planter families. We do not want to let individual human beings vanish into the conceptual maw of a grand plantation system, whether as “prime” reproducers or slaves “circulating” within a planters’ system of surveillance.