THE PLANTATION IMAGINATION

the plantation imagination: studies in salt, oil, and sugar

For fifteen years, I have traveled south Louisiana swamps and backroads, spilling styrofoam cups of gas station coffee and clapping caked mud out of my boots. I visit oil towns, salt mines, former sugar plantations, flood control structures, shipping ports, tourist attractions, prisons, and chemical refineries tucked along the banks of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. Sites of industry and pleasure blend seamlessly atop remains of enslaved people and displaced towns founded by Black families in the years following Emancipation. Over the course of many soul-sickening, lung-scorching years spent following the intertwined histories of oil, salt, and sugar in Louisiana’s sinking wetlands, I came to realize the perverse metabolism of natural resource extraction at the expense of Black lives and labor.

Studies over the course of the 20th century exhibit the incredible capacities of soil, air, and water to retain chemical residues (both benign and toxic) andstructural damage from environmental duress, such as heat, ice, floods, and industrial pollutants.1 New scholarship in the life sciences demonstrates that, conceived as a larger system of biomass, these materials metabolize energy in pathways similar to the human transmission and processing of emotion by neurotransmitters and parasympathetic nervous systems.2 With these studies in mind, this work offers a provocation: The molecular structures of soil and water collected from former plantation sites are evolving and restructuring themselves due to ecological, economic, racial, and psychological violence and theft enacted upon the environment by European settlers, plantation owners, and corporations. These practices range from soil exhaustion by monocropping, erosion from deforestation and engineering projects, and microbiological reconfiguration from the psychic energies of terror, pain,hope, and pleasure that circulated through the bodies of enslaved Indigenous, African, and African American peoples. This body of work, entitled “The Plantation Imagination: Studies in Salt, Oil, and Sugar,” is a deep history and “Black geographical reading practice” of a regionknown as The Cajun Coast.4 The mixed media pieces use pigments created with unfiltered sugarcane syrup, oil byproducts, rock salt, soil samples, metalshavings, and botanicals grown by enslaved people in plantation gardens. The pieces themselves become sites of ongoing historical accretion. As the pigments crystallize, oxidize, melt, dissipate, and congeal over time, a form of Black “livingness” emerges through the rendering of new creative and interpretive possibilities from commodities themselves.

A project by Robin McDowell.