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The order of destruction : monoculture in colonial Caribbean literature, c. 1640-1800 / Heinrich Wilke

Author
Wilke, Heinrich
Published
Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024.
Physical Description
1 online resource
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Contents
Destruction and contradiction in Richard Ligon's History -- Environment and circular rationality in Henry Drax's "Instructions" -- Reproduction, sameness, and James Grainger's The sugar-cane -- Racism, consumption, and the individual in Janet Schaw's letters -- Ideology and history in Toussaint Louverture's Labour proclamations -- Epilogue: "Cette énorme mélopée du monde".
Summary
"This book studies sugarcane monoculture, the dominant form of cultivation in the colonial Caribbean, in the later 1600s and 1700s up to the Haitian Revolution. Researching travel literature, plantation manuals, Georgic poetry, letters, and political proclamations, this book interprets texts by Richard Ligon, Henry Drax, James Grainger, Janet Schaw, and Toussaint Louverture. As the first extended investigation into its topic, this book reads colonial Caribbean monoculture as the conjunction of racial capitalism and agrarian capitalism in the tropics. Its eco-Marxist perspective highlights the dual exploitation of the soil and of enslaved agricultural producers under the plantation regime, thereby extending Marxist analysis to the early colonial Caribbean. By focusing on textual form (in literary and non-literary texts alike), this study discloses the bearing of monoculture on contemporary writers' thoughts. In the process, it emphasizes the significance of a literary tradition that, despite its ideological importance, is frequently neglected in (postcolonial) literary studies and the environmental humanities. Located at a crossroads of disciplines and perspectives, this study will be of interest to literary critics and historians working in the early Americas, to students and scholars of agriculture, colonialism, and (racial) capitalism, to those working in the environmental humanities, and to Marxist academics. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of language and literature, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, and the Global South studies"--
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ISBN
9781003465935 (ebook)
1003465935
9781040039601 (electronic bk. : PDF)
104003960X (electronic bk. : PDF)
9781040039632 (electronic bk. : EPUB)
1040039634 (electronic bk. : EPUB)
9781032514161 (hardback)
View MARC record | catkey: 44540497