Amid Memory and Historical Consciousness

In discussions of world history and global political economy, plantations have a special place. Their longevity, a development process that has involved significant continuities (as well as transformations) over time, and a symbolic significance arguably equal to their material contributions all contribute to the importance of this complex building block of the modern world. During Europe's transition to capitalism, beginning in the 16th century, agricultural estates, a millennia-old form of subsistence, took on new aspects and purposes. First in the Caribbean, the industrial production of single crops, predominantly sugar, for an emerging world market by unfree (enslaved) or marginally free (indentured) labor coerced by European empire-builders became gradually more sophisticated, and entrenched, in colonized overseas territories.1 This system – the “plantation”– emerged as the key means of production in the articulation of New World colonialism and capitalism, and as a paradoxical metaphor for power, exploitation, order, and progress. By the 18th century the Americas knew the plantation as a conflation of enterprise, prosperity, subjection, and resistance – that is, a possible new kind of life (among European creole planters), a probable degradation of life (among European metropolitans disdainful of creole culture), and an assured struggle for life (among enslaved and indentured laborers). In contemporary times, the legacy of the plantation lies in its early fine-tuning, a “factory in the field,” as Sidney Mintz (1985) characterized Caribbean plantations, whose industrial organization of labor and production reached perhaps its American apogee in Henry Ford's 20th century automobile factories. Production on a mass scale, repetitive and depersonalized tasks, and strictly scrutinized and disciplined workers had all been honed on plantations for the preceding three centuries. Then missing, of course, were wages, the great allure of enslaved labor for plantocracies. But the foundations, laid soon after the “post-Columbian moment” was inaugurated, carried through certain aspects until late 20th century capitalism began a new round of major transformations. Political economic globalization became increasingly subject to such neoliberal reforms as deregulation, privatization, and structural adjustment, along with deindustrialization in manufacturing and the rise of “service” industries. Cultural transformations brought about by vastly increased labor mobility and technological revolutions (especially in electronic media and the out-sourcing of jobs) also make inaccurate any exact parallels between New World plantation societies attached to slave economies and present day social formations. Yet long into the 20th century both the Global North and the Global South felt their inheritance from the plantation – either as beneficiaries or the disinherited. And, of course, plantation systems continue to be a vital part of the economies of certain parts of the world today. The plantation form, then, “exhibits both broad continuities with the past, and significant changes in the way it operates” in the present day (Mintz 1998: xii). The symbolic connotations of the plantation have congealed into a “bad reputation,” being associated with colonialism, exploitation of people of color, and terrible labor conditions (Mintz 1998: ix). There are, however, nuances to this unsavory image, which will be the focus of the rest of this essay. These nuances involve the relationship that the plantation, in both its literal and figurative manifestations, has with two modes of thinking that locate the plantation in time and space: what we call “history” and “memory.” The peculiarly American, “factory in the field” type of plantations scholars are most familiar with today present an interesting epistemological problem. On the one hand, they are an empirically documented, five centuries old production system that played a major role in ushering in the modern global economy, and arguably created “the Caribbean” we know today (a creation that begins with Columbus, thanks both to the genocidal consequences of colonialism and its ideologies about “people without history”[Wolf 1982]). The other hand is a conundrum: the Caribbean region is a part of the world that outsiders and locals, intellectuals and masses alike, have long debated as to the particular qualities and quantities of culture and personhood to be found there; the plantation's coming of age in this region, within the context of these debates and presumptions, gave rise to feelings, expressed in discourses still resonant, of ambiguous ownership of, and ambivalent relationship to, its plantation past. In other words, the association with slavery, forced migration, and questionable culture lend a multilayered symbolic significance to both the political economy and epistemological constructions attached to the plantation. The plantation, then, must be understood as belonging to a territory where questions (rather than givens) about culture and the impact of history shape memory – memory of the past and symbols of the past that are associated with the plantation in the Americas. This territory in literal terms is the Caribbean region, demarcated by geopolitical boundaries. Territory also can be interpreted in the more abstract terms of a “space.” We can think of this plantation space as lying between history, a term that denotes events, conditions, experiences, and transformations over time, as well as the construction and interpretation of the past, and historical consciousness– a concept that connotes historical, as I see it, that connotes historicalness. By that I mean the capacity or proclivity to think historically, to reflect on the nature of experience among one's group, community, etc., that is understood as being “historical,” to evince, in one form or another, not only the practices derived from historical consciousness, but its perception, as well.2 Before getting to these discourses of uneasy claiming of a plantation past (and their consequent, broader implications for understanding the multiple meanings that plantations have for both political economy and forms of self-knowledge), let me make a point about a general quality of “the past” and reiterate a point about historical consciousness. In all instances, everywhere, “the past” is a conceptual category. As such, it is a social construction, and like all social constructions, it is necessarily relational. That is, “the past is only past because there is a present, just as I point to something over there only because I am here” (Trouillot 1995: 15, ital orig). Taking this point further, Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes that “the past – or, more accurately, pastness – is a position” (1995: 15). In other words, the past is only possible as a construction of and in the present; we need a concept of “the past” in order to interpret our unfolding experiences in particular, temporally distinguished moments of change called “the past.” In a similar vein, Richard Price (1985) has argued that “consciousness” and “tradition” are also cultural constructs, that “any peoples' view of their collective past is heavily conditioned by their notions of who they are, their collective identity” (1985: 27). Price advises exploring the implications of this constructedness when studying historical consciousness among “peoples whose pasts have not taken the relatively even, linear form that Westerners have too often unthinkingly assumed to be universal” (1985: 27; 2009). There has been productive study of forms of non-linear historical consciousness among non-Western peoples (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fabian 1983; Bhabha 1990). Caribbean peoples, however, are both in and of the West. Rather than being geographical, the difference between “Western” and “non-Western” is best understood as a metaphor for the division between privileged and exploited classes of people, where authorized forms of knowledge – for example, the pedagogical canons of the colonizer – emanate from and are directed toward the elite. What is notable about the Caribbean's plantation past is that the local discourses attached to it, while not uniform – e.g., class distinctions do matter – are fairly consistent in terms of Caribbean people's self-reflexive forms of knowledge about when their history begins, what their culture consists of, and thus the significance of the plantation itself. The unwholesome reputation of plantations to which Mintz (1998) refers above derives, as his point implies, from the association that slavery and plantations have with trauma (expropriation, abuse). Yet in the academic literature on memory, plantations are not familiar examples; instead, trauma and memory are typically explored in such 20th century events as the Nazi Holocaust (Germany), Apartheid (South Africa), Dirty Wars (Argentina), Hiroshima-Nagasaki (Japan), and 9/11 (U.S.).3 The reason for this may lie in the “memory boom” currently underway (Blight 2009), which David Blight links to a “felt need for peoplehood and victimhood” and often thriving on grievance (2009: 249). He attributes the boom to, among other things, the 20th century's “sheer scale of violence” (2009: 243), the “anniversary consciousness” associated with civic remembrance (2009: 245), academia's “new subjectivity,” which brought an “explosion of new histories” of competing versions of the past and of authenticity (2009: 246–7), and the “rage for restitution”– the desire to comprehend and mend traumatic pasts (2009: 247–8). A growing public and scholarly dialogue, restitution debates in the Americas do involve issues of colonial divestment, including that involving land and its connection to the exploitation of labor. But the plantation past is part of, rather than the central hinge upon which these concerns are expressed. If memory and trauma in connection to plantations is mentioned, for example in Afro-Atlantic Studies, it is generally in broad terms referring to the trauma of dislocation from Old World to New. Historians of Caribbean plantations have tended to invoke what I call the “bad memory” explanation in their discussions of emancipation, the transition to peasant-based subsistence, and indenture. In brief, the bad memory scenario explains the lack of Afro-Caribbean labor on post-emancipation plantations (both in absolute terms and relative to indentured Indians) as due to newly freed slaves wanting to leave behind the ordeal of plantation enslavement and thus heading for urban areas. That planters were reluctant to pay proper wages and to risk the possibility of free Afro-Caribbeans competing in crop production is another story; my point here is that this claim about the discomfiture of remembering life on the plantation is virtually hypothetical, widely assumed and under-substantiated. Moreover, such an argument assumes a model of collective memory (on the part of freed slaves), which even if only based on inference would involve the empirical challenge of gathering sufficient accounts to be able to argue from such a position, as well as contending with the issue of “collective”: how do theorists (and the collectivity itself) decide what memories to include and how they should be interpreted (viz., Wertsch 2009; Klein 2000; Trouillot 1995)? The plantation past has been memorialized in film (e.g., “Sugar Cane Alley” in Martinique, “The Last Supper” in Cuba, and “Ganga Zumba” in Brazil) and theorized as memory decoupled from the plantation per se, associated more abstractly with the experience of slavery and diaspora attached to plantations (e.g., what Gilroy [1993] calls the “changing same,” or cultural affinity that arises from, for example, a shared musical aesthetic). Memory and the plantation past becomes another sort of project when it produces the text-based, first-person reflections we know as diaries (when penned by planters and other privileged members of plantation society) and narratives (when penned by slaves).4 Although these diaries and narratives (both of which are a kind of memoir) are not productions in the sense of Freud's idea of memory as a phenomenon of individual psychology – being, as they are, social in their very nature (e.g., in Hawlbachs' [1925] sense) – they emphasize the individual as repository and testament to a specific history, a history particular to certain governing regimes (British West Indian or U.S. plantation societies). Such texts typically do not represent collective memories as such, but rather eye-witness accounts of systems of domination. In this context, “systems” do not necessarily generate “collectivities” and “collectivities” do not necessarily result in “systems.” These issues are relevant, as well, to the plantation past of indentured populations, whose far more recent bonds, both literal and metaphoric, to the Caribbean plantation still beg the question of determining “collectivity,” and also what exactly is being remembered – for example, Uttar Pradesh or Canton are no less embellished, apocryphal, and subject to contradictory evaluation for their plantation diasporas crossing into the 20th century than is the Gold Coast. Discursive constructions that are this elusive are generally not sturdy enough upon which to build empirically-contingent arguments, although they provide a rich arena for exploring the plantation past in meta-discursive terms. In other words, although there are aspects of the plantation past whose study can be approached ethnographically and historically (here I depart from Scott's [1991] position), the problematic of historicalness and the practice of memory lends itself most productively to looking at the abiding key themes in discourse about the plantation. As a phenomenon that started “history” (epistemologically speaking) in the Caribbean – insofar as the post-contact moment is typically viewed as the entrance of this region/hemisphere onto the world stage – and (with a few exceptions) gone as a way of life since the 19th century, the plantation is not a “memory” of the past in the sense of being remembered by people in the conventional way that we understand memory to function – as certain things not too distant to be recalled in some fashion (e.g., recollected, retrieved, reminded). Rather, plantation past discourse is better approached as memorialization, as the practice of memory.5 Even laborers on Caribbean plantations who continued there as indentured as recently as the first quarter of the 20th century (for example, those from India and China) are in the main deceased, their memories now the stuff of memorialization on the part of subsequent generations. I would argue that memory involves first-hand retrieval, memorialization may or may not. Memory may anticipate likely meanings of things (events, acts) but does not predict them: neither individuals' memories nor “collective” memories are uniform, and one individual or group may hold diverse, even contradictory interpretations attached to a memory. Memorialization does not guarantee seamless wholes, either, but it is communal, whether cooperative, contested, or denied, because it entails the establishment of certain symbols (a statue, a monument, a song) through dialogue, labor, and some degree of mutual recognition (which is not equivalent to approval). Yet despite the hierarchical distinctions in the Caribbean between elite and popular forms of knowledge (rather than “Western”/“non-Western”), and the variability of interpretations possible in any given memory (whoever holds it), there exists a tenacious theme in the memorialization of the plantation past in the Caribbean. We can summarize this theme, borrowing from Orlando Patterson (1967), “an absence of ruins,” and consider what this “absence” means in the context of another key theme of the plantation, the “total institution.” These two themes articulated and, in tension, produced a mutually reinforcing and abiding representation of the plantation and its meaning for Caribbean culture and history. Ironically, the emergence of the “absence of ruins” thesis was connected to the search for Caribbean cultural origins, origins, as a by of of American In to the and empirical of (which North South and the as a culture whose scholarly and study was were interpreted as being, in an if and past (e.g., These or cultural contemporary – most from colonial – about or cultural and the for or being, not most was American it was who to by two with another kind of social the and of into U.S. the importance of (and thus as whose through enslavement and the associated of cultural had their to equal and (e.g., In what would as the the other to be their not but the about cultural and in other academic today. But until fairly recently in popular as well as in felt in about the of culture among peoples in the New has been an to this is from another scholarly where was on the plantation and the production system attached to and Sidney Mintz were in in to historical (and historical and studying what was called the “peoples and their contributions to the study of the Americas was their of and plantations in and the Caribbean. and Mintz (e.g., the plantation as “an agricultural by into a and a to a market by means of in which the of production are to without to the of the A few Mintz had argued what and would their that plantations represent special kind of industrial of the of life generally associated with are through plantation (Mintz argument about the Caribbean's rise to in its being central to the development of capitalism as a of production and as a way of life – is a that has had great in academic the on not the of as the would be increasingly Rather, the two possible reason may be because as and Mintz plantations and on plantations not involve the of the I will a here that social and of not upon or these another, of the plantation West Indian the most in the absence of that of societies created by in of rather than societies emerging from building in with certain notions of and and Mintz not the argument to their point about the they is, I to the if of the Caribbean (British West plantation as a of rather than of (e.g., In other words, the thinking plantations were not in the of local societies but rather in the of global also connected in some fashion to this of an is the model of the “total that has long been associated with the plantation. the and the first to make an between plantation and of “total was understood “total to be with and with a hierarchical plantation as a system in which of people are as and are through a of the of the in the to understand the of such and social (both in the sense of and based on other scholars of Caribbean plantation viewed as in the of the plantation is and in the of those within its As it, the plantation virtually no between organization and In this of the – plantation societies – was congealed into a – plantation as Trouillot (1998) “the plantation, as such, historically Rather, of plantations that to to the but within the by specific a that virtually exists in between and historical “total no to the plantation being a of memory and memorialization – a of these empirical or of the of history, and the plantation past is Even from can or this model of the plantation. example, Richard call to more to the typically forms of among such Caribbean peoples as the be to plantation because the an early and from plantation and thus were able to their historical consciousness, and collective sense of 2009). of all on the possible reason for the of the and absence of lies in the more or less way that and development in Caribbean history have been by intellectuals on the plantation. with his Sidney Michel-Rolph Trouillot that the Caribbean, in any given sense of the the way of only upon the of the plantations, the of the and the social that had the is our and the have as absence of similar as a metaphor to the of memory and historical consciousness, and most have that time, the slave to and is the history of the New and a central in his the that was the “the of the Orlando Patterson is arguably even more “the most legacy of slavery is the with a consciousness of the past. be a West Indian is to in a of past means no historical consciousness, which means no memory or The can only be to rise of the a found in and of gone rather than in the that calls the Caribbean's absence of an lack of culture and to be an at issue are debates about the quality and of how was crossing the and in the what was the (and the of the culture and what can be as for In brief, what kind of culture is the culture that in the Caribbean from the among and and These questions about the way have been or have the Caribbean as a of and struggle that are social such as those of no no or whose can now only be like or of the are or a for And, of course, some like those connected to the plantation, are both social and Memory and memorialization are forms of that are and in social of another and memory are two toward the past, two of historical consciousness that must at some point into one (Blight The issue is about the of a particular how it be to – the of absolute – and how that is in particular, by which That the Caribbean, like any has a history is of the Caribbean have five of colonial history to of of to The however, been at the of both about the nature of Caribbean history and about the meaning of the past to Caribbean The unfolding of experience and change is not equivalent to how those are In his of memory in historical Klein that it is now a to that memory and history are not but This interesting questions about the implications of “memory” and the not the plantation in terms of me a few all of which have to do with memorialization, the practice of memory of which I although today does with and of what as an does not and about conventional or conventional as This should not be as necessarily – something that is or to be – than other of but it does memory as in the “new memory to what Klein refers to as and of material and social This is one way to the challenge of interpretation to the absence of discourse or the “total institution.” (and to the first although collective memory, from which the plantation past it meanings and an in a broad sense – there must be some about an or development – is less for collective memory as it is, for the study of individual memory This may be to the plantation since its – reason for being, – are not typically contested, the of the plantation past does not need to lie in that it, or slavery, but rather in what its memory can be interpreted as the of through the of versions of history that and interpretation (e.g., of the Caribbean is, in with about the that in the region most being cultural memories are as in the Caribbean slave plantation past, Memory can in and the that memories despite the new memory or at of memory and history, memory still to leave more for and (e.g., currently more viewed in academic as a form of and thus its with if not – being an of what plantation past Yet just as of plantations can be congealed into a plantation past, the from individual memories to or public Memory Memory to subject in its free to and time this is however, necessarily something to be can mean being not as subject to the of may be but what is is and individual in to the of consciousness with which to make itself and memorialization, or the practice of memory, is a most the plantation as a of memory need not history nor from it can – or contemporary forms of the globalization of and labor. any of these to the transformations and over time of a material plantation production system and the symbolic meanings that plantations have – as of a region, a and a

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