The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)

Fungibility

Bibliographic Data

ID5777562
AuthorsTiffany Lethabo King (Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Georgia State University; Atlanta GA USA, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume48
Issue4
Pages1022-1039
Publication date2016-03-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAntipode (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0066-4812 • E-ISSN: 1467-8330
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/anti.12227
OpenAlexW2311167398
LanguageEN
Citations received103
References cited25

This article centers Saidiya Hartman's and Hortense Spillers' theorizations of Black fungibility as well as two speculative visual works in order to read Black bodies on plantation landscapes as symbols of transition, process, genderlessness and boundarylessness. I argue that reading Black bodies in this way breaks with the totalizing visual, conceptual and ontological regime of labor that tends to over determine Blackness within critical theories. Two visual fields help me with this counter read: William Gerrard De Brahm's 1757 "Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia", as well as Julie Dash's 1991 images of the porous indigo-stained hands of former slaves who worked indigo in the film Daughters of the Dust. While these two images oppose one another, their visual conventions enable a break with colonial and humanist scopic regimes like "Black labor" that tend to subsume multiple and intricate processes into the governing logic of labor

Aesthetics · Art · Economics · Fungibility · Humanism · Order (exchange · Political science · Reading (process · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · History · Law

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