An Archaeology and History of a Caribbean Sugar Plantation on Antigua, by Georgia L. Fox (ed.)

Margaret Randall, Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 248 pages, $23.95, paperback.In the early 1950s, Haydée Santamaría Cuadrado moved from a rural Cuban sugar plantation to Havana, to live with her younger brother Abel. Together, they would help to establish a revolutionary movement that would change the history of their country. Haydée, as she is known throughout Cuba—Yeyé to her friends—was one of only two women among 160 men who took part in attacks on Batista's army barracks at Moncada and Bayamo on July 26, 1953, which sparked the Cuban Revolution.… In her recent book, poet and scholar Margaret Randall, who lived in Cuba in the 1970s and became friends with Haydée, has captured the essence of this exemplary woman.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

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Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation

American Literary History ◽

10.1093/alh/ajz043 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 31 (4) ◽

pp. 741-774 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jarvis C McInnis

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Civil Rights Era ◽

History And Memory ◽

Southern Identity ◽

Sugar Plantation ◽

The Us ◽

History Of ◽

State Archives

Abstract This essay examines how several contemporary black women artists—Attica Locke, Natalie Baszile, Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, and Kara Walker—interrogate the afterlives of the sugar plantation in present day literature, performance, and visual art. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s conceptualization of “black women’s geographies,” I show how these artists turn to the landscape and built environment of the sugar plantation and factory to restore black women and the US South to the global history of sugar. Part one, “Plantation Pasts,” examines Locke’s 2012 novel, The Cutting Season, alongside Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, as critiques of the sugar plantation’s ongoing economic viability through plantation tourism and modern agribusiness. By foregrounding a “logic of perishability” that insists on the plantation’s dissolution and demise, Locke and Walker interrogate these sugar plantation afterlives to exhume, expose, and ultimately revise buried histories of racial dispossession and consumption in the US and global sugar industries. Part two, “Plantation Futures,” examines how Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, its television adaptation created by Ava DuVernay, and several of Beyoncé’s music videos—“Déjà Vu” (2006), “Formation” (2016), and the visual album Lemonade (2016)—“return” to Louisiana’s sugar plantation geographies to confront the violent histories of slavery and Jim Crow and to reconcile African Americans’ contentious relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era. Given the limits of colonial and state archives of slavery, I argue that these artists reestablish the landscape and architecture of the sugar plantation and factory as counter-archives, wherein the slave cabin, big house, refinery, and cane fields are figured as contested sites of official history and memory. In doing so, they “respatialize” hegemonic geographies, exposing and indicting the persisting legacies of racial-sexual dispossession and violence, on one hand, and positing embodied practices of pleasure, mourning, and collectivity as modes of “reterritorialization” on the other, imagining a new relationship to land, agriculture, and the earth.

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Jesuit Missionaries and Enslavement at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century: An Assessment from the Loyola Plantation in French Guiana

Journal of Jesuit Studies ◽

10.1163/22141332-0803p004 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (3) ◽

pp. 408-429

Author(s):

Réginald Auger ◽

Jean-François Guay ◽

Zocha Houle-Wierzbicki ◽

Raphaelle Lussier-Piette ◽

Antoine Loyer Rousselle ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Guiana ◽

Native People ◽

Archaeological Research ◽

Sugar Plantation ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

History Of ◽

Architectural Principles ◽

Jesuit Missionaries

Abstract We present an overview of the archaeological research carried out on a sugar plantation operated by the Jesuits in French Guiana. The Jesuits’ production was exported to Europe to provide funds to develop their missions among Native people living in French Guiana and Amazonia. We present a brief history of the plantation and discuss the place the missionaries occupied in the colonial venture and their role in the economy of the colony. Loyola was a large and successful plantation compared with other plantations in French Guiana, and its success rested on the exploitation of enslaved labor. Recent research on the area covered by the plantation storehouse, its chapel, and the forecourt in front has allowed us to reassess our initial interpretation of the chronology and development of the plantation. In doing so, we realized that the Jesuits rigorously conformed to the architectural principles of the Enlightenment to symbolize their prestige in the colony.

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First Contact and Early Colonization of Brazil

Atlantic History ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0312 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Stuart B. Schwartz ◽

Aldair Rodrigues

Keyword(s):

Sugar Industry ◽

First Century ◽

Capital City ◽

Brazilian Coast ◽

Plantation Economy ◽

Academic Communities ◽

Sugar Plantation ◽

Classical Studies ◽

History Of ◽

First Contact

This article covers much of the first century of the history of Brazil. The quincentennial commemorations of the Vasco da Gama voyage (1498) to India and that of Pedro Alvares Cabral (1500), which “discovered” Brazil, stimulated in Portugal and Brazil as well as in the academic communities interested in their histories a surge in research, reeditions of classic accounts, and a rise in the curiosity of, and readership by, the general public. This article includes major works from this recent historiographical boom along with classical studies that have long served as the basis for understanding Brazil’s first century. The article covers the period from 1500 to c. 1580 when a dynastic crisis brought Portugal and its empire under the control of King Phillip II of Spain. At first a number of royally commissioned voyages of exploration visited the Brazilian coast, but, for the most part, contact was in private hands since the Portuguese Crown granted contracts for the extraction of dyewood. In the 16th century, French competitors contested the Portuguese presence on the coast and the relations of the Portuguese with native peoples. By the 1530s, to secure this region from foreign competition, Portugal instituted a system of proprietary captaincies to develop settlements. A few of the captaincies (e.g., Pernambuco, São Vicente) flourished due to the beginnings of a sugar industry, but most of them failed such that, in 1549, to secure the colony, a royal governor and judicial and treasury officers were dispatched along with c. 1,300 men. Jesuit missionaries accompanied them and a capital city was established at Salvador. During the next three decades, the Portuguese settled and took control of the Brazilian coast, eliminating a French attempt at colonization and, in its place, founding the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1565. Meanwhile, relations with Brazil’s indigenous population shifted as missionary efforts, epidemic diseases, and the need for laborers in the growing sugar plantation economy resulted in war, enslavement, and depopulation. By the 1560s, colonists in Brazil had turned to the existing Portuguese slave trade with Africa to augment their supply of workers. By c. 1570 a multiracial society had formed. Although the laws and institutions of Portugal clearly provided governing structures for the colony, the extent to which Brazil’s colonial situation, the influences of indigenous and then African cultures, and the growing importance of slavery distinguished the colony from its metropolis has recently become a central issue of debate about the origins and the nature of early Brazil.

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An Archaeology and History of a Caribbean Sugar Plantation on Antigua

10.2307/j.ctvwvr3cf ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Sugar Plantation ◽

History Of

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An Archaeology and History of a Caribbean Sugar Plantation on Antigua

10.5744/florida/9781683401285.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

New Technologies ◽

Soil Analysis ◽

Heritage Management ◽

Sugar Plantation ◽

The Face ◽

History Of ◽

Rich Information ◽

The Rich ◽

Slave Quarters ◽

Historical Developments

An Archaeology and History of a Caribbean Sugar Plantation on Antigua uses archaeological and documentary evidence to reconstruct daily life at Betty’s Hope plantation on the island of Antigua, one of the largest sugar plantations in the Caribbean. It demonstrates the rich information that the multidisciplinary approach of contemporary historical archaeology can offer when assessing the long-term impacts of sugarcane agriculture on the region and its people. Drawing on ten years of research at the 300-year-old site, the researchers uncover the plantation’s inner workings and its connections to broader historical developments in the Atlantic World. Excavations at the Great House reveal similarities to other British colonial sites, and historical records reveal the owners’ involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and in the trade of rum and other commodities. Artifacts uncovered from the slave quarters—ceramic tokens, repurposed bottle glass, and hundreds of Afro-Antiguan pottery sherds—speak to the agency of enslaved peoples in the face of harsh living conditions. Contributors also use ethnographic field data collected from interviews with contemporary farmers, as well as soil analysis to demonstrate how three centuries of sugarcane monocropping created a complicated legacy of soil depletion. Today tourism has long surpassed sugar as Antigua’s primary economic driver. Looking at visitor exhibits and new technologies for exploring and interpreting the site, the volume discusses best practices in cultural heritage management at Betty’s Hope and other locations that are home to contested historical narratives of a colonial past.

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