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Plotting The Plantationocene With The History Of Mary Prince, Shelby Johnson
Plotting The Plantationocene With The History Of Mary Prince, Shelby Johnson
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
In this essay, I consider how The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) extends vital affordances for assembling a literary history of ecological rupture, settler colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. These insights arise from my experiences teaching Prince in “Plotting the Plantationocene in Early Atlantic Literature” (Fall 2021), a course which took up what it means to orient to historical formations of climate change as co-emergent with plantation systems. I argue that my students explored how figures like Prince open politically vibrant pathways for being in the world otherwise to plantation modernity.