What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete,
world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique
Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century
American plantations, where labor practices and ecological
particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that
separated persons from the natural world.
Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary
analysis, Ariel's Ecology explores the forms of personhood that
developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through
Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as
Philadelphia. Allewaert's examination of the writings of naturalists,
novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and
Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation
spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from
humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of
personhood explicitly attuned to human beings' interrelation with
nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological.
Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts
works from Shakespeare's Tempest and Montesquieu's Spirit of the
Laws to Spivak's theories of subalternity. In Allewaert's
interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into
ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of
existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara's dictum that
postcolonial resistance is synonymous with "perfect knowledge of the
ground."
