Introduction : Tempest in the Plantation Zone -- Swamp Sublime : Ecology and Resistance in the American Plantation Zone -- Plant Life : Tropical Vegetation, Animate Matter, and Cosmopolitical Form -- On Parahumanity : Creole Stories and the Suspension of the Human -- Persons without Objects : Afro-American Materialisms from Fetishes to Personhood -- Involving the Universe in Ruins : Sansay's Haitian Anabiography -- Epilogue : Afterlives of Ariel's Ecology
Summary
The author contends that on eighteenth-century American plantations, 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, this book explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and colonial metropoles
