Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Amid Memory and Historical Consciousness: Locating the Plantation Past

2009; Wiley; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01364.x

1467-6443

Aisha Khan,

Historical Studies of British Isles

In discussions of world history and global political economy, plantations have a special place. Their longevity, a development process that has involved significant continuities (as well as transformations) over time, and a symbolic significance arguably equal to their material contributions all contribute to the importance of this complex building block of the modern world. During Europe's transition to capitalism, beginning in the 16th century, agricultural estates, a millennia-old form of subsistence, took on new aspects and purposes. First in the Caribbean, the industrial production of single crops, predominantly sugar, for an emerging world market by unfree (enslaved) or marginally free (indentured) labor coerced by European empire-builders became gradually more sophisticated, and entrenched, in colonized overseas territories.1 This system – the “plantation”– emerged as the key means of production in the articulation of New World colonialism and capitalism, and as a paradoxical metaphor for power, exploitation, order, and progress. By the 18th century the Americas knew the plantation as a conflation of enterprise, prosperity, subjection, and resistance – that is, a possible new kind of life (among European creole planters), a probable degradation of life (among European metropolitans disdainful of creole culture), and an assured struggle for life (among enslaved and indentured laborers). In contemporary times, the legacy of the plantation lies in its early fine-tuning, a “factory in the field,” as Sidney Mintz (1985) characterized Caribbean plantations, whose industrial organization of labor and production reached perhaps its American apogee in Henry Ford's 20th century automobile factories. Production on a mass scale, repetitive and depersonalized tasks, and strictly scrutinized and disciplined workers had all been honed on plantations for the preceding three centuries. Then missing, of course, were wages, the great allure of enslaved labor for plantocracies. But the foundations, laid soon after the “post-Columbian moment” was inaugurated, carried through certain aspects until late 20th century capitalism began a new round of major transformations. Political economic globalization became increasingly subject to such neoliberal reforms as deregulation, privatization, and structural adjustment, along with deindustrialization in manufacturing and the rise of “service” industries. Cultural transformations brought about by vastly increased labor mobility and technological revolutions (especially in electronic media and the out-sourcing of jobs) also make inaccurate any exact parallels between New World plantation societies attached to slave economies and present day social formations. Yet long into the 20th century both the Global North and the Global South felt their inheritance from the plantation – either as beneficiaries or the disinherited. And, of course, plantation systems continue to be a vital part of the economies of certain parts of the world today. The plantation form, then, “exhibits both broad continuities with the past, and significant changes in the way it operates” in the present day (Mintz 1998: xii). The symbolic connotations of the plantation have congealed into a “bad reputation,” being associated with colonialism, exploitation of people of color, and terrible labor conditions (Mintz 1998: ix). There are, however, nuances to this unsavory image, which will be the focus of the rest of this essay. These nuances involve the relationship that the plantation, in both its literal and figurative manifestations, has with two modes of thinking that locate the plantation in time and space: what we call “history” and “memory.” The peculiarly American, “factory in the field” type of plantations scholars are most familiar with today present an interesting epistemological problem. On the one hand, they are an empirically documented, five centuries old production system that played a major role in ushering in the modern global economy, and arguably created “the Caribbean” we know today (a creation that begins with Columbus, thanks both to the genocidal consequences of colonialism and its ideologies about “people without history”[Wolf 1982]). The other hand is a conundrum: the Caribbean region is a part of the world that outsiders and locals, intellectuals and masses alike, have long debated as to the particular qualities and quantities of culture and personhood to be found there; the plantation's coming of age in this region, within the context of these debates and presumptions, gave rise to feelings, expressed in discourses still resonant, of ambiguous ownership of, and ambivalent relationship to, its plantation past. In other words, the association with slavery, forced migration, and questionable culture lend a multilayered symbolic significance to both the political economy and epistemological constructions attached to the plantation. The plantation, then, must be understood as belonging to a territory where questions (rather than givens) about culture and the impact of history shape memory – memory of the past and symbols of the past that are associated with the plantation in the Americas. This territory in literal terms is the Caribbean region, demarcated by geopolitical boundaries. Territory also can be interpreted in the more abstract terms of a “space.” We can think of this plantation space as lying between history, a term that denotes events, conditions, experiences, and transformations over time, as well as the construction and interpretation of the past, and historical consciousness– a concept that connotes historical, as I see it, that connotes historicalness. By that I mean the capacity or proclivity to think historically, to reflect on the nature of experience among one's group, community, etc., that is understood as being “historical,” to evince, in one form or another, not only the practices derived from historical consciousness, but its perception, as well.2 Before getting to these discourses of uneasy claiming of a plantation past (and their consequent, broader implications for understanding the multiple meanings that plantations have for both political economy and forms of self-knowledge), let me make a point about a general quality of “the past” and reiterate a point about historical consciousness. In all instances, everywhere, “the past” is a conceptual category. As such, it is a social construction, and like all social constructions, it is necessarily relational. That is, “the past is only past because there is a present, just as I point to something over there only because I am here” (Trouillot 1995: 15, ital orig). Taking this point further, Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes that “the past – or, more accurately, pastness – is a position” (1995: 15). In other words, the past is only possible as a construction of and in the present; we need a concept of “the past” in order to interpret our unfolding experiences in particular, temporally distinguished moments of change called “the past.” In a similar vein, Richard Price (1985) has argued that “consciousness” and “tradition” are also cultural constructs, that “any peoples' view of their collective past is heavily conditioned by their notions of who they are, their collective identity” (1985: 27). Price advises exploring the implications of this constructedness when studying historical consciousness among “peoples whose pasts have not taken the relatively even, linear form that Westerners have too often unthinkingly assumed to be universal” (1985: 27; 2009). There has been productive study of forms of non-linear historical consciousness among non-Western peoples (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fabian 1983; Bhabha 1990). Caribbean peoples, however, are both in and of the West. Rather than being geographical, the difference between “Western” and “non-Western” is best understood as a metaphor for the division between privileged and exploited classes of people, where authorized forms of knowledge – for example, the pedagogical canons of the colonizer – emanate from and are directed toward the elite. What is notable about the Caribbean's plantation past is that the local discourses attached to it, while not uniform – e.g., class distinctions do matter – are fairly consistent in terms of Caribbean people's self-reflexive forms of knowledge about when their history begins, what their culture consists of, and thus the significance of the plantation itself. The unwholesome reputation of plantations to which Mintz (1998) refers above derives, as his point implies, from the association that slavery and plantations have with trauma (expropriation, abuse). Yet in the academic literature on memory, plantations are not familiar examples; instead, trauma and memory are typically explored in such 20th century events as the Nazi Holocaust (Germany), Apartheid (South Africa), Dirty Wars (Argentina), Hiroshima-Nagasaki (Japan), and 9/11 (U.S.).3 The reason for this may lie in the “memory boom” currently underway (Blight 2009), which David Blight links to a “felt need for peoplehood and victimhood” and often thriving on grievance (2009: 249). He attributes the boom to, among other things, the 20th century's “sheer scale of violence” (2009: 243), the “anniversary consciousness” associated with civic remembrance (2009: 245), academia's “new subjectivity,” which brought an “explosion of new histories” of competing versions of the past and of authenticity (2009: 246–7), and the “rage for restitution”– the desire to comprehend and mend traumatic pasts (2009: 247–8). A growing public and scholarly dialogue, restitution debates in the Americas do involve issues of colonial divestment, including that involving land and its connection to the exploitation of labor. But the plantation past is part of, rather than the central hinge upon which these concerns are expressed. If memory and trauma in connection to plantations is mentioned, for example in Afro-Atlantic Studies, it is generally in broad terms referring to the trauma of dislocation from Old World to New. Historians of Caribbean plantations have tended to invoke what I call the “bad memory” explanation in their discussions of emancipation, the transition to peasant-based subsistence, and indenture. In brief, the bad memory scenario explains the lack of Afro-Caribbean labor on post-emancipation plantations (both in absolute terms and relative to indentured Indians) as due to newly freed slaves wanting to leave behind the ordeal of plantation enslavement and thus heading for urban areas. That planters were reluctant to pay proper wages and to risk the possibility of free Afro-Caribbeans competing in crop production is another story; my point here is that this claim about the discomfiture of remembering life on the plantation is virtually hypothetical, widely assumed and under-substantiated. Moreover, such an argument assumes a model of collective memory (on the part of freed slaves), which even if only based on inference would involve the empirical challenge of gathering sufficient accounts to be able to argue from such a position, as well as contending with the issue of “collective”: how do theorists (and the collectivity itself) decide what memories to include and how they should be interpreted (viz., Wertsch 2009; Klein 2000; Trouillot 1995)? The plantation past has been memorialized in film (e.g., “Sugar Cane Alley” in Martinique, “The Last Supper” in Cuba, and “Ganga Zumba” in Brazil) and theorized as memory decoupled from the plantation per se, associated more abstractly with the experience of slavery and diaspora attached to plantations (e.g., what Gilroy [1993] calls the “changing same,” or cultural affinity that arises from, for example, a shared musical aesthetic). Memory and the plantation past becomes another sort of project when it produces the text-based, first-person reflections we know as diaries (when penned by planters and other privileged members of plantation society) and narratives (when penned by slaves).4 Although these diaries and narratives (both of which are a kind of memoir) are not productions in the sense of Freud's idea of memory as a phenomenon of individual psychology – being, as they are, social in their very nature (e.g., in Hawlbachs' [1925] sense) – they emphasize the individual as repository and testament to a specific history, a history particular to certain governing regimes (British West Indian or U.S. plantation societies). Such texts typically do not represent collective memories as such, but rather eye-witness accounts of systems of domination. In this context, “systems” do not necessarily generate “collectivities” and “collectivities” do not necessarily result in “systems.” These issues are relevant, as well, to the plantation past of indentured populations, whose far more recent bonds, both literal and metaphoric, to the Caribbean plantation still beg the question of determining “collectivity,” and also what exactly is being remembered – for example, Uttar Pradesh or Canton are no less embellished, apocryphal, and subject to contradictory evaluation for their plantation diasporas crossing into the 20th century than is the Gold Coast. Discursive constructions that are this elusive are generally not sturdy enough upon which to build empirically-contingent arguments, although they provide a rich arena for exploring the plantation past in meta-discursive terms. In other words, although there are aspects of the plantation past whose study can be approached ethnographically and historically (here I depart from Scott's [1991] position), the problematic of historicalness and the practice of memory lends itself most productively to looking at the abiding key themes in discourse about the plantation. As a phenomenon that started “history” (epistemologically speaking) in the Caribbean – insofar as the post-contact moment is typically viewed as the entrance of this region/hemisphere onto the world stage – and (with a few exceptions) gone as a way of life since the 19th century, the plantation is not a “memory” of the past in the sense of being remembered by people in the conventional way that we understand memory to function – as certain things not too distant to be recalled in some fashion (e.g., recollected, retrieved, reminded). Rather, plantation past discourse is better approached as memorialization, as the practice of memory.5 Even laborers on Caribbean plantations who continued there as indentured as recently as the first quarter of the 20th century (for example, those from India and China) are in the main deceased, their memories now the stuff of memorialization on the part of subsequent generations. I would argue that memory involves first-hand retrieval, memorialization may or may not. Memory may anticipate likely meanings of things (events, acts) but does not predict them: neither individuals' memories nor “collective” memories are uniform, and one individual or group may hold diverse, even contradictory interpretations attached to a memory. Memorialization does not guarantee seamless wholes, either, but it is communal, whether cooperative, contested, or denied, because it entails the establishment of certain symbols (a statue, a monument, a song) through dialogue, labor, and some degree of mutual recognition (which is not equivalent to approval). Yet despite the hierarchical distinctions in the Caribbean between elite and popular forms of knowledge (rather than “Western”/“non-Western”), and the variability of interpretations possible in any given memory (whoever holds it), there exists a tenacious theme in the memorialization of the plantation past in the Caribbean. We can summarize this theme, borrowing from Orlando Patterson (1967), “an absence of ruins,” and consider what this “absence” means in the context of another key theme of the plantation, the “total institution.” These two themes articulated and, in tension, produced a mutually reinforcing and abiding representation of the plantation and its meaning for Caribbean culture and history. Ironically, the emergence of the “absence of ruins” thesis was connected to the search for Caribbean cultural origins, specifically African origins, undertaken as a lifelong pursuit by Melville Herskovits, first-generation student of Franz Boas, founding father of American anthropology. In Herskovits's mission to establish the validity and empirical bases of “Afro-America” (which included North America, South America, and the Caribbean) as a culture area whose scholarly value and study was imperative, Afro-Americans were interpreted as being, in essence, Africans, possessing an ongoing, if selectively and partially so, ancestral past (e.g., Herskovits 1941 [1958]). These “survivals” or “retentions” lent Afro-Americans distinctive cultural identities, challenging contemporary assumptions – most remnant from colonial ideology – about inadequate or absent cultural traditions and practices, the criteria for adequacy or presence being, not surprisingly, Euro-American based. Among Herskovits's most spirited interlocutors was African American sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier (initially, it was Herskovits who responded to Frazier's (1939) earlier, by two years, analysis). Concerned with another kind of social problem, the full assimilation and acculturation of African Americans into U.S. society, Frazier emphasized the importance of viewing (and thus treating) African Americans as Americans, whose oppression, particularly through enslavement and the associated ostensible erasures of cultural heritage, had prevented their access to equal opportunity and rights (e.g., Frazier 1939 [1966]). In what would become famously known as the Herskovits-Frazier debate, each contended the other to be misguided, defending their not entirely but extensively oppositional stances.6 Within anthropology the Herskovitsian position about cultural possession prevailed, and certainly predominates in other academic disciplines today. But until fairly recently in popular wisdom as well as in scholarship, Frazier's influence, felt in views variously tilted askance about the substance of culture among African-descended peoples in the New World, has been entrenched. Possibly an unintentional contributing factor to this tenaciousness is from another scholarly corner, where attention was trained on the plantation and the production system attached to it. Anthropologists Eric R. Wolf and Sidney W. Mintz were trained in research conducted in Puerto Rico, committed to historical (and historical materialist) research and studying what was then conventionally called the “peoples and cultures” there.7 Among their numerous important contributions to the study of the Americas was their analysis of haciendas and plantations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Wolf and Mintz (e.g., 1957) defined the plantation as “an agricultural estate, operated by dominant owners (usually organized into a corporation) and a dependent labour force, organized to supply a large-scale market by means of abundant capital, in which the factors of production are employed primarily to further capital accumulation without reference to the status needs of the owners” (1957: 380). A few years earlier, Mintz had argued what he and Wolf would elaborate throughout their careers: that plantations represent “a special kind of industrial organization. Many of the features of life generally associated with . . . ‘modern’ society . . . are introduced through plantation organization” (Mintz 1953: 138). Mintz's argument about the Caribbean's giving rise to “modernity”– in its being central to the development of capitalism as a mode of production and as a way of life – is a position that has had great sway in academic discussion. But, curiously, the emphasis on modernity did not dislodge the imagery of absent ruins (even as the latter's presumptions would be increasingly questioned). Rather, the two perspectives co-existed. One possible reason may be because as Wolf and Mintz contrasted plantations and haciendas, capital accumulation on plantations did not involve the “status needs of the owners” (1957: 380). I will speculate a bit here that “status needs” implies social relationships and patterned expressions of feeling: capital accumulation not dependent upon or entailing these suggests another, related image of the plantation (at least British West Indian ones, the most common referent in the absence of ruins discourse), that of societies created artificially, by largely absentee plantocracies in bald pursuit of profit, rather than societies supposedly emerging organically from human beings building lives in accordance with certain notions of community values and moral imperatives. While Wolf and Mintz did not connect the latter argument to their point about accumulation, the distinction they draw is, I think, relevant to the familiar, if tacit image of the Caribbean (British West Indian) plantation as a place of “exploitation” rather than of “settlement” (e.g., Knight 1990; Brown 2008). In other words, the thinking goes, plantations were not founded in the name of living local societies but rather in the name of deadening global profit. Perhaps also connected in some fashion to this expression of an organic/artificial binary is the model of the “total institution” that has long been associated with the plantation. Among the first, and probably the first anthropologist, to make an analogy between plantation society and Erving Goffman's (1961) notion of “total institution” was Raymond Smith. Smith (1967) understood “total institutions” to be “organized groups with well-defined boundaries and with a marked internal hierarchical structure . . .,” describing plantation society as a “bureaucratically organized system in which whole blocks of people are treated as units and are marched through a set of regimentation under the surveillance of the small supervisory staff” (1967: 230). Also in the attempt to understand the workings of such allegedly inorganic, ostensibly closed, and apparently petrified social formations (both in the sense of rigidly structured and based on fear), other important scholars of Caribbean plantation society viewed them as total institutions because, in the words of George Beckford, the plantation is “omnipotent and omnipresent in the lives of those living within its confines . . .” (1972: 55). As Lloyd Best succinctly put it, the plantation “admits virtually no distinction between organization and society . . .” (1968: 287). In this mode of theorizing, the plural – plantation societies – was congealed into a generic singular – plantation society. Conversely, as Trouillot (1998) argues, “the plantation, as such, never existed historically . . . Rather, thousands of plantations did, that tried to conform to the ideal type, but always within the limitations imposed by specific circumstances” (1998: 22).8 Illustrating a tension that virtually always exists in theory-building between abstracting models and specifying historical particularities, “total institution” homogenization no doubt contributed to the plantation being a symbol of memory and memorialization – a “metahistorical category” (Klein 2000: 128). Neither of these requires empirical fine points or acknowledgement of the vicissitudes of history, and the plantation past is made static. Even arguments from opposite angles can reinforce, inadvertently or not, this model of the plantation. For example, Richard Price's (1983, 1985) call to attend more carefully to the non-canonical, typically discounted forms of historiography among such Caribbean peoples as the Saramaka Maroons cannot be effectively applied to plantation society theory because the Saramaka made an early and crucial break from plantation society and thus were able to preserve their oral traditions, historical consciousness, and collective sense of self (Price 2009). Freedoms of all sorts live on the outside.9 Another possible reason for the co-existence of the modernity and absence of ruins arguments lies in the more or less lyrical way that transitions and development in Caribbean history have been treated by intellectuals reflecting on the plantation. Resonating with his mentor Sidney Mintz, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1984) maintains that “in the Caribbean, ‘tradition’, in any given sense of the word, succeeded modernity: the ‘peasant way of life’ fully blossomed only upon the ruins of the plantations, amid the remains of the developed technology and the highly stratified social structure that King Sugar had fostered. Here, the ‘disruption’ is our starting point” (1984: 38). Also emphasizing domination, interruption, and minimal remains, the region's literary luminaries have reiterated, as absence of ruins proponents, similar sentiments. Employing “amnesia” as a metaphor to evoke the problem of memory and insufficient historical consciousness, Derek Walcott (1974) and most recently, Junot Diaz (2007) have written, respectively, that “in time, the slave surrendered to amnesia” and “that amnesia is the true history of the New World” (Walcott 1974: 4); and Beli, a central character in his novel, “embraced the amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands . . . ,” she embraced “the power of the Untilles” (Diaz 2007: 258). One syllable, “Un,” speaks volumes. Orlando Patterson is arguably even more blunt: “the most important legacy of slavery is the total break . . . with a consciousness of the past. To be a West Indian is to live in a state of utter pastlessness” (1982: 258). No past means no historical consciousness, which means no memory or authentic memorialization. The hopeful expectation can only be to rise up out of the ashes, a message found in Diaz's sympathetic and ironic critique of power gone mad, rather than in the fatalistic vision that Patterson's “utter pastlessness” calls forth. Thus the Caribbean's absence of ruins, an ostensible lack of culture and historicalness, grew to be an elemental regional motif. Fundamentally at issue are debates about the region's quality and quantity of culture: how much was (allegedly) lost crossing the Middle Passage and in transit throughout the Americas, what was the substance (and the value) of the culture each population possessed, and what can be identified as salvageable for redeveloping? In brief, what kind of culture is the “creole” culture that arose in the Caribbean from the encounters among indigenous, European, and African (and, later, Asian and Levantine) peoples? These basic questions about the way cultures have been defined, transformed, or rescued have fashioned the Caribbean as a site of loss and struggle against that loss. Some losses are social facts, such as those of languages no longer known, territories no longer home, or skills whose techniques can now only be surmised, like mummification or monuments of the ancients. Other losses are apocryphal or iconic, a “Golden Age,” for example. And, of course, some losses, like those connected to the plantation, are both social fact and master symbols. Memory and memorialization are forms of historiography that are communicated and made meaningful in social relations of power. Put another way, “history and memory are two attitudes toward the past, two streams of historical consciousness that must at some point flow into one another” (Blight 2009: 242). The issue is really about the truth value of a particular version, how close it might be to ontology (what happened) – the impossibility of ascertaining absolute measurement notwithstanding – and how that value is accorded, in particular, by which vested interests. That the Caribbean, like any place else, has a history is indubitable. Scholars of the Caribbean have five hundred years of colonial history (not to mention thousands of years of pre-Columbian history) to work with. The challenge, however, “has always been at the level of interpretation, both about the nature of Caribbean history and about the meaning of the past to Caribbean peoples” (Price 1985: 24). The quotidian unfolding of experience and change is not equivalent to how those processes are represented. In his discussion of memory in historical discourse, Kerwin Klein comments that it is now a cliché to assert that memory and history are not opposites (2000: 128; but cf. Nora 1994). This comment raises interesting questions about the implications of relating “memory” and the plantation; why not simply approach the plantation in terms of “history”? Let me offer a few considerations, all of which have to do with memorialization, the practice of memory of which I spoke earlier. For one, although historiography today does work with unconventional documentation and unconventional ideas of what constitutes evidence, “memory,” as an analytical framework, does not require much scrutiny and dialogue about conventional documentation or conventional facts, as historiography frequently does. This leeway should not be seen as necessarily possessing greater value – something that is preferable or to be avoided – than other kinds of approaches, but it does allow memory greater opportunity, as in the “new memory discourse” (Klein 2000), to incorporate what Klein refers to as “diverse and shifting collection[s] of material artifacts and social practices” (2000: 130). This is one way to meet the challenge of interpretation noted above, to offset the absence of ruins discourse or nuance the “total institution.” Secondly (and related to the first consideration), although collective memory, from which the plantation past derives it meanings and significance, presupposes an “accuracy criterion” (Wertsch 2009: 122) in a broad sense – i.e., there must be some consensus about an occurrence or development – accuracy is less crucial for assessing collective memory as it is, say, for the psychological study of individual memory (Wertsch 2009: 122). This may be especially applicable to the plantation since its basic elements – organization, reason for being, personnel – are not typically contested, so the force of the plantation past does not need to lie in assertions that it, or slavery, happened but rather in what its legacies are. Third, memory can be interpreted as “counter-memory,” the usurpation of power through the appropriation of official versions of history that exclude and deny alternative interpretation (e.g., Foucault 1977). Study of the Caribbean is, in fact, replete with theorizing about the “counter” energies that inhere in the region (the most common being cultural “creolization”). When living memories are impossible, as in the Caribbean slave plantation past, Memory can step in and perform the ideological projects (identity, reparation, reform) that memories cannot. Finally, despite the new memory discourse's equation, or at least articulation, of memory and history, memory seems still to leave more room for emotion and subjective impression (e.g., Nora 1994), currently more easily viewed in academic scholarship as a form of evidence and thus persuasion. “Memory's notorious vagaries become its strengths,” with “therapeutic if not revolutionary potential” (Klein 2000: 138) – emotion being an important element of what fuels plantation past discourse. Yet just as plural histories of plantations can be congealed into a singular plantation past, the “analogical leap” from individual memories to social, cultural, collective, or public Memory allows Memory to become “a subject in its own right, free to range back and forth across time . . .” (Klein 2000: 135–136). Perhaps this is not, however, necessarily something to be wary of. Being transhistorical can mean being not as subject to the erasures of changing moments. Particulars may be sacrificed but what is gained is persistence. Memories die and individual visibility pales in comparison to the voices of collectivities. Historical consciousness requires tools with which to make itself matter, and memorialization, or the practice of memory, is a most effective tool. Memorializing the plantation as a site of memory need not contradict history nor become indistinguishable from it.10 And it can take various turns – lamenting absences, celebrating subversiveness, or critiquing contemporary forms of the globalization of capital and labor. Most any of these turns allow us to chart the transformations and consistencies over time of a literal, material plantation production system and the symbolic meanings that plantations have conveyed – as metaphors of a region, a hemisphere, and a people.