The Planter S Prospect

Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings

Race and Transatlantic Identities provides a rich overview of the complex relationship between the construction of race and transatlantic identity as expressed in a variety of cultural forms, refracted through different disciplinary and critical perspectives, and manifested at different historical moments. Spanning a period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributions provide a panorama of the wealth and variety of contemporary approaches to grappling with notions of race in a transatlantic context, raising questions about the permanence and fixity of racial boundaries. The volume, which focuses on the cultural sites where individuals construct and express their racial identities in the context of those boundaries, also explores strategies through which those boundaries are defined and redefined. The collection conducts this inquiry by juxtaposing essays on literature, history, visual arts, material culture, music, and dance in ways that encourage the reader to engage with concepts across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The articles in this book were originally published in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies.

A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share, from one of our most compelling political theorists In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as “past” and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.