The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly): Fungibility
Abstract
This article centers Saidiya Hartman's and Hortense Spillers' theorizations of Black fungibility as well as two speculative visual works in order to read Black bodies on plantation landscapes as symbols of transition, process, genderlessness and boundarylessness. I argue that reading Black bodies in this way breaks with the totalizing visual, conceptual and ontological regime of labor that tends to over determine Blackness within critical theories. Two visual fields help me with this counter read: William Gerrard De Brahm's 1757 “Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia”, as well as Julie Dash's 1991 images of the porous indigo-stained hands of former slaves who worked indigo in the film Daughters of the Dust. While these two images oppose one another, their visual conventions enable a break with colonial and humanist scopic regimes like “Black labor” that tend to subsume multiple and intricate processes into the governing logic of labor.
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- Authors
- King, T. L.
- Affiliations
- Georgia State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- King, Tiffany Lethabo
- Venue
- Antipode
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2016-03-22
- Volume
- 48
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1022-1039
- ISSN
- 0066-4812 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2311167398
- Semantic Scholar
- f2bb78f2667fe75c3aac96cf0093b4ad74e008fd
- Cited by
- 308
- References
- 37
- Citations by year
- 2026: 36 · 2025: 50 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 48 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 33 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 36.88
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Antipode (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Colonialism, slavery, and trade
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Visual Culture and Art Theory
- Keywords
- plantation landscapes, Black body, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Black labor, indigo cultivation, Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash, freedmen, scopic regimes, boundarylessness
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