Plot and counter-plantation: Jean Casimir and captive modernity

The Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” presented a synthesis of the Caribbean at large as “the classic plantation area” because it was “’planted’ with people”, who would themselves exist as “adjunct” to the single crop commodity they produced within the market system. This meta-system of the plantation, in which humans were planted to plant plants, for which role they had been purchased as products like the plants they produced for the market, served, in Eric William’s terms, as “’both cause and effect of the emergence of the market economy.’” The Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir, in the 2020 book The Haitians: A Decolonial History, presents a divergent, yet dialogic, account of Caribbean modernity, in which “The Haitian peasantry—and those of the entire Caribbean—constituted themselves in opposition to the processes of integration and assimilation to the commodity-producing plantation.” Although it may be, in Mark Fisher’s terms, “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” Casimir schools the reader to imagine what has been called the “plantationocene” era through an ethos of the reproduction of counter-plantation institutions rather than labor.

Duke Scholars

Author Deborah Jenson Romance Studies