Plantation Effects: Visual Ecologies of Race, Place and Labor

This seminar examines the multiple iterations of the plantation, and to draw from Katherine McKittrick, the kinds of futures it brings forth for us now. The plantation might be, to paraphrase Krista Thompson and Huey Copeland an “afrotrope” – a “recurrent visual form” that has played a key role in the formation of Black Diaspora identity and culture. We will consider its various representational formats, along with its various lives, and afterlives. As an ecological, material and economic intervention in the landscape, the plantations is a site of labor and knowledge production. It is both a form of enclosure and an extremely mobile form, a space where human and commodity flows converged, and an ecology formed through interspecies interaction. By considering these histories of the plantation – an ideological and spatial apparatus – we will think through its implications for practices of labor, experiences of the natural world, the organization of vision and, constructions of freedom as they have been formulated in African American Studies. Furthermore, across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, the plantation remains a site where alternative constructions of freedom, and otherworldly economies of knowledge, resilience and resistance formed. We will also consider how the transformations wrought by the plantation across the globe create possibilities to imagine the intimacies and particularities of time and space differently that can help us better understand the politics of race, representation and labor in our contemporary moment. Invited presenters for this seminar include scholars, writers and artists working in the fields, and intersecting geographies of Art History, History, Literary Studies, African American Studies, Creative Writing, Anthropology, Geography and the Environmental Humanities.

Please note that incoming and advanced graduate students are welcome to register.

About The Speaker

Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history. She has a joint appointment between the Department of Africana Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization.

She received her Bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University in 2009 and PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 2015. She has held research positions at Princeton University, New York University, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. 

At the intersections of the environmental humanities and science and technology studies, her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, and nature. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. Film production, sound editing, digital cartography, and oral history are also integral to her praxis. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Amerasia Journal, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.

She is at work on a book on the ecological poetics and entanglements of the Caribbean plantation.  Her second project is a manifesto on digital technology, black feminist praxis and DJ culture called Pon De Replay. 

For more information, please contact:

• Anna Arabindan – Kesson, Faculty Convener
• Dionne Worthy, Graduate Program Administrator 

The Seminar is not open to the public and only for Princeton University faculty, students and staff.

Please RSVP to Shelby Sinclair, [email protected]