The Plantation’s Gardens in Nineteenth Century Latin American Literature
A Politics of (Up)Rooting
The Plantation’s Gardens in Nineteenth Century Latin American Literature
A Politics of (Up)Rooting
Description
With an interdisciplinary approach to the agri-biopolitical regulation of life that centers on the early to mid-nineteenth-century rise of monoculture and the plantation model, this book turns to key Romantic literature imagined as agricultural novels to propose a new environmental aesthetic built around the “garden” and its plant relations under monoculture in Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. Organized as a journey around the different garden sites tied to the plantation to trace the failure and attempts at ensuring the plantation's success, the author engages with literary gardens and their material counterparts. From a diverse archive: archaeology and literary studies to Black Geographies, Plant Studies, and burgeoning theories of the garden, it looks to the conuco, creole garden, xochimanque, and the majestic garden as they emerge out of and dialogue with the plantation's monocultural narrative. In doing so, this work addresses (up)rooting: emplacement and belonging, for Afro-descendent, Indigenous, and Upper-Class Creole peoples.
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Table of Contents
Part 1: Transformation
2. The Garden State: Vegetal Aesthetics of Order
- Spanish America as Garden
- Civilized Anxiety
- The Rise of the Garden State
Part 2: Control
3. Conucos
- Imperial Georgics: Blackness, Mechanization, and the Cimarrón
- Anti-slavery Literary Resistance and the 'Noble Savage'
- The Conuco and Dispossessed Gardening
4. Xochimanque
- Ruination and Sacred Gardens
- Secularization and the Garden State
- (Errant) Secularization and the Anti-laborer
- Who Inherits What? Ruination and the Indigenous Hero
Part 3: Collapse
5. The Creole Garden
- Domestic Nature in the Garden State
- Utopic Visions of the Garden
- Religion and Desire in Utopic Nature
- Labor and the Fallacy of Freedom
- Death, Desire and the Limits of Domesticity
6. The Majestic Garden
- Collapse of the Georgic
- The Woman-Valley
- The Majestic Garden
7. Epilogue: Tending the Vegetal under Monoculture
Product details
| Published | 10 Dec 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9798216438199 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Series | Critical Plant Studies |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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