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Book Review
| Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 240. $65.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8078-3104-5); $22.50 paper (ISBN 978-0-8078-5801-1).
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| The recent bicentennials of the slave trade's abolition in England and the U.S. provide opportunities to mark the legacy of legal action. The periodic self-scrutiny of corporations that formerly profited from slavery generates awareness of the institution's far-reaching economic impact. Generally less noticed is the cultural afterlife of slavery, but Jessica Adams's book seeks it out. Wounds of Returning examines the epistemic fallout of slavery's legal and economic history: what are the enduring effects of a society's once having defined people as property? |
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Adams's argument rests upon a Lockean foundation. The legal sanction of property in persons not only denied selfhood to enslaved people, Adams asserts; it also changed the terms of selfhood for slaveowners, whose identity came to rest on ownership not of themselves (as Locke would have it) but of others. By dissolving that basis, emancipation rendered "whiteness ... an ambivalent quality of property" (36). Jim Crow's legal and economic contortions perpetuated forms of enslavement, but Adams contends that it took the plantation "as both symbol and physical place" (10) to prop up a white ideology that required not just African Americans' subjugation but specifically their status as owned objects. In this regard, Wounds of Returning is influenced by Stephen Best's The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (2004) and somewhat complicated by Dylan Penningroth's The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003), which demonstrates that a stark racial divide between owners and the owned, however central a conceit in white society, did not characterize enslaved people's actual relationships to property. |
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Wounds of Returning is not a history of the nineteenth century, though. It is a cultural study of the twentieth, and its principal contribution is its analysis of a highly original archive that includes New Orleans prostitution in the early 1900s, the cult of Elvis Presley in the late twentieth century, and tourist-grabbing Southern plantations and prison rodeos in the present. In all these arenas of cultural production, Adams detects the persistent logic of the slave plantation. The "postslavery plantation" of the book's subtitle refers not just to antebellum structures that remain standing but also to reinventions of the plantation—other social spaces and structures that turn persons into commodities. The plantation, Adams suggests, remains ineluctably a part of southern culture, a genetic ingredient of modern tourism, consumer culture, and spectatorship. Though Adams does not expressly engage with discourse about the "New South," her book insists, in the spirit of William Faulkner, that the South's past lurks throughout the contemporary landscape (especially in Louisiana, the location of most of the tourist spots, literary texts, and archival materials Adams examines). |
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Adams's method of analyzing this multiform "postslavery plantation" is a lively and impressive combination of cultural studies, ethnography, performance studies, and literary criticism. She herself calls the book "an eclectic, unconventional plantation tour" (15–16), and indeed much of the book's evidence is the fruit of Adams's travels—visits to tourist sites, observations of tourists, conversations with docents. Even the author's own photographs enrich a few chapters, including Chapter 2, "Plantations Without Slaves," which examines plantations (in the conventional sense) as "theaters of memory" (56). Adams finds, somewhat unsurprisingly, that the historical interpretations being staged at several restored plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi elide slavery. More striking are the details of how the heritage-tourism industry sometimes accomplishes that elision. Adams's exegetical attention extends even to plantation tours' portrayals of excretion; of two plantations Adams analyzes in tandem—one that posts a sign identifying the restrooms as "Servants Quarters" and another that touts the several white dignitaries who sat on a preserved wingback chamber chair—she writes, "As strange as it is to imagine the nether parts of these famous men passing over the same pot, this historic segregated men's room becomes 'tradition,' while sites where slaves slept are effaced by modern plumbing" (62). |
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The variety of subjects and methods in Wounds of Returning is one of its best attributes, but it also strains the book's cohesiveness at times. A chapter on representations of the frontier in novels by Willa Cather sits particularly uneasily in the argument's overall structure. The concluding chapter, though, helpfully brings all of the book's principal concerns back to the fore. "Stars and Stripes," a dazzling reading of the prison rodeo at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (itself formerly a slave plantation), follows the afterlife of slavery from the convict-leasing system to the contemporary prison. An exemplary application of performance studies, the chapter analyzes the spectacle of the rodeo at Angola, including a weird bazaar of prisoner handicrafts in which (mostly black) inmates become the spectators of (mostly white) tourists acquiring commodities. It powerfully demonstrates the conjunction of racial identity and property ownership around which Wounds of Returning gravitates. |
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| Christopher Hager
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| Trinity College (CT) |
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