{"product_id":"ariels-ecology-monique-allewaert-9780816677283","title":"Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntegrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, \u003ci\u003eAriel's Ecology\u003c\/i\u003e explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert's examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings' interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eCertainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare's \u003ci\u003eTempest\u003c\/i\u003e and Montesquieu's \u003ci\u003eSpirit of the Laws\u003c\/i\u003e to Spivak's theories of subalternity. In Allewaert's interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara's dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with \"perfect knowledge of the ground.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Monique Allewaert\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 081667728X\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780816677283\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Minnesota Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/11\/2013\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 248\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.66lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.70d","brand":"Monique Allewaert","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":43926488449279,"sku":"9780816677283","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/products\/img_e3a21f69-9975-41ae-8e6a-977dcacabc37.jpg?v=1681083352","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/ariels-ecology-monique-allewaert-9780816677283","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}