This special issue focuses on the plantation, the post-plantation, and the afterlives of slavery to consider how we have inherited and continue to be structured by the plantation form. This reconsideration of the plantation form heeds recent calls to reconceptualize notions of the human in relation to colonial plantation slavery to challenge the omission of race in much current theory of posthumanism, biopolitics, and bare life. As Alexander Weheliye and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson note, Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception and bare life and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics—arguably the predominant critical frameworks for analyzing state violence and inequality as constituent aspects of democratic formation—neglect the history and legacy of racialization, colonialism, and slavery. We invite essays that consider the biopolitics of the plantation form and its legacies in order to question modernity’s human exceptionalism and the hierarchies of violent inequality it supports.
The Enlightenment conception of “Man” as a rational, conscious individual...
