Although Foucault ( 2003) names “racism” the mechanism through which the state demarcates these subgroups and Agamben ( 1995, 2005) chooses “the camp” as the exemplary state of exception for those who are divested of political status and reduced to bare life, Achille Mbembe ( 2003: 21) notes that slavery “could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation” and “the plantation system and its aftermath.

This power includes the right to kill, let live, or expose to death certain subgroups. Foucault’s biopower and Agamben’s state of exception helped shift the conception of modern political sovereignty away from the belief in a democratic community ordered by rational subjects and toward a view of the state as defined by its power to organize and regulate populations. Weheliye ( 2014: 32–36) and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson ( 2013: 670) note, Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception and bare life-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. This reconsideration of the plantation heeds recent calls to challenge the omission of race in much current theory of biopolitics and bare life. Rather, there is something to be gleaned from interrogating this structure and resistances to it, not perhaps for liberal humanism’s heretofore failed project of human rights and racial equality but to change the ground (sometimes literally) of the discussion, to approach the archive aslant, and to imagine different possibilities of relation. This is not to say that we can simply map the plantation’s form onto all contemporary forms of racial injustice or that the slave past wholly determines our present, the meaning of blackness, or the grounds for political affiliation.

They consider the plantation from a variety of points across the geographic and temporal ranges of American literary studies, including the spaces of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States and the periods of plantation slavery proper in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to its subsequent iterations in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and up to the neoliberal present in which the carceral state props up fantasies of postracialism. The essays here rethink the biopolitics of plantation slavery and its legacies to interrogate the plantation as a form, logic, and technology by which inequalities of power, personhood, and value are realized. This special issue focuses on the plantation, the postplantation, and the afterlives of slavery to consider how we have inherited and continue to be structured by the plantation form.

Agamben state of exception summary