Landscapes of enslavement: Imaginings, re-imaginings, projections, and aestheticizations of the Atlantic Plantation in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This thesis addresses the centrality of slavery in eighteenth-century British culture through a complex, interdisciplinary lens which brings together texts, landscapes and insights from a range of scholarly approaches and priorities. In particular it foregrounds landscape as a valuable and encompassing medium through which to explore such issues.
The most significant feature of the integrated plantation landscape in the Atlantic colonies was strategic violence, actual and threatened, deployed as a means of control. Surveillance was inbuilt, for despite their power, white colonists experienced constant fear of rebellions by enslaved workers.
Politeness, the culture of the metropolitan ruling elite, was a complex amalgam of performed genteel behaviours and evidence of taste in an exclusive and inclusive social construct. The culture of politeness was synonymous with the picturesque genre which connected art, poetry and landscape, a genre also deployed to configure the plantation colony in a cultural continuum with the metropole. This is explored in the planteresque writing of Edward Long and the colonial picturesque tour of Maria Nugent.
The overseer landscape of overt brutality enacted the proxy power of the planter, enabling the plantocracy to feign distance from the plantation and perform metropolitan politeness. The overseer class essentialized and enacted the violence, racism and misogyny of the white male gaze.
The Atlantic Ocean was an arena of transitions and transformations. The intersection between metropolitan politeness and the creole culture of the plantocracy is instanced in the differing landscapes of the fourth-generation absentee planters, William Beckford of Somerley, who traversed the Atlantic, owned the creole landscape and configured an imagined polite trans-Atlantic identity, and William Beckford of Fonthill, who shunned the oceanic crossing and displaced his creole identity in a landscape of self-fashioning and obsessive behaviours. Both experienced anxieties and neuroses derived from the plantation source of their wealth.

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ORCID for Christer Petley: orcid.org/0000-0002-0616-1871

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