Friday, April 7th
3222 Angell Hall

10:15a.m.-12:00pm Scholarly Panel

"'Regions of Hopeless Disorder': Swampland and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum South"

Description:
My paper, "'Regions of Hopeless Disorder': Swampland and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum South," considers a uniquely southern wilderness space--the swamp--to argue that the "peculiar institution" of slavery was intimately connected to the prevailing ecological and societal ideas about swamps and other wetlands as "peculiar" places-somewhere in between "land" and "water"-that needed to be drained, and thus, tamed or controlled, by the hands of humans. As liminal spaces existing on the boundaries of the arable land of the plantation, swamps became sites of trepidation for white southerners, places where wildness and luxuriant growth appeared threatening. Of course, equally if not more threatening to whites was the swamp's role as a haven for fugitive slaves and the geographic locus of slave insurrections. I argue that the drainage and canal projects persistently applied to swampland correlate to contemporary theories of race and attitudes toward wildness. As a wilderness space that defied categorization, swampland became a source of anxiety for whites who desired to tame its "unchecked growth" and uncover its "dark recesses," just as they enacted cruel laws and implemented cruel policies to keep slaves completely under their control.