absent agronomist and the lord of poison: cultivating modernity in transatlantic literature, 1758-1854.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20213429

This dissertation contributes to the field of New Southern Studies by reading antebellum American literature in relation to the new forms of labor, knowledge, and racialization developed on the eighteenth-century French Caribbean plantation. Even though we think of modernity as having been produced and dominated by European Enlightenment science, literature's stories about the plantation show that modernity grew from the seeds of creole African knowledge ways and European agronomy-both of which were created on colonial soil. My readings of literature from St. Domingue (pre-revolutionary Haiti), France, Britain and the U.S. from the 1750s to the 1850s identify two twinned and competing figures of power: that of European colonial knowledge embodied in the absent agronomist and his systems of surveillance, and that of creole African knowledge, embodied in the mytho-historical figure and maroon slave known as François Makandal, the "lord of poison," whose knowledge of soil and plants enabled revolution "from below." I consider the specifically ecological nature of modernity and its counter cultures by showing that in reality and in fiction, there is a co-productive and competing relationship between scientific modernity and an Atlantic African counter-culture of modernity created in the monocultural plantation economies of the South.