Heirs-at-Large: Precarity and Salvage in the Post-Plantation Souths of Faulkner and Jesmyn Ward

Abstract

new histories of demonstrate how fully involved the US was in an international system of colonial plantation economies, in the growth of fi nancial institutions like and insurance, and numerous other features of modern capital. 1 As a result of such scholarship, we may appreciate how Yoknapatawpha manifests fundamental properties of riverboat-mental-ity of Th e research into the relations of cotton capitalism and slavery published over the last few years by Beckert, Baptist, and Johnson has been understood as exemplifying the “New History of Capitalism,” or NHC. In fl uential as its general claims have become, substantial dispute has developed over a number of the principal conclusions drawn about the cotton plantation regime and the growth of Euro-American capitalism. Complaints focus on the subordination of racism to economic accounts, as well as to alternative explanations to capitalism as the driver for the global expansion of cotton production. For examples of authoritative critiques, see Olmstead and Rhode, Clegg, McCurry, and Hudson. For an argument that recent studies of capitalism and slavery su ff er from neglecting earlier historiography on the subject, see Nelson. In his monumental study Black Marxism, Robinson includes thorough accounts of earlier black historiography that fi rmly estab-lished the relation between slavery and capitalism, including the foundational work of W.E.B.