“ALL DEPENDS ON ALL”: INTIMACY AS METHODOLOGY

Up through the mid-nineteenth century, sugarcane, Saccharum Officinarum (see Figure 6.1), was treated and cultivated as an asexually produced crop, meaning, the relationship between the “parent-cane” and its progeny is one of clonal re/production rather than one rendered through a process of breeding—of cross-parent sexual reproduction.¹ This form of clonal propagation can be done either by planting cuttings (portions of the stalk) taken from a cane-parent or through the process of ratooning, where most of the aboveground stalk is cut and only the roots remain. Since “cloning increases colonizing ability and persistence because it eliminates seedlings—the stage of growth when the risk of mortality is highest,” planters have continued to rely on and exclusively use asexual reproduction for its efficient and productive alignment with the tempos and rhythms of nascent global capitalism.²

The ability to sexually re/produce sugarcane through its flowering and seeds, however, was not discovered until the mid-nineteenth century. This discovery led to breeding efforts that would produce cane species resistant to disease, thus encoding eugenicist implications in sexually re/produced sugarcane. Yet, in A Treatise on Planting (1790), author and self-described planter Joshua Peterkin obsesses over the apparent and presumed virile heterosexual vitality of sugarcane. To promote the heterosexualization of sugarcane production, Peterkin obfuscates the necessary African enslaved labor involved and ironically reveals the queerness of sugarcane by conflating a rhetoric of desire with a rhetoric of gendered embodiment. Peterkin attempts to assure Caribbean planters of sugarcane’s “normal” desires by focusing on the plant’s seemingly cisgender genitals: the “stamina”—the pollen-producing reproductive organ—or what Peterkin calls “the husbands of the flower,” and the “female parts” or the “stigma,” which through “impregnation” apparently reveals “the origin of the vegetable world.”³ Peterkin’s allegiance to Carl Linnaeus perpetuates an enforcement of a cisgender and heterosexual framework onto sugarcane’s re/productivity within the vegetable kingdom: “The manner in which these species are produced amongst vegetables, greatly resembles the generation of animals: the existence and union of sexes are necessary in the greatest number of plants.”⁴

Even in the sexual re/production of sugarcane, which involves two cane-parents, the supposed sex of each parent is arbitrary. As a perennial grass, cane flowerings are, in biological re/productive terms, bisexual or hermaphroditic, which means that cane flowers possess male and female reproductive organs and therefore can be used as either parent in cross-fertilization. Scientists have more recently documented an “emasculation” process in which hot water is used to reduce pollen viability, ostensibly producing a sterile male that can then be used as a female parent in breeding programs.⁵ Therefore, the further Peterkin, and Caribbean planters more broadly, doubled down on implementing a cisgender and heterosexual rhetoric for describing sugarcane production, the queerer, more non-monogamous, more nonsexual, more erotic, and more biodiverse the process of serving and perpetuating empire actually started to sound.

James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar-Cane (1764) recognizes sugarcane cultivation as a nonsexual form of non/human re/production.⁶ Yet, like Peterkin, Grainger infuses his verse with the language of Anglo, cisgender, heterosexual erotic romance. When one refers to the romance of Grainger’s georgic, the star-crossed lovers of Theana and Junio, wherein Junio, “the perfect example of Europeanized-Creole manhood” performing gentility and courtship toward Theana, comes to mind.⁷ Though Grainger uses this couple as “proof positive that a slavocracy was capable of fostering virtue and steadfastness,” thus presenting Anglo, cisgender, heterosexual love in the Caribbean as an ideal form, this chapter considers the real romance the poem offers: that between sugarcane and soil.

Throughout the poem, Grainger observes the precarious balance of intimate relations among species and between forms of matter that results in the production of St. Kitts (formerly St. Christopher Island) sugarcane:

An alien mixture meliorates the breed;

Hence Canes, that sickened dwarfish on the plain,

Will shoot with giant-vigour on the hill.

Thus all depends on all.⁸

Grainger’s description of healthy and unhealthy cane is framed in terms of phallic virility, wherein a healthy cane “will shoot” vigorously in certain soils over others: “the hill” rather than “the plain” in this verse line. What affords such health, what is healing is “an alien mixture”—soil: the various inorganic matter, organic matter, water, and air that re/produce vegetative life and sustain other species who live and burrow within its pores. It is the messy lack of purity and singularity, an alienness, that drives the soil’s fertility, re/productive receptivity, and the healthy production of various species. In ecological terms, “alien” also describes plants or animals that have been “brought to another country or district and subsequently naturalized; not native.”⁹

In Grainger’s poem, however, the delineation between alien (naturalized) and native is inverted. It is the native soils of St. Kitts that he defines as “alien” matter, suggesting that for Grainger, alienness is that which is foreign to the colonial project and foreign to Anglo whiteness. Such a designation forecasts the failures and violences of colonial expansion at the level of the biosphere because colonial projects forcibly ignore and disregard the unique ecosystems of St. Kitts and the Caribbean more broadly. Native Kittitian species must be “naturalized” to the plantation economy. Those that cannot be effectively naturalized to the plantation, which in the eyes of the colonizer includes translocated fugitive enslaved persons, are abandoned by the colonial project for which they have been stolen. These bodies become spatially conceived of as “outside” the plantation and thus as a proliferating threat that must be contained by the plantation economy through a variety of safeguards, including Kittitian assembly acts.

In a 2010 issue of Feminist Studies, KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks underline asexuality’s queerness by suggesting that such an orientation represents a “practice and a politics” that “radically challenges the prevailing sex-normative culture.”¹⁰ This chapter, inspired by the asexual turn, as Ziona Kocher’s chapter in this collection likewise explores, asks: What would it mean to consider ecological forms of asexual re/production as not only queer but also as the essence of a violently homophobic, heteronormative colonial plantation (mono)culture? Grainger’s georgic incidentally reveals sugarcane cultivation as non-monogamous, asexual, cross-racial, cross-species, and dependent on the instrumentalization of a multitude of bodies—human, non/human, animal, organic, and inorganic—to maintain the soil’s increased receptivity. This chapter concludes that monocrop production purposefully obfuscates the cross-species and cross-racial erotics integral to sugarcane propagation while simultaneously promoting Anglo, cisgender heterosexuality as natural and naturally produced through and by global agri-capitalist expansion. Through the language of love, courtship, and romance readily associated with English pastorals and georgics, The Sugar-Cane attempts to enclose and contain the various relationships on which sugarcane propagation depends. Grainger fantasizes that such a system is not only possible but sustainable and able to mitigate the widening gap between sites of production and sites of consumption brought on by plantation exportations.

I situate the poem within the broader historical and (agri)cultural context of St. Kitts, the specific West Indies Island setting for the poem, and the fields of queer ecologies and critical race studies. By using intimacy as a methodology, I argue that asexual re/production for the colonial plantation becomes resolutely hidden behind a framework of heterosexual love and courtship, which is repeatedly mapped onto the sugarcane’s relationship to the soil and even to the cane’s relationship to the enslaved Black laboring bodies that facilitate the crop’s nonsexual propagation. The costs of scalability include the fungible conflation of sugarcane and the enslaved African as compostables. The use of such a “straight” framework is also not rigid enough to refuse the transgressive and resistant queer matters that remain outside of the full control of colonial plantation managers and projects.

I draw from Lisa Lowe’s recent reflections on her former work on “intimacy as methodology.” Lowe writes that “by emphasizing relation, convergence, contradiction, interdependency, intimacies as method may attend to contacts and conflicts above and below the classifications of national archives, the residual and emergent knowledges that may be elided by the dominant disciplines in which we work.”¹¹ Though I agree with Lowe’s depiction of intimate relations and ways of observing types of archival proximities that often shore up coterminous geographic realities, I am equally struck by the voidance of touch, sexuality, desire, love, and the erotic. To access “convergence, contradiction, and interdependency,” and to uncover empire’s cooptation and reliance on peculiar manifestations of touch and desire, I look at the ways in which frameworks of sexual re/production crop up in unexpected avenues. I use the concluding phrase of the poem’s early line, “all depends on all” then, to develop a methodology of asexual ecologies—a specific method of intimacy in which relations are inevitable and inevitably enmeshed, entangled, and intra-acting. Such a method suggests a fundamental awareness that the discrete separation and containment of environmental bodies is an impossibility. The line also implies Grainger’s own awareness and exploitation of sugarcane production as not an inherently closed system, but extremely dependent on its relationship to soil, which is indicative of intimate relationships between and across a diverse spectrum of matter.¹²

The fragility of Grainger’s colonial project is not merely based in the fantasy of an enclosed parcel of sugarcane land but also in the fantasy of enclosed sexualities and enclosed intimacies. Brit Rusert argues that “the image of the plantation as an ecologically enclosed, protected space of British cultivation and experimentation is revealed to be a fragile colonial fantasy, always on the verge of being ‘infected’ or creolized by indigenous plants, animals, and diseases, as well as by Africans both within and outside the plantation.”¹³ Building on Rusert’s exploration of plantation ecologies, I suggest that Grainger knowingly manipulates St. Kitts’ open, biodiverse, ecological system in which “all depends on all” toward a singular, teleologically exploitative goal of colonial sugarcane propagation. Through a proliferating ecology of footnotes that textually eclipse the lengthy georgic verse, The Sugar-Cane offers a formal symptom of scalability: the attempt to retrofit a material reality of disturbance-based plantation ecologies within specific preexisting discursive frameworks.¹⁴ By reading the soil/species intimacies in Grainger’s poem—by tracing the porous entanglements between soil and the proliferating scales of life and vitality it registers—this chapter unearths and uncovers what a logics of white Anglo love tries to obfuscate: which matters matter.

SURVEYORS OF LOVE: INTIMATIONS OF SUGARCANE CULTIVATION

Early in The Sugar-Cane, the speaker muses: “This soil the Cane / With partial fondness loves; and oft surveys its progeny with wonder.”¹⁵ The peculiar use of “love” to describe the sugarcane’s relationship to the “clay or gravel mix’d” soil of St. Kitts not only gestures toward a non/human romance of sorts between sugarcane and dirt but also to love’s attunement with land improvement, particularly the development of monocrop production within the plantation economy. The speaker aligns the sugarcane’s “fondness” for the soil with the perspective of the surveyor who must examine and ascertain the value and tenure of one’s crop or “progeny” as if the cane itself were a metonymic extension of the colonial planter—as if sugarcane were constitutive of the planter’s own offspring, brood, or descendants. Grainger only uses the term “progeny” twice throughout his 2,563-word poem: once in the above reference to sugarcane cultivation and once in describing the enslaved Africans as “Afric’s sable progeny.”¹⁶ The lines also highlight the specificity of the sugarcane’s desire for soil as pointedly heterosexual, given its focus on futural impulses and its result of re/producing offspring.¹⁷

In “The Future is Kid Stuff,” Lee Edelman aligns heterosexuality with reprofuturity through the figure of the Child “who has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”¹⁸ Here Edelman aligns the Child with that which is “held in perpetual trust,” which ultimately conflates the notion of progeny with property or as property. The use of a legal term “perpetual trust” defines a process of indefinite ownership over assets that allows future generations to amass and bequeath wealth without incurring transfer taxes. What if “the image of the Child” could be understood more broadly, to include non/human progeny? To include monocrops, like sugarcane? In reading Edelman’s queer sociality thesis more broadly, reprofuturity comes to emphasize the historical logics of colonial plantation management: to control, to contain, and to frame intimacy as inherently white-owned and (hetero)sexual in order to possess, sell, and profit from intimacy’s productions.¹⁹

Grainger’s description of how the cane examines its harvest, or progeny, with “wonder” reinforces an earlier connotation of the term “survey” that most aptly reflects the notion that the non/human cane Child is legally owned by the cane parent and by extension, the plantation owner and not the enslaved laborer: “To examine and ascertain the condition, situation, or value of, formally or officially, e.g. the boundaries, tenure, value, etc. of an estate, a building or structure, accounts, or the like; more … spec., to examine the condition of a property on behalf of its prospective buyer.”²⁰ This definition of “survey” includes a list of objects to be examined and ascertained, but is not exhaustive, ending with a nebulous “or the like” in reference to what can be surveyed for its value, boundaries, and tenure. Such examination is in service of selling, yet another form of strategic and profitable property transfer and one that is completely restricted and regulated, disallowing enslaved Africans any opportunity to sell the literal fruits of their labor. In St. Kitts’ Acts of Assembly (1711–1735), a 1711 act fined persons up to twenty pounds if they were to “trade, traffick, or deal with any Negro, or other slaves, for Sugar, Syrrup, Molosses, Indigo, Tobacco, Ginger, Cotton, Brass, Pewter, or any other Goods, Merchandize, or any Stock or Poultry … without the Knowledge or Consent of the said Master or Owner of such Negro, or other Slave or Slaves.”²¹ Though the enslaved African laborers are the ultimate cultivators of sugarcane, their relationship to the monocrop is not perceived to be a direct one or one of direct exchange or trade. Their laboring intimacy with the cane is alienated through this process of global distribution.²²

“GIVE THE SAP TO RISE”: SUGARCANE’S CROSS-RACIAL AND CROSS-SPECIES QUEER EROTICS

Cristobal Silva argues that Grainger “aestheticize[s] sugar as a poetic commodity” for a British literary audience to obfuscate the daily realities of enslaved labor that is at the heart of this imperial economy.²³ By inserting a plot of heterosexual romance between sugarcane and soil, Grainger positions the planter’s and the enslaved Africans’ directed labors as necessary to this poetically constructed non/human procreative relationship. As the obvious hierarchical power dynamic between the planter/owner and the enslaved African becomes overladen with the sugarcane’s sweet sap, the relationship between the two becomes increasingly pederastic and homoerotic. Vincent Woodard argues that sites of production offer “an originary framework for the emergence of homoeroticism out of the transatlantic slave trade and plantation culture.”²⁴ As the enslaved Africans hoe the sugarcane, Grainger refers to the planter as “the master-swain [who] reviews their toil.”²⁵ In imagining a pre-enslavement life where the Africans worked “their native land” willingly, he suggests that their lack of effort in St. Kitts stems from being “uninstructed swains.”²⁶ The use of the term “swain” has a significant double meaning, particularly in the context of St. Kitts as a West Indian plantation. “Swain” is predominantly associated with pastoral poetry and can mean both “a country or farm labourer” and “a country gallant or lover.”²⁷ Such a boundary-collapsing term, perhaps most readily signified in a term like “husbandry,” prescribes and enforces a specifically British heterosexual masculinity onto the process of sugarcane propagation.

Yet, the notion that sugarcane requires the assistance of a British male lover and anglicized laborer also destabilizes the scalability of the term “swain.” Rather than maintaining a compulsory heterosexuality, “swain” achieves queer valences in the assumptive pastoral homoerotics associated with a collective of male laborers arousing sugarcane to re/produce.²⁸ Grainger identifies each part of the power dialectic with a similar term, the planter being the “master-swain” and the enslaved Africans as the “uninstructed swains,” which adds a pederastic cross-racial intimacy between and among the white plantation owner and “the Negroe-train”—the line of enslaved Black laborers—as well as a cross-species intimacy between and among the human cultivators, the sugarcane, and the soil. Grainger’s georgic obfuscates capitalism’s reliance on the integral cross-racial and cross-species erotic intimacies inherent to monocrop production. The notion of an “uninstructed swain” likewise portrays a complex framework of what specific modalities of a culture become colonized. Grainger appears to see the planter’s job as one of white instruction, wherein the whiteness is not simply grinded in via enforced style of plantation farming techniques but also through an inculcation into an anglicized male heterosexual role of gallant lover.

The English pastoral poem juxtaposes the enslaved African’s role as opposite to the virile Anglo protagonist. The former’s role is that of an intimacy coordinator whose own sexuality is predicated upon the colonially produced monocrop sexuality of sugarcane and whose own potential desires are negated or sublimated in service of an objectified and feminized role of arousal labor. Mel Chen argues that animacy works “to blur the tenuous hierarchy of human-animal-vegetable-mineral with which it is associated.”²⁹ Chen’s pivot to animacy makes tangible the ways in which sexualities are not containable or separate dynamics; rather, sexualities become contaminated, transformed, encroached on, and altered by constant touches and material proximities between and among forms of matter. The relationship between the enslaved African laborer and the sugarcane becomes erotically charged. Integral to the process of sugarcane cultivation is the necessary “dalliance” or flirtation between “fresh sportive airs” for which the sugarcane joints will “embrace,” and thus “give the sap to rise.”³⁰ Once the sugarcane’s first blades have lost “their verdure,” it is up to the enslaved laborers to strip off these languid, yellowing blades to facilitate—to intimately coordinate—the courtship between the green, virile cane joints and the fresh air.³¹ The poem inflects the ratooning process as one that requires the enslaved African laborer to remove the cane’s flaccid elements—where they “hang their idle heads”—to facilitate the growth of erect ones.³² Though the African enslaved laborer occupies the position of “uninstructed” Black male lover in relation to the Anglo white male planter, he also comes to ostensibly occupy the position of a racialized female lover to the sugarcane. With such positioning, the Black laborer’s individual desires and sexualities are erased through the process of arousing the virile cane to ejaculative sap completion.³³

The goal of producing sap invokes a linear erotics of orgasm. Such a framework elucidates the meanings of Grainger’s invocation of sap as semen and as productive progeny for commodification and exchange value. Annamarie Jagose suggests that within queer and leftist discourses, (human) orgasm is “figured in the register of normativity” and thus “is always in the service of systems of oppression.”³⁴ For Jagose, the desire to revel in orgasm’s incoherence stems from the assertion that orgasm is not inherently teleological. Grainger’s poem throws into doubt what counts as incoherent about orgasm. The poem registers the cane’s eventual release of sap through a connotative framework of seminal fluid, thus implying the potential for non/human orgasm as a result, not of sexual re/production but of an asexual clonal re/production assisted by the hands of enslaved laborers. Such poetic figurative work reveals and portrays the irony of monocrop production. To contain and enclose the plantation toward a singular production—toward an exclusive monocrop—requires and registers a variety of cross-racial and cross-species intimacies. The drive toward one narrowly defined aim of producing sap for the sugar trade relies on and produces a porous “alien mixture” of soil and species sexualities.

KJ Cerankowski further argues that such enclosure of sexuality is “necessarily tied to the logics of colonization—orgasm, at the right time, in the right way, with the right person [or species].”³⁵ The enslaved African is crucial to sugarcane propagation through their specifically timed coordination of harvesting techniques, which implies that without them, this particular asexual model of courtship is foreclosed. The assumed need for heterosexually inflected assistance ironically reveals sugarcane production as a much queerer, erotic, asexual, and non-monogamous process. Sugarcane cultivation requires a variety of participants’ direct and discretely directed involvement to effectively arouse the sugarcane to mate with the fecund St. Kitts soil. These queer intimacies are also tragically predicated upon a colonial reality of stolen bodies. Hortense Spillers identifies this “theft of the body” as one that severs “the captive body from its motive will, its active desire.”³⁶ Beyond the fruits—sugarcane sap—of enslaved African labor that are stolen by the plantation economy, monocrop sugar production specifically registers the ways in which the plantation system steals from the Black body by sapping it of its own embodiments of desire and of sexuality.

EROTICS OF COMPOSTABILITY: WHOSE MATTER FERTILIZES THE SOIL?

By conflating the enslaved African and the sugarcane through his singular use of the term “progeny,” Grainger creates a severing wherein the progeny in the poem are not reflective of heirs to property but are the stolen labor and the promised future assets, alongside the sugarcane crop, of British heirs to the plantation.³⁷ Grainger’s georgic reveals how monoculture creates a despairing future of land exhaustion that is then narrativized as removed from the very system that has put such a crisis into effect through the language of and attention to composting and re-fertilizing the soil. Abetting such a fantasy of consumption, as Karl Marx asserts, robs “the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility.”³⁸ Grainger idolizes the soil as that which can be reproductively receptive and seemingly inexhaustible, to imply the plantation’s effects are only valuably held in perpetual trust so long as the soil’s nutrients can be regularly replenished:

“SCARCE less impregnated, with every power

Of vegetation, is the red-brick mould,

That lies on marly beds.—The renter, this

Can scarce exhaust; how happy for the heir!”³⁹

The term “mould,” referring to topsoil or surface soil, also specifically names dirt that is extremely friable and fertile due to it being “rich in organic matter”: “moulds are loams mixed with animal and vegetable remains, particularly from putrefaction.”⁴⁰ Grainger insists that the future “heir,” that legally promised recipient of this monocrop’s productions, can be “happy” now because the “renter,” who I understand as the enslaved laborer, “can scarce exhaust” this type of topsoil through repetitive working and ploughing. By being made of composted decaying remains of organic matter that return nutrients to the earth, the mould’s fertility and receptivity appear for Grainger cyclical and constant and able to keep up with the tempos of monocrop production. As long as the “rented”—stolen—labor of enslaved Africans to work the sugarcane is available, the sugarcane appears effortlessly and indefinitely fertile, and there is no end to its re/productive capacity. Grainger’s poem idealizes and fantasizes the possibility and potential for earthen metabolic balance and harmony.

Grainger’s need for and involvement of so many bodies—human, animal, living, non/living, organic and inorganic—in the sugar cultivation process reveals the environmental contradictions produced by colonial monocropping. Simply put, Grainger’s georgic exposes the awareness and manipulation of “soil as a living world rather than a mere receptacle and input for crop nutrition” through the plantation system’s very insistence to exploit and exhaust the soil solely toward one end.⁴¹ St. Kitts’ soil, which becomes exponentially more productive, “likely to make more sugars this year, than since it has been first settled,” is often juxtaposed with Nevis’ and Antigua’s soil, which is often impacted by “dry weather and will make but very small crops this year.”⁴²

The nineteenth-century cartographer, John Pinkerton, describes St. Kitts’ soil as not only especially fertile but also uniquely plowable as if the soil was made only for sugarcane propagation: “No part of the West Indies that I have seen, possesses even the same species of soil that is found in St. Christopher’s. It is in general a dark grey loam, so light and porous as to be penetrable by the slightest application of the hoe.”⁴³ In an attempt to describe St. Kitts soil as uniquely productive, Pinkerton aligns the soil’s porosity with penetrability via a harvesting tool, implying that its porous nature is uniformly geared toward agricultural re/production even though the more porous a soil is, the more species and organisms, including bacteria, can survive and develop there. By relying on the language of speciation to define St. Kitts soil, Pinkerton falsely and discursively encloses soil as a contained or containable entity. A soil’s natural receptivity to re/production is broad and broadly distributed among species and organisms.

As St. Kitts’ sugarcane production increases, the physical health and bodily constitution of the enslaved African laborers becomes jeopardized: “After the prospect of making the largest crop of sugars that has been known … and were their negroes in health to labour, yet the inhabitants would now loose [sic] more than half of their expectations.”⁴⁴ The tension between increased production and decreased labor is that of profit margins for the plantation owners. Samuel Baker’s 1753 map of St. Kitts (see Figure 6.2) sketches the overarching topography of the island, including illustrations of the hills, volcanoes, and other more rugged terrain formations, including icons for the various ponds. Baker’s map also includes icons for the parishes’ various “Windmills for Grounding Sugar Canes,” which are multiply located throughout each parish parcel on the island. For Grainger, mills are crucial to sustaining the soil’s increased fertility, able to “double thine estate” for the planter.⁴⁵ He instructs to “never, ah never, be asham’d to tread/Thy dung-heaps, where the refuse of thy mills,/With all the ashes, all thy coppers yield,/With weeds, mould, dung, and stale, a compost form,/Of force to fertilize the poorest soil.”⁴⁶ The dung-heaps are made of the refuse of the mills, creating a “compost form” or mixture of weeds, topsoil, excrement, and leftover plant stalks and stems necessary to maintaining the soil’s increased fertility. Grainger attends to the ways in which composted decaying organic materials can manage to revitalize even the “poorest soil”; however, such knowledge of composting lends to extractive exhaustion of the soil—only revitalizing the soil for the sake of the sugarcane—and to speculations of further abuse of the enslaved laborer, by begging the question of what counts as refuse?⁴⁷ Or, does it matter which matter fertilizes the soil?⁴⁸

Beyond these obvious forms of fungibility—the enslaved Black body’s value being not in monetary pounds simply but in pounds worth of consumptive material of sugar—there is the fungibility of compostability.⁴⁹ If Marxists are concerned about the increasing distance between sites of consumption and sites of production, then what about the increasing proximity between the bodies of enslaved Black laborers and the sites of their work? (see Figure 6.3)⁵⁰ In Book III, Grainger mentions an “accident” that “will sometimes happen, especially in the night” at the mill: the forcible dismemberment of an enslaved Black laborer’s limb.⁵¹ In this same footnote, Grainger speculates on a practice Pere Labat was informed of where if “the English were wont, as a punishment, [… they would] grind their negroes to death.” The fact of speculation of the conflation of the enslaved Black body and of sugar in the plantation’s social imaginary is fact enough of an erotics of compostability, which is a symptom and consequence of the exponential expansion of sugarcane exportation. The increasing fungible proximity between the enslaved Black laborers and sugarcane is also registered in the payment of returned fugitives—dead or alive—to the plantation in the amount of “six Pounds current Money of this Island, or the Value thereof in Sugar.”⁵² The supposed milling accidents of “imprudence or sleepiness” wherein the cane and “the entangled member” become conflated within and by the mill grinder produces a fungibility indicative of the costs of scalability.⁵³

The potential for literal “dismembering” was a regularly occurring punishment for enslaved Africans and noted in St. Kitts’ Acts of Assembly in the case of wounding or maiming a white person while figurative dismemberment was as regularly occurring and registered as a poll tax: “A duty of eight shillings per poll [per head] on all negroes and slaves.”⁵⁴ Further, after the passing of these acts, if an enslaved African was to be condemned for a crime, said individual was to be appraised in “pounds of sugar” and that estimated value could be lessened if said individual suffered a disability, “by having but one Limb.”⁵⁵ Not only are the enslaved Africans alienated from the crop they labor over so tirelessly but they have become alienated quite literally from their own selves, their own bodily matter having become fodder for the mill. Anna Tsing defines the monocrop as a system of alienation “in which only one standalone asset matters; everything else becomes weeds or waste.”⁵⁶ They are no longer simply plowing the soil to plant the cane or arousing the cane to cultivation, but rather, they are forced into a haphazard confrontation and misguided reconstitution of their selves as the reproductive waste needed to fertilize the soil and maintain the plantation’s monocrop productionist tempos. The cost of scalability is Black flesh.⁵⁷

TRANSPLANTATION: MOVING BEYOND FROM WITHIN METES, BOUNDS, AND PROVISION GROUNDS

Can the conflation of the Black body and the soil ever produce a form of metabolic harmony that does not reconstitute a white Humanism? If the monocrop plantation is an unsustainable system that anticipates infrastructural collapse while continually promoting anti-Blackness, what, if anything, lies beyond its bounds? Fugitive enslaved persons disrupted the rhythms of monocrop production by disregarding the metes and bounds of the plantation and by resisting the metabolic exhaustion of their own provision grounds through a Black asexual erotics.⁵⁸ A land parceling logic of “metes and bounds,” a mode of legal containment owned and administered by individual landowners, cannot fully control the everyday uses and means of occupancy by enslaved persons within those bounds.

William McMahon’s 1828 survey map of St. Kitts (see Figure 6.4) can be more accurately understood as a cadastral map, or a “metes and bounds” map, which is a large-scale, comprehensive recording of a country’s geography as illustrated through property parcels, boundaries, and subdivisions for the purposes of legal documentation of land ownership. McMahon’s map lists the various parish boundaries and provides all the parcel owners for each parish as well. The acreage of land within each parish is then calculated and categorized as either “Cane Land” or miscellaneous: “Works, Negro Huts, Pasture, Mountain, and Uncultivated Land.” What counts as cane land, also, unsurprisingly, outmeasures the leftover land, leftover for sustaining human and non/human life directly on the island, which suggests a continued increasing of distance between production and consumption through a dwindling of land parcels for the production of sustenance. This division of land types can be summed up as productive land versus unproductive land, which ultimately implies that the land used for enslaved Black persons’ homes as well as for their own food and sustenance is considered wild or uncultivated space despite still being contained by the metes and bounds of parish divisions. In “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Sylvia Wynter argues that provision grounds—the plots of land given to enslaved Black persons by enslavers—are indicative of a process of transplantation in which not just African bodies but African customs and traditions become transposed and recultivated, offering forms of “cultural guerilla resistance” to the plantation from within through a return to a system of shared use value against the colonial system of exchange value.⁵⁹

This chapter has argued that to worship at the altar of the monocrop is to promote sugarcane production as a perverse love story as if such a discourse can ever bridge the widening gap between sites of production and sites of consumption. It is not merely that Grainger and other planters hide sugarcane’s complex asexual production behind a humanist framework, but more specifically that such a discourse attempts to efface the increasing banality of sex that enslavement and capitalist industry has produced through the language of romance and courtship. Through the process of transplantation, Wynter theologizes: “The land remained the Earth—and the Earth was a goddess; man used the land to feed himself; and to offer fruits to the Earth; his funeral was the mystical reunion with the earth.”⁶⁰ Transplantation resists the banal—“All forms of de-spiritualized and impersonal human interaction”—by re-introducing a reciprocal, consensual, nurturing relationship between bodies (bodies of land and bodies of flesh).⁶¹ What Wynter identifies through the maintenance of sustenance plots by enslaved Africans is a Black asexual erotics. For Ianna Hawkins Owen, asexuality denotes “the banality of sex or the substitutability of sex with other kinds of pleasure that may lie outside of the bounds of the hegemonic notions of sex and sexual desire.”⁶² Through this Black asexual ontology, land occupies the role of direct sustenance, a gift given on the condition and expectation of a return offering. Such an exchange of metabolic energy does not require the exploitation and exhaustion of one body at the expense of another.

I do not find it a coincidence that Wynter’s conception of transplantation emphasizes a logic of transparency. Here, I am drawing a connection between the use of the prefix trans (meaning across, with, and beyond categorical difference) in both “transplantation” and “transparency” and the conceptualization of an anti-capitalist framework that does not attempt to hide, disguise, deny, or obfuscate the porosity, fluidity, and openness of asexual ecologies and multispecies intimacies. The OED’s entry examples for “transparency” during the years of 1651–1653, 1705, 1750, and 1860 rely on objects of the biosphere: crystal minerals, streams, stones, and the atmosphere, therefore implying a material meaning to the term, or more simply put: transparency is an environmental concept.⁶³ By accepting and treating the soil of the biosphere as a living world that is open and porously connected to the Black body, the Black self is reconstituted. As land is recognized as a site of sustenance for the Black body, the Earth still requires metabolic offerings of decay—“his funeral was the mystical reunion”—to regenerate the soil. Within these African precolonial soil intimacies are future-facing salves to the widening gaps between production and consumption. Such soil intimacies reintroduce Black pleasure to projects of sustainability and restoration; they are erotic, nonsexual, and recommit to a pleasure that does not need to be duplicitously bound by and within the language of Anglo romantic love and courtship to prosper.

NOTES

1. 1. For broader frameworks of gender and sexuality in nature, see Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). See also James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777, ed. Thomas Krise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 166–270 (180). All citations are to this edition.

2. 2. Barbara D. Booth, Stephen D. Murphy, and Clarence J. Swanton, Invasive Plant Ecology in Natural and Agricultural Systems (Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2010), 68.

3. 3. Joshua Peterkin, A Treatise on Planting, from the Origin of Semen to Ebullition; with a Correct Mode of Distillation and a Melioration on the Whole Process Progressively. Dedicated to the Planters of the Leeward Charribbee Islands (St. Christophers, Basseterre: Printed by E. L. Low, 1790), 2–3.

4. 4. Peterkin, A Treatise on Planting, 2–3.

5. 5. See also, “The Biology of Saccharum spp. (Sugarcane),” Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, version 3 (May 2011); and D. J. Heinz and T. L. Tew, “Hybridization Procedures,” in Sugarcane Improvement through Breeding, ed. D. J. Heinz (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1987), 313–342.

6. 6. See Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird’s defense of the necessary backslash in the term “non/human”: the placement of “the slash between as well as” part of “ ‘non’ and ‘human’ ” recognizes “the trace of the nonhuman in every figuration of the Human” and “of the exclusive and excluding economy of discourses relating to what it means to be, live, act, or occupy the category of the Human.” See Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, eds., “Introduction,” in Queering the Non/Human (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 1–16 (2).

7. 7. Richard Frohock suggests that “the georgic is ultimately a flawed form for celebrating the planter-hero: on the one hand, it allows for the elevation of agriculture to the heroic work of empire in the fashion of Virgil’s model. On the other hand, the georgic requires didacticism, and in detailing the planter’s modus operandi the abuses and brutalities inherent in the chattel slavery system necessarily appear.” See Frohock, Heroes of Empire: The British Imperial Protagonist in America, 1596–1764 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 179; and Keith A. Sandiford, “The Sugared Muse: Or the Case of James Grainger MD (1721–66),” New West Indian Guide 61, no. 1/2 (Spring 1987): 48.

8. 8. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 1:459–1:462.

9. 9. See “alien 1b(b),” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/alien_adj?tab=meaning_and_use#7106962.

10. 10. KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks, “New Orientations: Asexuality and Its Implications for Theory and Practice,” Feminist Studies 36, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 650–664 (661).

11. 11. Lisa Lowe, “Response: Intimacies as Method,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 207–213 (208).

12. 12. Neel Ahuja notes that “it is necessary to reconfigure notions of intimacy and reproduction across the planet: minerals, mosquitoes, settlers, gases, solar rays, and other bodies share in reproductive metabolisms crossing scales, species, and systems.” See Ahuja, “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 21, no. 2–3 (June 2015): 365–385 (367).

13. 13. Brit Rusert, “Plantation Ecologies: The Experimental Plantation in and against James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane,” Early American Studies 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 341–373 (346).

14. 14. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1910), Sigmund Freud writes about the development of (hetero)sexuality as one in which the Social drives and encloses the natural and “infantile” desire for the whole body as an erogenous zone into one that focuses solely on genital stimulation and thus becomes geared toward copulative acts and intimacies between differently sexed bodies. Anna Tsing defines “scalability” as the “ability to make projects expand without changing their framing assumptions.” See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 38.

15. 15. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 2:128–130. The poem’s use of “survey” in this early line readily aligns with the traditional prospect poem: “To look at from, or as from, a height or commanding position; to take a broad, general, or comprehensive view of; to view or examine in its whole extent,” which was still in fashion at the time of the poem’s publication. Even so, it is necessary to consider other definitions that further emphasize the term’s discrete association with property management, such as: “To determine the form, extent, and situation of the parts of (a tract of ground, or any portion of the earth’s surface) by linear and angular measurements, so as to construct a map, plan, or detailed description of it” (“2”). See “survey, v. 4a,” and “survey, v. 2,” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/survey_v?tab=meaning_and_use#19802827.

16. 16. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 1:4.

17. 17. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

18. 18. Edelman, No Future, 11.

19. 19. John Gilmore’s biography of Grainger emphasizes how he had married into what “modern historians call the plantocracy, that is, the local elite of European descent whose wealth and position was dependent on the ownership of plantations and of the slaves of African origin or descent who cultivated the land in sugar-cane and processed the cane into sugar for export to Britain.” See John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s “The Sugar Cane” (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 14.

20. 20. See “survey, 1. Transitive,” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/survey_v?tab=meaning_and_use#19802827.

21. 21. See Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Island of St. Christopher; from 1711, to 1735, Inclusive (London: printed by John Baskett, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1739), 9.

22. 22. Walter Johnson points out that it is not just enslaved persons’ abstract labor that becomes violently appropriated but also their material knowledge, their “ways of knowing that planters might command or even claim as their own, but that [planters] could never fully understand.” See Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 165.

23. 23. See Cristobal Silva, “Georgic Fantasies: James Grainger and the Poetry of Colonial Dislocation,” ELH 83, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 127–156 (138).

24. 24. See Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slavery Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 19.

25. 25. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 1:405.

26. 26. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 1:229.

27. 27. See “swain, n. 4” and “swain, n. 5,” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/swain_n?tab=meaning_and_use#19498157.

28. 28. See David Shuttleton, “The Queer Politics of Gay Pastoral,” in De-centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations beyond the Metropolis, ed. Richard Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton (London: Routledge, 2005), 125–146.

29. 29. Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 98.

30. 30. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 1:666–1:667.

31. 31. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, l:664–1:665.

32. 32. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, l:664–1:665.

33. 33. Owen problematizes the mammy figure’s rendering as asexual through her racist and white supremacist constitution. Owen argues for “the necessity of disentangling the human as fundamental to notions of asexuality. The historical construction of some figures as not fully human (recall the Three-Fifths Compromise) and as asexual offers additional trouble to the stability not just of sexuality as a human given but also of human as asexuality’s emergent given.” See Ianna Hawkins Owen, “Still, Nothing: Mammy and Black Asexual Possibility,” The Feminist Review 120 (2018): 70–84 (72).

34. 34. Annamarie Jagose, Orgasmology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 8–9.

35. 35. KJ Cerankowski, “The ‘End’ of Orgasm: The Erotics of Durational Pleasure,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 22, no. 3 (September 2021): 132–146 (136).

36. 36. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81 (67).

37. 37. Christopher Allan Black describes The Sugar-Cane as promoting stewardship rather than exploitation. However, Black concludes, even Grainger’s model only further “equalizes commodity producers and commodities in ways that induces forms of anthropomorphism and dehumanization simultaneously.” Benevolent treatment of Black enslaved laborers only in service of yielding healthy and abundant sugarcane crops merely maintained and perpetuated violent abuse of the Black body and over-exhaustion of the land. There is no sustainable stewardship under global agricapital. See Christopher Allan Black, “Slavery and Plantation Stewardship: The Eighteenth-Century Caribbean Georgics of James Grainger and Philip Freneau,” in Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities, ed. Jeremy Chow (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2023), 189–204 (191).

38. 38. See Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 638. See also John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).

39. 39. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, l:84–1:87.

40. 40. See “mould, 1b,” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/mould_n3?tab=meaning_and_use#35712937. See also Richard Kirwan, Elements of Mineralogy, 1794–1796, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Printed by J. Nichols, for P. Elmsly, in the Strand, 1794).

41. 41. María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 172.

42. 42. See Governor Hart, The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574–1739, vol. 33, Jan. 20, 1723; and Governor Hart, The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574–1739, vol. 35, February 15, 1727.

43. 43. See John Pinkerton, Modern Geography, A Description of the Empires, Kingdoms, States, and Colonies with the Oceans, Seas and Isles in All Parts of the World … Digested on a New Plan (London: Cadell, 1807), 463.

44. 44. See Governor Hart, The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574–1739, vol. 33, January 20, 1723.

45. 45. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 1:222.

46. 46. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 1:223–1:227.

47. 47. See Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14.

48. 48. Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis rework Donna Haraway’s ethics of compost, writing: “In our paraphrase it matters what compostables make compost and it matters if and how those nutrients are acknowledged.” See Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis, “Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 10, no. 2 (November 2018): 501–527 (502).

49. 49. In a letter to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Governor Hart refers to the British practice of selling enslaved Africans for “money or sugar: … if they sell for money they generally resort to these islands [St. Eustacia and Martinique] to purchase sugars for Great Britain: But if they dispose for sugars, then they carry them for Ireland directly.” See Hart, February 15, 1727.

50. 50. See Jordy Rosenberg, “Afterword,” in Transgender Marxism, ed. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke (London: Pluto Press, 2021); and Kathryn Yusoff, “White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike,” e-flux journal, no. 97 (February 2019): 1–13.

51. 51. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 221.

52. 52. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 70.

53. 53. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 221.

54. 54. See Petition of Wavell Smith and Savile Cust, to the Council of Trade and Plantations, in The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies (1574–1739), vol. 42, (May 28, 1736), 9. Edward Bancroft, John Gabriel Stedman, and Bartolomé de las Casas’ travel narratives also include references to the regular practices of enslaved persons’ dismemberments as punishment.

55. 55. Petition, 11. See also Monique Allewaert’s discussion of fragmented personhood in Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 85–114.

56. 56. Tsing, Mushroom, 6.

57. 57. Sophie Gee contends that “waste is always made not found—created by political and social processes, and, most importantly, by language itself.” See Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9.

58. 58. Audre Lorde emphasizes that a Black feminist erotics differentiates between “the power of each other’s feelings” and “using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex.” She argues that when “we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us” we turn away from reciprocated consent and turn toward abuse. See Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press, 2007), 58.

59. 59. See Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5 (June 1971): 95–102 (100). In a recent issue of ABO on teaching Mary Prince, Nicole Carr describes how classroom visual analyses of Caribbean sugar iconography affords student engagement with “the myriad and mundane ways enslaved Black people asserted their humanity,” which included resilient practices of home and family within the metes and bounds of the plantation. See Nicole Carr, “The Black Wanderer: Reading the Black Diaspora, Resistance, and Becoming in The History of Mary Prince in the Classroom,” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830, 13, no. 1 (Summer 2023): 1–14 (9).

60. 60. Wynter, “Novel and History,” 99.

61. 61. See Stefan Sullivan, “Banality,” in Marx for a Post-Communist Era: On Poverty, Corruption, and Banality (New York: Routledge, 2002), 135–160 (136).

62. 62. See Ianna Hawkins Owen, “Ordinary Failures: Toward a Diasporan Ethics” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2016), 74.

63. 63. See “transparency n., 1a,” OED Online, June 2020, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/transparency_n?tab=meaning_and_use#17971238.