ABSTRACT
The film presents slave resistance on and off plantations to counter early plantation literature, which omitted the possibility and depth of enslaved people’s discontent and rage. The short story “The Youngest Doll,” for example, introduces readers to a family that “was nearly ruined; they lived surrounded by a past that was breaking up around them with the same impassive musicality with which the dining-room chandelier crumbled on the frayed linen cloth of the dining-room table”. In the essay “Pleasure and Jouissance,” Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant uses the plantation, and particularly the canefields, as sites of potential resistance, where the hidden encounters of enslaved peoples, including brief sexual encounters, rejected the European masters’ complete domination over their physical bodies. Worldwide, perhaps the most popular narrative with an idealized plantation setting would be Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, a bestselling historical romance novel later made into a major motion picture.
