Fugitive Poetics

This dissertation presents an account of fugitivity in poetic form as well as political practice. In this account, fugitivity is an ecological strategy of resistance to enslavement, where ecology describes both the set of relations orchestrated between words on a page and the set of relations between species, including humans, on the plantation. In order to understand fugitivity as an ecological strategy, I examine the mutual imbrication of nascent theories of race and ecology in the long nineteenth century. I thus present two competing theories of race and ecology, each of which carries distinct poetic implications. The first, plantation poetics, is evident in poems written on and about plantations in the second half of the eighteenth-century. These poems, in their rigid poetic structures, reinforce the racial and ecological logics of the plantation, in which hierarchical relations between and within species are inherited from early natural histories, and are used to support both slavery and the monocultural cultivation of the plantation. In contrast to this system, I present a fugitive poetics that, sharing the theory of race and ecology as intertwined systems, turns that theory