Jeremy Wells | Indiana University Southeast (original) (raw)
Papers by Jeremy Wells
Journal of American History, 2011
Humanities
This article explores how White writers wrote about African American spirituals during and after ... more This article explores how White writers wrote about African American spirituals during and after the Civil War. While these writers tended to view Black speech as deficient, they were willing to regard Black musical expression as simply different, paving the way for its eventual nationalization as “American music”. Noting that White writers were not in the habit of admitting the inadequacies of their preferred modes of representation, the article concludes that the print representation of the spirituals contributed to a transformation of what was meant by the word “American”.
Journal of American History, 2012
The Global South, 2016
When Samuel Johnson first published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, “plantation” me... more When Samuel Johnson first published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, “plantation” meant something different than it does now, denoting process as much as place, an activity as much as a socioeconomic institution. In Johnson’s Dictionary, plantation was “the act or practice of planting” or “the place planted.” Its third definition—“a colony”—comes closer to the modern sense of the word, though “plantations” of this sort (New England’s Providence Plantation, for example) did not by definition involve the salient features of later ones, namely monoculture, slave labor, and mass production. Writing about his 1615 expedition to New France, Samuel de Champlain described “l’honneur [. . .] de planter la foy [faith] Chrestienne en un pays incognu et barbare” (97). Writing about preparations for his own voyage to the New World in Of Plymouth Plantation (1651/1856), William Bradford noted that “the Spaniards [. . .] had not yet planted” in Guiana, a rival site for Dissenter settlement (29). Champlain and Bradford’s words are indicative of early modern usage, but they also point to Johnson’s fourth, final, and most broadly metaphorical definition of plantation: “introduction; establishment.” That this sense of the word has disappeared is probably for the best; we are not tempted to say that we are writing the “plantation” to this special issue of The Global South. Yet its existence two and a half centuries ago may suggest why plantation has proved one of the more durable signifiers of modernity: why it possesses cognates in more than thirty languages and why, in some of them, at least, it keeps acquiring additional significance. This issue of The Global South is devoted to the concept of “plantation.” Its focus is on the word paired with the definitive article: the plantation. Most of the places mentioned in the essays that follow fit the definition of the “classic plantation” set forth by Sidney W. Mintz in 1968:
Journal of American History, 2011
Humanities
This article explores how White writers wrote about African American spirituals during and after ... more This article explores how White writers wrote about African American spirituals during and after the Civil War. While these writers tended to view Black speech as deficient, they were willing to regard Black musical expression as simply different, paving the way for its eventual nationalization as “American music”. Noting that White writers were not in the habit of admitting the inadequacies of their preferred modes of representation, the article concludes that the print representation of the spirituals contributed to a transformation of what was meant by the word “American”.
Journal of American History, 2012
The Global South, 2016
When Samuel Johnson first published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, “plantation” me... more When Samuel Johnson first published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, “plantation” meant something different than it does now, denoting process as much as place, an activity as much as a socioeconomic institution. In Johnson’s Dictionary, plantation was “the act or practice of planting” or “the place planted.” Its third definition—“a colony”—comes closer to the modern sense of the word, though “plantations” of this sort (New England’s Providence Plantation, for example) did not by definition involve the salient features of later ones, namely monoculture, slave labor, and mass production. Writing about his 1615 expedition to New France, Samuel de Champlain described “l’honneur [. . .] de planter la foy [faith] Chrestienne en un pays incognu et barbare” (97). Writing about preparations for his own voyage to the New World in Of Plymouth Plantation (1651/1856), William Bradford noted that “the Spaniards [. . .] had not yet planted” in Guiana, a rival site for Dissenter settlement (29). Champlain and Bradford’s words are indicative of early modern usage, but they also point to Johnson’s fourth, final, and most broadly metaphorical definition of plantation: “introduction; establishment.” That this sense of the word has disappeared is probably for the best; we are not tempted to say that we are writing the “plantation” to this special issue of The Global South. Yet its existence two and a half centuries ago may suggest why plantation has proved one of the more durable signifiers of modernity: why it possesses cognates in more than thirty languages and why, in some of them, at least, it keeps acquiring additional significance. This issue of The Global South is devoted to the concept of “plantation.” Its focus is on the word paired with the definitive article: the plantation. Most of the places mentioned in the essays that follow fit the definition of the “classic plantation” set forth by Sidney W. Mintz in 1968: