Resistant Ecologies: Swamps and Serial Form in Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Stories

In “Resistant Ecologies: Swamps and Serial Form in Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories,” Kate McIntyre focuses on Chesnutt’s examination of swamps during Reconstruction, arguing that the swamp provides an ecological... [ view full abstract ]

In “Resistant Ecologies: Swamps and Serial Form in Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories,” Kate McIntyre focuses on Chesnutt’s examination of swamps during Reconstruction, arguing that the swamp provides an ecological arena in which he stages interspecies resistance to the monocultural agenda of the plantation. Though Chesnutt’s swamps are all but emptied of human life, their evocation calls up their history as contact zones for maroon communities and indigenous populations. The amorphous ecosystem of the swamp serves as a porous boundary between communities, offering a corrective to the plantation ecologies in their orbit. In Chesnutt’s stories, the racialized division of labor and its concomitant social hierarchies are inseparable from the ecological enclosure of the plantation. Literary production, however, also sets up a system of related parts that can be read ecologically—and while theories of aesthetic autonomy would seem to define literary form through enclosure, this paper argues that Chesnutt’s serial publication of these stories in The Atlantic installs them in a system defined as much by relation as by individuation. The accumulation of stories across magazine issues establishes an aesthetic system open to transformative encounter with other works, much as the swamp offers up an ecosystem that encourages the dissolution of the ecological and political boundaries of American empire.