The Briars Drive Me to This': Weeds, Fence Lines, and Slave Resistance

Harry Brown’s paper on “Weeds, Fence Lines, and Slave Resistance” will build on Lynn Nelson’s work, Pharsalia (2007) to explore the connection between two plantation practices that seem distinct: managing weeds and... [ view full abstract ]

Harry Brown’s paper on “Weeds, Fence Lines, and Slave Resistance” will build on Lynn Nelson’s work, Pharsalia (2007) to explore the connection between two plantation practices that seem distinct: managing weeds and managing slaves. Nelson defines agroecology as the study of “farms as ecosystems,” using this idea to synthesize the study of southern agriculture with Southern political and intellectual history, two areas that historical and literary scholarship have treated separately. The continuing struggles to contain the spread of weeds into crop fields and the spread of slave revolt across plantation boundaries both reflect the agrarianist fantasy of financial and political independence. Wood-rail and stone fences, the most ubiquitous structures on the plantation landscape, manifest this fantasy of control by establishing the ecological and social boundaries of the planter’s imagined autonomous realm. Movements of plants and people across the microenvironment of the fence line reveal the reasons that the fantasy finally disintegrated.