Nervousnous and Negotiation on a Plantation Landscape

Summary

This research focuses on a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century plantation site, L’Hermitage, in order to investigate how a "nervous landscape" can be read through spatial organization, material culture, and interpersonal interactions.  I refer to Denis Byrne’s use of the phrase "nervous landscape" to explore how a landscape and its occupants can be literally and figuratively nervous when absolute power fails and a heterogeneity and multiplicity of power and identities are introduced. That is, the disruption of homogeneity and hegemony breeds nervousness. Byrne uses this concept to explore racial tension; however, I recognize that anxiety can emerge from uneasiness around other structural factors, such as religion and citizenship. In this paper I will pay particular attention to how the power dynamics around these hierarchies played out within the nervous frame, mitigating or contributing to a nervous landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Obscured by Clouds: Landscapes in Historical Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 590