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1 / Nation and Plantation between Gone with the Wind and Black Power: The Example of Ernest J. Gaines’s Of Love and Dust This chapter explains how the attention to questions of sameness and difference in plantation literature from the 1930s through the 1960s reflects and engages the social, political, and economic changes that transformed the South during those years. By looking at these decades together, I deviate from the more common practice of grouping twentieth-century American literature into periods punctuated by the two world wars. Instead, I follow the lead of many historians of the South by treating World War II as part of a larger period of change that began in the Great Depression and continued until the end of the 1960s. In brief, these changes resulted from New Deal economic policies that tried to equalize the region’s status with the rest of the nation; the rise of industrialization and mechanization; the shifts in population and culture brought on by the South’s involvement in World War II; and the push for racial equality that began to take shape in the 1930s but consumed the South during the 1950s and 1960s. As all of these changes played out, I argue, they often took the shape of a larger clash between national democratic ideals , which emphasize the theoretical sameness of all citizens as citizens, and the notion that the South was fundamentally different from the rest of the nation in part because of its conservative insistence on racial inequalities and other social differences within the region. By the end of the 1960s, however, this discursive pattern waned as the integrationist aims of the civil rights movement gave way to a more militant affirmation of both individual and cultural differences by the Black Panthers and other liberation groups of the time. Whereas earlier movements had fought for social equality by stressing commonalities within the South 26 / cotton's queer relations and across the nation, growing liberationist arguments saw diversity as the necessary basis for civil rights, replacing the older emphasis on sameness and unity with a new discourse of multiculturalism. Moreover, by the late 1960s the South was no longer as dependent on agriculture as it had been, and the tenant plantation system that had dominated the region since the end of the Civil War had been almost entirely replaced by more modern forms of farming. With the emergence of these new social movements and the virtual disappearance of the working plantation as a material part of southern life, writers at the end of the 1960s thus began to look for new ways to engage the cultural mythology of the plantation, if they chose to do so at all, and the phase of literature that I examine here more or less came to an end. Throughout this chapter, I loosely intertwine these arguments about southernhistoryandplantationliteraturewithaliteraryanalysisofErnest J. Gaines’s novel Of Love and Dust (1967). I also discuss the changing representations of queer identities and relations in American literature and culture during these decades. As I use this historical and literaryhistorical research to support my interpretation of Gaines’s text, I proffer the novel as an example of how all of the works I study engage both the legacies of the past and the issues of the mid-twentieth-century present. Gaines portrays his 1948 plantation setting as a thoroughly sexualized space in which an oppressive discourse of heterosexual obligation and kinship defines and reifies the plantation’s exploitative social structures. He draws this portrayal from the historical networks of patriarchy and paternalism that typically shaped the plantation households of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. This historical material helps clarify the various acts of rebellion and resistance that are central to the novel. These acts are as much sexual as they are social, and they suggest possibilities for finding empowerment and equality within the legacies of the plantation—a project shared by all of the texts that I discuss. The black prisoner Marcus Payne initiates the novel’s primary conflict by sleeping with Louise, the wife of the white overseer Bonbon. But Gaines also imagines a distinctive model of equality in the homosexual partnership of two field hands, John and Freddie. Although these characters are somewhat marginal to the novel’s plot, I show how the antihierarchical structure of their relationship helps explain why Marcus’s rebellion ultimately fails. More importantly, their homosexual bond destabilizes the plantation’s power structures and shields them from its dehumanizing...

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