Circuits through Injury: Plantation Economies and Diasporic Forms in Charles Chesnutt and V. S. Naipaul

In both V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories, meditations on injury occur at sites in which racialized bodies exist in anxious and dynamic proximity to objects. Both authors write in the aftermath of the legal dissolution of plantation economies built on racialized, colonial, and enforced labor. Both texts revisit agrarian labor while maintaining narrative distance—in Chesnutt through his postbellum frame, and in Naipaul with his postindentureship setting. Yet Chesnutt’s narrative frame works assiduously to demonstrate the persistence of plantation economy logics in the postbellum period, for instance in how Uncle Julius’s stories have a moral lesson that directly affects material considerations in the life of the narrative frame. Meanwhile, Naipaul foregrounds the continuities of indentured labor through his representation, for example, of the Tulsi family economic structure.¹ Both texts employ injury as circuits that are transhistorical—as they consider and trouble the “post” of legal structures of enforced labor—and, in the conversation I stage between them, transnational. I therefore extend what Brinda J. Mehta terms “a common heritage of kala pani crossings on the ‘black’ Atlantic” and connect the Indo-Caribbean with the American South, to consider the long life of injury arising from plantation economies (Mehta, 15).

The relationship between geography and difference, and between geography and literary form, has been analyzed extensively within a Black Diasporic context. For example, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds argues that “racial domination and human injustices are spatially propped up by racial-sexual codes” and that “racism and sexism produce attendant geographies that are bound up in human disempowerment and dispossession” (3). McKittrick’s use of space builds on Edouard Glissant’s use of landscape and is sympathetic with his argument that a spatial structure gives rise to (literary) form. Glissant connects everyday repetition—how the “same organization would create a rhythm of economic production and form the basis of a style of life”—to expressive culture (63). From these spatially constituted—but geographically vast—conditions arises the “cry of the Plantation, transfigured into the speech of the world”—a transnational literary form (73).

Yet, even as we have form as space, form as economy, and form as literary expression with their sometimes separate critical lives in the region, there has been less critical attention to extend these analyses to consider the entwined histories that mark the Americas and, I will argue, that can influence how transnational diasporic literary form informs our readings of canonical texts. Beginning in this essay with the Caribbean context, whose diasporas are typically treated as separate phenomena, I argue that these nuances across difference deepen our understanding of the relationship between economic structures and literary form. And it is here that the persistence of the trope of injury—particularly injury that is potentially transfigurative and either animates objects or does violence to them—becomes evident. What then, can injury tell us about form? If Caroline Levine’s influential Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network seeks to extend formal analysis beyond aesthetics to the realm of the “social” with her definition of form as “an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (Levine, 3), I argue that in literatures of both the South Asian and the Black diasporas, injury dramatizes not a static arrangement but a circuit as dynamic rearrangement that brings together histories of Indigenous dispossession, African enslavement, Indian indenture, and their aftermaths. Diasporic forms move, just as they stage injury’s capacity to transfigure. In both Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories, injured/injuring objects alert us to temporal and ontological dynamism as historical and literary form.

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When Mr. Biswas’s powerful in-laws, the Tulsis, consign him to move into barracks on their Trinidadian sugar estate, Biswas is placed in a false position of authority over the workers, whose conditions vary little from those endured by the generation of indentured laborers from whom they are descended. These “dispossessed labourers, though they saw Mr. Biswas every day, contented themselves with...