Antonia Halstead, Long Term Fellow, Brown University

“Sugar,” I typed on Americana’s homepage. There’s nothing like a broad search term to delay the onset of writing with the possibility of critical research. 

Scrolling through the results I came upon an etching from Chevalier de Prefontaine’s 1763 text Maison Rustique. As an Americanist in Brown’s English department, my research focuses primarily on transatlantic British colonial texts written in English, which—unlike French—I can easily read. I had never encountered Maison Rustique before. C’est la vie. 

My dissertation draws a connection between 17th and 18th century colonial representations of the Caribbean sugar plantation and 19th century American representations of the factory. I consider how the trope of the machine and the garden emerge in these earlier narratives to manage the representation of colonial violence. In Prefontaine’s etching, I detected a graphic depiction of the rhetorical strategies I had been tracing. 

Later that week, now in the reading room at the JCB, I began to look at the etching in Maison Rustique more closely.  On the left, No. A, “Coupe d’un Moulin a Sucre” or “A Cross-Section of the Sugar Mill,” outlines the technical aspects of the sugar mill. There is no mention—visual or rhetorical—of enslaved labor. On the right, No. B, “Echaffaut” or “Scaffolding,” illustrates two ostensibly enslaved men who swing axes at the tree. The “V” shape of the men’s upraised arms parallels the tree’s stretching branches. The side of the right man mirrors the tree’s trunk: an almost perfect puzzle piece. Even as the men appear as an extension of the tree, viewed together, their crossing bodies create an “X,” reflecting the form of the sugar mill’s wind blades. The tree appears so large that it extends beyond the image’s border, and the near erasure of the enslaved men suggests it may never even be cut down. In No. A, the diagram is detailed, organized, and carefully proportioned, but in No. B the boundaries between enslaved men, environment, and text are blurred; bodies reach, bend, buttress, swing, and signify in response to each other. The etching depicts economic potential and ecological splendor, while obscuring the violence of enslaved labor and environmental destruction. 

Yet, Maison Rustique was new to me, and it was only after meeting with Bertie Mandleblatt, the George S. Park II ’52 curator of maps and prints at the JCB that I began to see how it might fit into my dissertation. Pointing me towards resources in the JCB’s reference collection, current scholarship, and her own work on Maison Rustique, Dr. Mandleblatt contextualized both the text and the etchings. Perhaps, finally, it was time to start writing…