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"For as long as the US owed its prosperity to a New World plantation complex, from colonial settlement until well into the twentieth century, the toxic practices associated with its permutations stimulated imaginary solutions to contradiction of the nation's enlightenment ideals and republican ideology. Ideals of liberty, democracy, and individualism could not be separated from a history of forcible coercion, oligarchic power, and state-protected economic opportunism. While recent historical scholarship about what has been called "slavery's capitalism" explores the depths at which US ascension was indebted to global plantation slave economies, Hidden in Plain Sight probes how exemplary works of literature represented a society's determination to deny an open national sore. Difficult truths were hidden in plain sight, allowing beholders at once to recognize and disavow knowledge they would not act upon. What were the habits of mind that enabled free Americans to acknowledge what was intolerable yet act as if they did not? In what ways did non-slave-owning Americans imagine a relation to slavery that both admitted its iniquity and accepted its benefits? How did the reconfiguration of the plantation system after the Civil War, both at home and abroad, elicit new forms for dealing with its perpetuation of racial injustice, expropriation of labor, and exploitation for profit of the land? Hidden in Plain Sight examines exemplary nineteenth century works by Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Joel Chandler Harris to show how writers portrayed a nation founded on the unseen seen of slavery's capitalism"-- Intro -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 1. Purloined Letters: Poe, Pym, and the Plantation World -- CHAPTER 2. Unreckonable Riches: Hawthorne, Salem, and The House of the Seven Gables -- CHAPTER 3. How Remus Frames Race: The Plantation after the Plantation -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- F -- G -- H -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- W -- Y -- Z -- Blank Page
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