Jennifer Donnelly publishes a chapter in Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions, the inaugural volume in the University of Virginia Press' series Race, Place, and Justice and edited by Nathaniel Robert Walker and Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann. Over fifty nineteenth-century sugar plantations, or ingenios, decay in various states of ruin in the the tropical valleys of the Valle de los Ingenios on the southern cost of Cuba. The region was once a global center for the production of sugar. Tall watchtowers once provided complete surveillance over a vast enslaved population and a mechanized landscape of oppression. Donnelly's chapter analyzes the spatial logic of the ingenios as brutal landscapes of power and the limitations of these systems to contain the human spirit. This investigation documents visible and invisible means of resistance recorded physically and spiritually on the landscape.
Read more about the volume on the University of Virginia Press' website: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10084/
Read Jennifer Donnelly's faculty profile here: https://www.haa.pitt.edu/people/jennifer-donnelly