The Materiality of Mastery: Eliza Lucas Pinckney and the Production of Plantation Culture in the Eighteenth-Century South

Abstract

My dissertation project, “The Materiality of Mastery: Eliza Lucas Pinckney and the Production of Plantation Culture in the Eighteenth-Century South”, examines objects, including texts, made by South Carolinian Eliza Lucas Pinckney (ELP) to discuss the emergence of eighteenth-century plantation culture. Each chapter focuses on a different object owned/made by ELP and analyzes these objects in terms of their material and ideological production. These products serve as an access point to explore the ways in which all planters used material goods to construct idealized narratives of mastery. Tracing the production history of each object also reveals pieces of others’ narratives—in particular slaves—whose voices were often co-opted or overwritten by their white masters.