A Plantation Illogic: Narrating Proslavery's Imagined Futures.

This article examines the temporal and narrative dimensions of speculative proslavery thought in the nineteenth century, focusing on how proslavery political economy articulated a vision of capitalist modernity distinct from liberal national futurity. It analyzes literary works by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and Edmund Ruffin, arguing that proslavery imaginaries are marked by exhaustion and an inability to envision a progressive future beyond the plantation's limits. Proslavery theorists like Thomas Roderick Dew and Tucker framed slavery as central to capitalist social reproduction, yet their speculative visions reveal a tension between slavery as a universal economic logic and the plantation's spatial and temporal constraints. The article suggests that this impasse challenges dominant narratives that depict slavery's relationship to modernity solely as a disavowed foundation of capitalism, instead highlighting slavery's role in producing a stalled, exhausted futurity that resonates with contemporary critiques of racial capitalism's crises.