For this OMG, Niall Peach will present a chapter from his dissertation “Propagating Nationhood/Rooting Citizenry: Barbarie, Gardens, and the Question of Civilization in Latin American Romantic Literature.” In this the presenter continues to build on the idea of the garden state that he develops in the dissertation to address how the relationship between race and gardens or garden-like structures undermines imperial politics of civilization. Niall looks at the changing colonial discourse on race and nature through the figure of the cimarrón (the runaway slave), Cuban anti-slavery literature, and the work of the Spanish naturalist Ramón de la Sagra y Peris (1798-1871), arguing that the conuco (enslaved subsistence plot) appears as a heterotopic garden space through which Romantic narratives establish Afro-Cuban entitlement to place. 

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