Erika Valdivieso

Does Virgil’s “Georgics” speak about slaves? Should slaves appear in georgic literature? Traditionally, the answer to both questions has been “no.” But as classicists draw attention to the ways Roman slave-holding profoundly shapes the “Georgics,” it is no longer clear that the representation of slaves in georgic literature is an anomaly. In fact, there is one context in which poetry in the georgic mode explicitly discussed enslaved laborers: the slave-driven economies of the Americas (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries). From Brazilian sugar mills to Mexican mines, from Barbadian plantations to Carolina rice fields, planter poets took up their pens to write about cash crops, profit margins, and chattel slavery in the manner of Virgil’s “Georgics.” Utilizing a multilingual poetic archive from the British, Portuguese, and Spanish Atlantic, this project traces the untold story of how an ancient poem lent itself to aesthetic meditations on, and moral challenges to, chattel slavery in the Americas.