Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Geography & Anthropology

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

This dissertation offers an ethnographic and theoretical account of the ostensible afterlife of a plantation, arguing that its continuity is best understood through a framework of dissociation, which is contraposed with the more common latent framework of repression. Freudian models tend to render persistence in terms of depth, burial, and the return of the repressed, whereas I develop here a critical revivification of Pierre Janet's theory of dissociation that is articulated through two concepts from Félix Guattari, asignifying semiotics and transversality, and woven together with Frantz Fanon's colonial geography, arguing that unassimilated material produces temporalities embedded not only in individual psyches but in places. In this account, the persistence of the plantation is not explained as that which is hidden and later recovered, but that which operates alongside but is unintegrated and registers in temporal convergence.

The research is sited at Yes We Cannibal, a multimodal platform for new art and thought I co-founded and co-directed at 1600 Government Street in Baton Rouge from 2020 to 2025. Five years of ethnographic immersion, conducted primarily as curatorial practice, ground four empirical chapters, each developing a distinct dissociative operation. Chapter 1 introduces representational foreclosure, an institutional dissociation that instrumentalizes the non-assimilation of material to prevent certain assemblages from reenactment. Chapter 2 extends this to a police black site, the Brave Cave, where people vanish and the city redacts itself. Chapter 3 follows a figure named Peter-Johnny -- a split name, a maladjusted house, an oscillating state of ownership -- to show a grammar shared between personal dissociation and the legal infrastructure of Louisiana civil law. Chapter 4 tracks reappearance at the other side of vanishing, through a temporary restaurant event that precipitates the surfacing of unassimilated material.

The dissertation's primary theoretical contribution is a theory of dissociative instruments: a repertoire of institutional, legal, and curatorial forms -- representational foreclosure, redaction, affective constituencies -- that share a common grammar with financial instruments, operating by dissociation rather than repression. Read together, they describe how the plantation and other episodes of historical political violence persist not as memory but a type of operation, and how they remain, for that reason, vulnerable to disassembly.

Date

7-17-2026

Committee Chair

Helen Regis

LSU Acknowledgement

1

LSU Accessibility Acknowledgment

1

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