Genres of the Human

Abstract This article explores the historic connection between the Caribbean plantation system and liberalism’s normative concept of the human. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Charles Mills, Sybille Fischer, and Rinaldo Walcott, it examines the role of racial slavery in the development of the capitalist world-system and its dominant modes of subjectivity. The material and epistemic violence of the New World plantation system subtended liberal discourses of freedom in the imperial metropole. In the colonial peripheries, meanwhile, alternative understandings of human freedom were being articulated by enslaved peoples and enacted in revolts and revolutions (not least the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1814). After sketching this history, the article moves to consider how 21st century Caribbean literature has sought to interrogate dominant models of humanness in the context of the long, catastrophic unfolding of the Plantationocene. It does so through a close analysis of Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads. Combining elements of science fiction, the historical novel, marvellous realism, and Caribbean popular culture, Hopkinson’s speculative fiction not only recuperates the voices of those erased from or marginalized within the historical record; it also imaginatively rehearses radically other modes of being human alongside radically other visions of freedom. Citation: Niblett, Michael, ‘Genres of the Human: Racial Liberalism and Cultural Form in the Plantationocene’ (10 Feb. 2026), in Paulo de Medeiros, Pablo Mukherjee, and Ranka Primorac (eds), Art and Culture, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context (Oxford, online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 Mar. 2025 -), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198945246.003.0092, accessed [date].