The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination examines the persistent presence of the plantation in trans-American literatures of the last century. Russ conceives the plantation to be not primarily a physical location, but rather an ideological and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told and retold. The permutations of this imagined site (as something related to but separate from the real plantation) illuminate a number of fundamental issues of concern in Latin American and transnational American studies. The book's comparative analyses engage in debates over gender, race, and nation by emphasizing a series of differences: between modern and postmodern imaginaries, the United States and Spanish America, and continental and island plantation societies.