Gullies and Removals of the Plantation South

Chapter 4, “Gullies and Removals of the Plantation South,” engages Katherine McKittrick’s concept of “plantation futures” to analyze the erosion site of Providence Canyon in Georgia alongside a close reading of the corresponding soil science and settler colonial logic embedded in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Gone with the Wind. To illuminate the connections between erosion and Removal in the setting of Mitchell’s novel, the chapter draws from Charles Lyell’s two-volume A Second Visit to the United States of North America (1849). The chapter concludes with a return to a reading of Providence Canyon via visual artist Elizabeth Webb’s 2019 installation For the Mud Holds What History Refuses (Providence in Four Parts), which draws from African American poet and scholar Thomas Jefferson Flanagan’s 1940 poetry collection The Canyons at Providence. This analysis engages questions of how settler colonialism, the plantation economy, and ongoing white supremacy manifest in discourses of erosion.