Department of English

Th is experimental ekphrastic essay meditates on the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rice plantation slavery from the ecocritical perspective of the bobolink, or rice bird. Th e vignettes of a postbellum image of a Georgia plantation reveal the many facets of this avian migrant’s entanglement with Indigenous histories of wild rice and with Black labour and performance. Weaving in contemporary art and music, this essay explores how a prized songbird—and agricultural pest—developed its grain diet and fl ight patterns in tandem with the growth of plantation capitalism across the Americas and the Atlantic world.