"Placing S. M. Swenson and Swedish-Texans in the Plantationocene," a public lecture by Dr. Lucia Hodgson of Uppsala University in SwedenApril 23 at 7–8:30 p.m.

This paper relocates the study of Swedes who migrated to Texas in the nineteenth century from the familiar scholarly terrain of immigration to the Plantationocene. The Plantationocene is a conceptual analytic that allows us to see how plantations have been central to the transatlantic slave trade and American chattel slavery, Indigenous dispossession and genocide, racial capitalism, and white heteropatriarchy. Placing S. M. Swenson, the first known Swedish settler colonist in Texas, and the hundreds of Swedes who followed him in the Plantationocene focuses attention on how they built their prosperity on Indigenous land appropriation and enslavement of African-Americans. Drawing on archival materials held in the Briscoe Center for American History and the Swedish Emigrant Institute, I argue that plantation ownership and management enabled Swenson and other male Swedish-Texans to fashion identities as elite white Texans and Americans and to establish their own state and national belonging. In Swenson's correspondence, we can see how he fashions himself as a citizen of the new country who can confidently tell its history and describe its geography, agriculture, inhabitants and prospects from the position of one who unquestionably belongs. His correspondence, I argue, is written in the generic tradition of what Jennifer Greeson terms plantation literature which originated in the late sixteenth-century to attract potential investors and settlers to English colonial projects in North America. These letters and travel narratives explained and justified plantation projects characterized by dispossession of Indigenous land and enslavement of African people and thus preceded, necessitated, and instigated an Enlightenment discourse of individual property rights and racial difference. The cultural history of Swenson and his fellow Swedes provides a case study for how the racial projects of slavery and dispossession came together in the plantation and through it consolidated white male identity in the Republic of Texas.