Colonial era-1940s: (Sabine Lamour on Plasaj as Colonial Labor Extraction — Haitian Feminist Sabine Lamour Critically Asserting That Plasaj Emerged as a Noni…

Colonial era-1940s: (Sabine Lamour on Plasaj as Colonial Labor Extraction — Haitian Feminist Sabine Lamour Critically Asserting That Plasaj Emerged as a Noninstitutional Mode of Union for the Captive Group of Africans During the Colonial Era in Which Multiple Women’s Labor Was Used on a Single Garden Plot So That Men Could Maintain Their Land in the Face of Wealthy Proprietors — Plasaj Normalizing the Formation of a Labor-Intensive Work Ethic in Which a Woman Must Sacrifice Herself in Order to Be Valuable, This Self-Sacrificing Model of Haitian Womanhood Disproportionately Laid to Bare on Black Poor and Working-Class Women): Haitian feminist Sabine Lamour critically asserts that plasaj emerged as a noninstitutional mode of union for the captive group of Africans during the colonial era, in which multiple women’s labor was used on a single garden plot so that men could maintain their land in the face of wealthy proprietors. Plasaj normalized the formation of a labor-intensive work ethic in which a woman must sacrifice herself in order to be valuable. This self-sacrificing model of Haitian womanhood was disproportionately imposed on Black poor and working-class women — Lamour’s analysis inverted the romance of plasaj: what appeared as women’s autonomous arrangement was, at its root, a mechanism for extracting women’s labor to secure men’s land, the colonial plantation’s logic surviving in miniature on the peasant garden plot.