Beyond the Overseer’s Eye: Carceral Surveillance, Intimacy, and Black Resistance in Ernest J. Gaines’s Of Love and Dust

This article reads Ernest J. Gaines’s Of Love and Dust through the plantation gaze theory and the linked frameworks of carceral surveillance and the policing of intimacy. Building on insights offered by Thadious M. Davis, who presents a reading of Gaines's Louisiana as a place where the plantation and the prison coexist and serve for disciplining bodies and spaces, and Jenna Grace Sciuto, whose argument emphasizes that intimate relations become publicly observable, I argue that the surveillance regime presented in Of Love and Dust is visual, spatial, communal, and erotic. Thus, Marcus challenges the power of the regime in question not only through opacity and the returned gaze, but also through open resistance and self-fashioning, as well as through his erotic relationship with Louise, which jeopardizes the existing racial-sexual order of the plantation. Furthermore, Bonbon does not emerge here as an observer exercising sovereign power; instead, he proves to be an endangered and vulnerable figure who is himself subjected to surveillance by the whites (Marshall Hebert) and by his own quarters.