“Full fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes …” Allewaert opens her book with Ariel's oft-quoted lines from The Tempest to suggest that, in describing the seeming breakdown of the human body, Ariel actually describes “an emerging minoritarian colonial conception of agency” in which humans are empowered by their interpenetration with animals, plants, and the environment (1). Combining postcolonial ecocriticism, new materialism, political philosophy, and literary analysis in her exploration of eighteenth-century personhood on American plantations in the US and the Caribbean, Allewaert argues that bodies in the American tropics fostered personhood through disorganization and decomposition (2). She eschews late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sentimental discourses for their assumption that bodies are bounded, contained, and sheathed, instead arguing for an unbounded, disaggregated ethics of relationality (18–19). Contrary to philosophers like John Locke, Allewaert suggests that tropical understandings of the body were formed with and alongside Enlightenment notions of the hermetic body (20). Such simultaneity allows for an alternate “American mythos in which plurality and diversity provide the originary and centrifugal motion” (20). To elucidate this minoritarian mythos, Allewaert combines transversal readings of dominant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural and botanical histories with analyses of Afro-American fetishes and oral stories (22–24).

Part I of the book investigates the far-reaching effects of tropicalization as understood by Anglo-European natural historians (21–22). In chapter 1, “Swamp Sublime,” Allewaert undertakes a transversal reading of William Bartram's Travels (1791), and, unlike other scholars who emphasize the role of Travels in developing revolutionary nationalism, suggests that it also offers an ecological formulation of revolution useful to eighteenth-century plantation resistance (29–30). Deploying the term “plantation zone” to denote a subtropical or tropical space in which politics and economy are influenced by plantation structures, Allewaert posits that an abundance of plantation zone entanglements threatened human, animal, and vegetal taxonomies, highlighting an interconnected ecology that did not distinguish between subjects and objects and that empowered those slaves and maroons who merged with its ecological forces (30). She argues that Bartram's account of dissolving subjectivity, particularly in the tropics' vast, immeasurable swamps (36), is actually part of a minoritarian enlightenment tradition that developed an ecological form of personhood that broke with early American literature's presumption of citizen subjectivity (22).

Similarly, in chapter 2, “Plant Life,” Allewaert continues her elucidation of minoritarian enlightenments, drawing on the work of Benjamin Rush, Alexander Humboldt, and Benjamin Barton in order to track the notion that plants' gases were agential and possibly dangerous (22). She argues that these texts of vitalist materialism, in which plants' parts were themselves powerful forces, threatened fixed identity, proposing “an ontology in which combining and not being was the first principle” (62). Returning to Bartram, Allewaert posits that he, more so than other vitalist materialists, emphasized the autonomy of parts and, at times, anticipated twentieth- and twenty-first-century understandings of human and nonhuman selves and others (80).

In Part II, Allewaert moves from somewhat privileged colonial accounts and theorizations of the tropics to Afro-Americans' narratives of personhood (22). Chapter 3, “On Parahumanity,” proposes the term “parahuman” to emphasize the ways in which slaves' bodies, categorized as neither human nor animal, were broken into parts (85). The term also seeks to place humans, animals, and parahumans on the same horizontal plane – beside one another rather than ordered hierarchically (86). Although Allewaert recognizes postcolonial scholars' reasons for avoiding historically laden areas like animality and parahumanity, she nonetheless insists that such dangerous categories be taken up as alternative forms of personhood not predicated on anthropocentric hierarchies but on “the horizontal relation and mutual dependence of life-forms” (109–10). Similarly, chapter 4, “Persons without Objects,” explores the development of an Afro-American diasporic personhood that extended interiority beyond the body proper to component parts like fetish artifacts (135).

Lastly, in chapter 5, “Involving the Universe in Ruins,” Allewaert, analyzing Leonora Sansay's work, extends her argument to include white women whose sense of personhood was transformed through their exposure to the tropics, Vodou, fetishes, and Afro-American stories (147). Allewaert ends with this particular case study in order to demonstrate how a minoritarian, ecologically based form of personhood circulated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings on the American tropics (147).

Allewaert has written a highly interdisciplinary book that practices a minoritarian style of writing and a transversal approach to commonly accepted interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts. Rich textual analysis underpins Allewaert's argument that a uniquely Afro-American form of personhood, founded on disaggregation and disorganization rather than collectedness and citizenry, arose alongside Enlightenment ideology in the US.