When I first read the essay, I found two possible thesis statements in the first and second paragraphs respectively:

“The enduring impact of the intermeshing colonialist/imperialist and racialist legacy of the plantation continues to haunt contemporary lives and imaginaries to such an extent that various scholars have suggested renaming the modern era as “Plantationocene” in search of a critical tool for recalibrating some of the extant approaches.”

(Sklodowska, 1)

“Against the backdrop of the Plantationocene as a crucible of gendered and racialized experience of slavery and Indigenous genocide, each of these artists confronts the specters of transgenerational trauma in their own, idiosyncratic ways.”

(Sklodowska, 2)

Which sentence is the thesis? I didn’t know at first, but after reading the full essay, it seems like the second one is the thesis, as the essay will later focus on how artists represent the enduring impacts of racial slavery from many different viewpoints (race, technology, gender). However, the specifics didn’t matter too much as I understood the broader context the author was speaking about: racial slavery in Cuba.

This is my general guideline for the first reading:

• Read the topic sentence fully
• Typically they help in understanding the idea of the body paragraph.
• Scan the body paragraph
• Do not lean too heavily on details. It might be difficult to understand the little nuances of a work on your first reading. However, it’s much easier to pick up on these details after rereading a work once you’ve understood the main points the author is making. As long as you have a general understanding of the argument, it’s fine to move on.
• Look up vocabulary words or other words you don’t know
• Unless I already understand what the text is saying, this can help me glean the meaning of the text. However, I don’t do it often unless I can’t understand the rest of the text or if it appears more in the following sentences.
• Additionally, I make sure I understand the word in the context of the sentence(s).
• “Plantationocene” - the proposed name for the modern era of Cuba, which is haunted by the legacy of slavery and plantations.
• "Idiosyncratic" - distinct, individual; Relating to many Cuban artists’ unique ways in demonstrating the legacy of slavery.
• May take a short break at the conclusion
• Conclusions sometimes summarize the points made in the body paragraph. Either way, it can help to recollect my thoughts before moving on to the next paragraph
• As I get further into the essay, I write down key points made in the paragraphs I read to revisit later.

Reading the whole essay, while also taking notes (both for my essay and for this website) took me ~1hr 40min. I could have read it faster if I wasn’t taking notes for this assignment or if I knew more of the vocabulary. Ultimately, it’s a skill to read fast, so don’t feel bad if reading these kinds of papers take a long time.

Below are my notes for this first reading. I tend to be brief so I can get through the essay faster.

• I reread the thesis so I remember what the main argument is.
• This essay is structured in 5 different parts, pertaining to 5 different artists, so I’ll format my more detailed notes like that.
• I don’t go sequentially like in my first reading: I just go back to the paragraphs where I remember a lot of details or arguments that were insightful.
• i.e. diction and syntax, refutations, connotations, symbolism.
• When reading, I will extract quotes that have lots of details listed above or that offers a strong line of reasoning that I can address in my essay
• Important: When writing quotations from a source, no matter how long, always put the words in quotation marks. That way, if you copy your notes directly, you won’t accidentally plagiarize by copying a quote.

Examples:

Sklowdowska first introduces the painter Echemendía Cid and his painting Contracción, which is described as follows:

A naked, muscular Afro-Cuban man stretches between two wheels of an antique-looking train. He acts as a coupling rod, holding together the train’s driving wheels, and his power and labor stand in for the engines of the locomotive and of industry. His nakedness evokes his herculean strength, as well as the degradation of backbreaking toil and slave markets.

(Sklodowska, 9)

In the sentences following the quote above, Sklowdowska quotes Karl Marx’s analogy that workers were a “living appendage of the machine” and also Frederick Douglass’s stance that slavery “reduces man to a mere machine.” These quotations both use the concept of a man becoming a machine, effectively objectifying the workers and providing the paradox with slavery: that men try to turn human beings into objects under their control. Sklowdowska further deepens the machine analogy, comparing the man in the painting to “a cog in the plantation machine, ‘alienated, expendable and interchangeable.’” The analogy of a cog creates an even more dehumanizing image, as cogs are small and are easily replaced. She again quotes another scholar to underlie how slave owners grossly justified their abuses through this objectification of slaves.

In the next paragraph, she introduces a different artist who hides the image of slavery. The artist Laplante was commissioned by Justo Cantero to paint the many machines on plantations to argue for a rise in technological progress. Thus,

Sklowdowska first introduces the painter Echemendía Cid and his painting Contracción, which is described as follows:

[Cantero and Laplante] portrayed the black workers in the boiler rooms of the mills as a diminutive mass, like ants organically integrated into the immaculate atmosphere of the plantation. Meanwhile, in general views—usually drawn with an aerial perspective from a nearby hill—the plantations were made to appear like zones of comfort or oases of development within the countryside. The intention was to document industrial and technological development at the expense of any indication of the social complexity and violence of the sugar plantation.

(Sklodowska, 9)

In contrast to Cid, Laplante ignores the hard labor and punishments that slaves endured and instead focuses on the products they made and the machines that plantation owners bought by exploiting their slaves. The depiction of black workers like “ants” becomes a symbol of hard work and progress, effectively erasing the pain they went through. Sklowdowska addresses Laplante’s work to demonstrate how Cid’s work counters the benefits of slavery, reminding viewers of the pain that many people endured under slavery. By presenting both sides, Sklowdowska contrasts Laplante’s naive view of plantations with Cid’s realistic portrayal of slavery in Cuba, both showing how people try to erase history and how artists like Cid revive the global consciousness of slavery alive.

If you did a good job, there should be many choices to choose from. I tend to pick a detail that I have the most notes on so that I can write more about it. For my essay, I think the symbols of machinery would be the most useful for my argument, as Pedro is a victim of capitalism who believes he can compete against factories.