African American poetry often revisits plantations not as nostalgic landscapes but as spaces of coercion, resistance, kinship disruption, spiritual survival, and historical haunting. Plantation memory may involve agricultural imagery, labour rhythms, ancestral presence, or critiques of romanticised history. The concept helps explain how landscapes become repositories of trauma, memory, and unresolved national conscience.

Plantation memory in African American poetry negotiates the extraordinarily difficult task of engaging the plantation as both a real historical site of atrocity and a distorted cultural symbol romanticised by the plantation myth in dominant white culture. Poets must work against the Gone With the Wind mythology while also honoring the lives actually lived on plantations — the relationships, the resistance, the culture created under conditions of extreme violence. Natasha Trethewey's work, particularly "Native Guard," is exemplary in its precise, morally serious engagement with plantation sites. Related terms include enslavement memory, countermemory, Southern memory, dispossession, and master narrative.