Drowned Towns, Submerged Archives, and the Myth of Universal Progress
Topics: Black Geographies
, Development
, American South
Keywords: Black Geographies, Black Ecologies, Development, Dispossession, Hydroelectric Infrastructure
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56
Authors:
Morgan P. Vickers, University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract
In its purported progressive efforts, the United States has socially constructed Black spaces as demonic (McKittrick 2006) and uninhabitable (Wynter 2003), impermanent and impermeable (King 2019 & Roane 2019), in order to reclaim the spaces and make them “productive.” In the early 20th century, the state drowned dozens of Black communities through the creation of dams and reservoirs, disappearing homes, community centers, and graves, and fragmenting lives in the process. Often these sites are effaced from the map and from public memory in favor of hydroelectric energy and state-sponsored histories. Efforts to occlude or reframe the drowning of Black towns contribute to processes of forced forgetting and myths of universal support for state interests (Connerton 1989 & Read 1998). Using the cases of the Black communities drowned beneath the Santee Cooper Project in South Carolina, Jordan Lake in North Carolina, and Lake Lanier in Georgia, I argue that the drowning of Black towns in dam and reservoir projects in the South was not merely a material, imperial practice, but is an ongoing historical and social submersion that perpetuates the exclusion of Black communities from the benefits of “progress” by framing them as constantly out-of-place. In naming these material and social disappearances, this paper illuminates drowned towns as places of analytical possibility (Hofmeyr 2022), opens up space for “a reservoir of historical alternatives” for those whose lives were submerged (Opperman 2021), and asks us to think against the state’s solidified narratives by instead dredging up a wetter, murkier archive (Bennett 2020).
Drowned Towns, Submerged Archives, and the Myth of Universal Progress
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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