Black Ecologies and Agrarian Insurgencies: Struggles over Land, Labor, and Livelihoods in the Black Belt South
Topics: Black Geographies
, American South
, Environmental Justice
Keywords: Black Belt South, Black geographies, Plantation Bloc, Agro-environmental racism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 40
Authors:
Carrie R. Freshour, University of Washington
Brian Williams, Mississippi State University
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
We ground this essay in the uneven geographies of the cotton-producing Black Belt South, a region constructed at the intersection of agro-environmental racism and plantation violence, nutrient-rich soil, and dynamic Black geographies. The processes of containment, dispossession, and commodification of life and land were essential to the construction of the region following a racist and monopolistic agricultural development trajectory and environmental regime dominated by what Clyde Woods calls the Plantation Bloc. Yet, strategies and struggles to make life against and outside of these dynamics also took hold of the region. We reconceptualize the Southern Black Freedom Movement and the overlapping struggles for land, housing, education, and new forms of work as mobilizations against agro-environmental racism and the making of a place-based environmental justice rooted in Black ecologies. Drawing on Black feminist and abolition ecologies frameworks, we trace connections across Black women’s knowledge and organizing in cooperative and farm communities and poultry and catfish processing plants in Mississippi and Georgia. By organizing along modes of social reproduction and against threats to daily life, these women and movements mobilized frameworks for agro-environmental justice that sought to supplant dynamics of environmental racism, commodification, and exploitation through collective stewardship and co-operation.
Black Ecologies and Agrarian Insurgencies: Struggles over Land, Labor, and Livelihoods in the Black Belt South
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides