Contested Landscapes and Living Archives

Keywords: Seeds, Landscape, Historical Ecology, Political Ecology, Archive, Black Ecologies, Black Geographies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

This paper is concerned with archival contestations in the historical-ecological landscapes of the U.S. South. In the lives and afterlives of plantocracy and settler colonialism, I ask how struggles over environmental history inform food and land politics. Which stories are told, which seeds are kept, which narratives and counter-narratives shape community memory, food systems, and seedways today? In addressing these questions, I seek to explore the ways in which an engagement with the archival materialities of food systems and local ecological knowledges, in this case seedkeeping projects and seed catalogs, may lead to a deeper understanding of the entwined political and historical ecologies of power and violence through and upon the strata of overlapping landscapes.

This lands on two sites: the USDA Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection in Maryland and the Homowo African/African American Seed Collection in North Carolina. Through the former I conduct material, textual, and visual analyses of the racial and environmental imaginaries of Southern seed catalogs, seeking an understanding of the claims to and contestations over land, landscape, edible memory, and racial-environmental governance. In the latter, I explore the possibilities of historical-ecological reclamation through a living archive of community memory: a seed collection that sprawls out from the museum space of the seed room through a patchy landscape of historic gardens and urban growing spaces. I wrestle with an archival practice that holds the imperatives of plantocratic claims to land in tension with the counter-claims being written into landscapes of community memory season by season.