SouthTalk: The Race Land Project

Description

This presentation outlines several case studies central to the Race Land project. These case studies often focus on rural spaces, which functioned as theaters of racialized innovation, economic exploitation, and ecological degradation, for instance oil drilling in the Louisiana wetlands and the development and application of pesticides and herbicides on Deep South plantations. The South of the United States has often been considered a regional backwater, an area out of step with modernity. The Race Land project departs from this stereotypical view; it applies a radically different perspective that places the South at the center of U.S. policymaking and racialized innovation in the Cold War era. Southern segregationists employed ingenious (and often devious) strategies to keep their racist worldview intact and export its main tenets across the globe, with profound consequences for ecosystems around the world and for the populations inhabiting them. The legacy of these strategies continues until today.

Yet the rural South has of course also functioned as a site of resistance against various forms of discrimination and large-scale, for-profit monocrop agriculture. Examples of such “counterplantation” initiatives are the Fishermen and Concerned Citizens Organization in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, and Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms Cooperative in the Mississippi Delta, a grassroots attempt to grow foodstuffs instead of cash crops. These efforts are also part of the Race Land project.

Period	14-Sept-2022
Held at	Univ Mississippi, University of Mississippi
Degree of Recognition	Regional