The Rural in the Race Land Project

“Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation” is a global and environmental history of the racially segregated U.S. South during the Cold War era. Rural landscapes are important theaters of action in the “Race Land” project. First of all, they function as locales 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. Such activities were not just commercial ventures aimed at making as much money as possible without significant regard for the environment, but also ways to uphold white supremacy. Secondly, the lawmakers involved in creating the legal framework for these activities often considered themselves as closely tied to the land or identified as farmers first and politicians second. Finally, the rural has also functioned as a site of resistance against various forms of discrimination and large-scale, for-profit monocrop agriculture. An example of such a “counter-plantation” initiative is Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms Cooperative in Mississippi’s Delta region, a grassroots attempt to grow foodstuffs instead of cash crops. A major aim of the “Race Land” project is to investigate the connections between Cold War modernity and cultural traditionalism in the rural South on the one hand, and revolutionary ruralism on the other.