Liberatory Agriculture in Afterlives of the Plantation

In 1881, African American educator and political leader Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. The school's mission was to provide practical education and vocational training in fields such as agriculture and mechanics to African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. Tuskegee ultimately became a world-renowned agricultural and industrial school for African Americans – and actually for all people. Today, we're speaking with Duke University's Jarvis McInnis about his award-winning book Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South. Interview Transcript Jarvis, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this book. And hopefully we'll make a link to the Franklin Humanities gathering (https://youtu.be/rfSy1lWWOwA?si=dVcWH3xDBuBStEEc) that we had for your book launch. As I said at that time, and I'll say it right now, this book resonated with me so deeply because of my rural upbringing. My experience as a son, a grandson of farmers and agricultural workers. And someone who grew up in the 4-H Club down South. Hopefully we will get to some of those topics as we go through. So, let's start off with a real basic idea. Could you give our readers an overview of what the book is? And also, about what you mean by the Afterlives of the Plantation. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for that question, Norbert. The book is an effort to think about the cultural and intellectual and political ties between Southern African Americans and Afro-Caribbean people in the late 19th to early 20th Century as they were responding to the legacies of slavery, right? This is the period after emancipation, and across the hemisphere. And so, I'm really interested in the way that they are sharing ideas as they are confronting the new modes of racial oppression that emerged in slavery's aftermath. In the United States, you have Jim Crow, right? Segregation, and other forms of violence and dispossession like lynching and land dispossession and so forth and so on. And then in the Caribbean, in Latin America, you have institutions like the European colonialism, and US imperialism, right? And so that is the afterlife of slavery. They're emancipated, but it's not a period of full citizenship, right? Of full access to the rights and privileges of citizenship. And so in telling that story, I center Booker T. Washington's school, the Tuskegee Institute, which was founded on the site of an abandoned and burned cotton plantation in Alabama in 1881. And this is getting at the second part of your question. I became really fascinated by what it meant to establish a school, to establish a future-oriented institution, that's committed to uplifting Black people. To establish that on the site, on the ruins of a burned plantation. And, in some ways, I became curious about that as an undergraduate student because I'm a graduate of Tougaloo College, in Tougaloo, Mississippi, which is a historically black college much like Tuskegee. And much like Tuskegee, Tougaloo was also founded on the site of a former cotton plantation. And I saw that this idea, or this practice, this logic of transforming these sites of violence into something that is more liberatory and more emancipatory was really a strategy that Black people used throughout the US South and throughout the Caribbean. Throughout much of the Americas where slavery and the plantation had existed. I placed Tuskegee, and particularly its approach to agriculture, at the center of that story to demonstrate how an institution rooted in the US South is not backward. It's not pre-modern. That's firmly rural, but that rurality... they're taking the knowledge that's cultivated there and disseminating it to other Black people in other parts of the world to aid in their struggles toward freedom and citizenship. I think this is an important point to make. And I know we've had conversations about this as you were developing the book. And I'll just say again, out of my rural Southern agricultural background, I often found a sense that people thought, oh, well you must be backward. Oh, you must come from this... and that's not a good thing. I can only imagine that people of this time must have thought, well, shouldn't people want to move away from agriculture? Why would you