No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Growing Black food on sacred land: Using Black liberation theology to imagine an alternative Black agrarian future
Abstract
This article uses Black liberation theology (BLIBT) as a framework to theorize “the spirit” in the alternative food and sustainable agriculture movement. While BLIBT was formally named by theologian James Cone, it was born of the struggles of Black people in the United States who believed that God called Black people to be free, and God called Black preachers to preach Black liberation. I argue that Black liberation is a grounded vantage point to understand how some Black people might find freedom through food and agriculture. In the first potion of the paper, I make a claim for the importance of studying spirituality in agrarian and food spaces, whether or not a researcher is spiritually inclined. In the second portion of the paper, I delve deeper into Cone’s articulation of BLIBT, and explore how we might begin to theorize it as an agrarian mandate including: a call for an urgent food source, liberation of the individual Black body, community ownership of land, the spirit of Black religious spaces, an emphasis on land reparations, and the freedom to dream. I conclude with a call for why an attention to BLIBT is called for in our present moment.
... To speak of Black monuments is to speak of modes of commemorating and monumentalizing through a "Black register" (Sithole, 2020) that challenges the archival fixation on the documentation and commemoration of violence and death (Hartman, 2007;McKittrick, 20014;Sharpe, 2016;Woods, 2002). More than this, Black socio-ecologies insist on remembering and honoring resistance, epistemologies, and the socio-ecological relations by which Black liberatory geographies, visions of freedom, and belonging have been effectuated (McCutcheon, 2021). These Black spaces, ways of knowing, and remembering, commemorate Black struggle and flourish, keeping Black ancestors in mind, while not discounting the workings of anti-blackness. ...
... Black counter-memorialization is, then, a decolonization of mind and land; understanding dominant commemoration (articulated through imposing statuary and toponymic inscriptions) as a territorialization of a mentality with and alongside the appropriation of space (Alderman & Inwood, 2013;Azaryahu, 1996;Clare, 2013;Madera, 2015). Robinson (2000) described as the long Black Radical Tradition (BRT), have always rejected abstractions and dematerialized conceptions of how race, place, and space are articulated and experienced (see also McCutcheon, 2021). Conceptually, the BRT moves toward a consideration of a global history of Black resistance to anti-blackness. ...
... The plot memorializes the labors of making freedom in place. The plot as Black space-from the actual slave provision grounds to the clearing in Toni Morrison's Beloved, from the Black Belt to Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative-constitute mnemonics of Black peoples' ecological, political, and spatial resistance to normalized antiblack violence and dehumanization (Bledsoe, 2017(Bledsoe, , 2018Davis et al., 2019;McCutcheon, 2019McCutcheon, , 2021McKittrick, 2013). In this way, Black Geographies map spaces that allow us to locate "the ways in which anti-black violence in the Americas evidence protean plantation futures as spaces of encounter that hold in them useful anti-colonial practices and narratives. ...
Discrete monuments remain in the domain of the symbolic,
land as mnemonic shifts to a more materialist commemorative praxis. This paper proposes a turn toward land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place-making. Reviewing the scholarship on memoryscapes, I show that the critical
insights of Black ecologies and geographies scholarship has
moved further than traditional scholarship and offers multiple openings for new monuments and commemorative practices in honor of Black life. Black socio-ecologies scholarship
centralizes the place-based epistemologies, spatial histories,
and experiences of Black communities and clarifies the form
and function of land or plots as mnemonics of the Black freedom struggle, place-making practices, and spatial epistemologies. Black plots are, therefore, ideal for orienting a new
mode of Black commemoration. While much of the paper
centers monuments to Black people, if Black commemoration is foregrounded in abolitionists thinking and practices,
such memorialization must grapple with the histories of Indigenous dispossession and settler-colonialism. The paper
concludes with a consideration of what the argument for
land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place-making might mean for future avenues of research
... In "Growing Black food on sacred land: Using Black liberation theology to imagine an alternative Black agrarian future," Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon uses Black liberation theology to understand the presence and role of "Spirit" in Black farming communities [53]. In her work, McCutcheon argues that spirituality should be an important factor of consideration for researchers studying Black farming and agrarian communities. ...
... In her work, McCutcheon argues that spirituality should be an important factor of consideration for researchers studying Black farming and agrarian communities. To date, there has been little scholarship exploring the relationship between spirituality and agriculture [17,53,54]. ...
Gardens and farms provide individuals and communities with access to affordable, nutritious, and culturally significant foods. There is a rich body of literature unpacking the connections between Black urban growing and agency, freedom, resistance, and care. However, spirituality remains one aspect of health and wellbeing that has not been studied extensively in relation to agriculture. The main goal of this study was to conduct focus groups with Philly-based growers to understand the self-determined impacts of urban agriculture on health, agency, and wellbeing. The secondary goal of this work was to determine if these impacts differ by race. I apply a collective agency and community resilience theoretical framework to this study. This framework offers a model to understand agriculture as a way for communities to become self-determined, self-reliant, and self-sustained. For this study exploring the impacts of urban agriculture on health, there were three eligibility criteria. Participants had to be at least 18 years old, identify as Black or White, and have grown food in a garden or farm in Philadelphia. I hosted six race-specific focus groups at Bartram’s Garden in Southwest Philadelphia. The audio recordings were transcribed, and the full transcripts were coded using open and axial coding methods and a “key concepts” framework. We also employed several methods of triangulation to help ensure the credibility and validity of the findings. Four major themes emerged from the data: growing as a demonstration of agency and power, growing as a facilitator of body–mind wellness, community care and relationship-building, and deepened spiritual connection and interdependence. There were both similarities and differences in the impacts of urban agriculture by race. Across the six focus groups, people talked about concepts related to community care and relationship-building as being major benefits of growing food. In both groups, people also brought up significant issues and barriers around land security. Mentions of spirituality appeared more frequently and more emphatically in the Black focus groups. Black focus groups were more likely to discuss the collective impacts of agriculture, while White participants were more likely to discuss the impacts on themselves as individuals. The findings of this focus group study point to some key domains through which agriculture impacts the health of farmers and growers in Philadelphia.
... Tanah diyakini sebagai harapan bersama, dan tanah sebagai relasi iman. Tanah sebagai harapan bersama bermakna tanah adalah harta abadi dan terakhir (McCutcheon, 2021). Sementara konsep tanah sebagai harapan hidup berkaitan erat dengan harapan hidup masyarakat asli Papua, di mana mereka tidak bisa hidup tanpa tanah. ...
Tujuan penelitian mendalami sustainbility, konflik, dan sosio-ekonomi dalam implementasi Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil System (ISPO) di Kabupaten Merauke, Provinsi Papua Selatan. Metode metode asosiatif dengan menggunakan pendekatan kuantitatif, yang dilakukan untuk mengetahui ada tidaknya sustainbility, konflik, dan sosio-ekonomi terhadap implementasi Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil System (ISPO) di Kabupaten Merauke, Provinsi Papua Selatan yang dianalisa secara korelasional. Populasi yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah petani / mitra perkebunan kelapa sawit yang berada di Merauke. Teknik sampling menggunakan simple random sampling yaitu sebanyak 100 orang. Temuan penelitian bahwa variabel keberlanjutan memiliki koefisien regresi sebesar 1.113, yang berarti setiap peningkatan satu satuan dalam keberlanjutan akan meningkatkan partisipasi ISPO sebesar 1.113. Dengan nilai t hitung 3.303 > t tabel, keberlanjutan memiliki pengaruh signifikan terhadap partisipasi ISPO. Artinya, semakin baik persepsi masyarakat terhadap ISPO yang menjaga keberlanjutan dan tradisi, semakin tinggi partisipasi petani. Variabel sosial ekonomi juga menunjukkan pengaruh signifikan dengan koefisien regresi sebesar 0.317 dan nilai t hitung 2.168 > t tabel, yang berarti setiap peningkatan satu satuan dalam sosial ekonomi akan meningkatkan partisipasi ISPO sebesar 0.317. Semakin besar dampak ekonomi yang dirasakan masyarakat, semakin tinggi partisipasi petani. Namun, variabel rekonsiliasi konflik, dengan koefisien regresi 0.194 dan nilai thitung 0.900 < ttabel, tidak memiliki pengaruh signifikan terhadap partisipasi ISPO. Meskipun pelaksanaan ISPO membaik, pengaruh rekonsiliasi konflik terhadap partisipasi petani tidak signifikan.
... But scholarship must also remain cognisant to the role of religious networks in helping curate more radical possibilities in areas of welfare and food provision -be that collaborations between Black Panther breakfast clubs and churches in the 1970s (Lloyd, 2017), community organising (Slessarev-Jamir, 2011), or the work of community farms, food cooperatives, and land ownership as part of Black liberation and reparative justice (McCutcheon, 2021). To this end, we hope that being alert to the ways in which the more regressive organisational and technological systems common to many UK food banks have been challenged in the past -by religious as well as secular groups -may yet work to undermine their ideological doxa and encourage future challenges too. ...
It is widely supposed that food banks and key aspects of the UK’s wider food banking system – referral networks, eligibility tests, food vouchers, corporate sponsorship and the close entanglement of food charity with local and national government – are new to the UK, either imported from North America or emerging ex nihilio with the Trussell Trust in the early 2000s. Drawing on local and national newspaper archives and data from Companies House, the Charity Commission and internet archiving website the WayBack Machine, we present a genealogy that challenges these origins and situates UK food banking in a set of historically contingent practices, alliances and struggles many of which are nowadays forgotten. Contributing to work on policy mobilities in the voluntary sector, we pay particular attention to the development of the UK’s contemporary food banking system through the movement of ideas and practices between different organisations (for example, between food banks, corporate food retailers and US tech companies) and different charitable fields (including overseas aid and homelessness), between the charitable sector and the state, and between different places both within and without the UK. The resulting genealogy not only extends, and reframes, the history of British food banking – including claims as to the recent institutionalisation of food banks in a neoliberal state welfare apparatus – but works to disrupt the rationalities and ‘regime(s) of acceptability’ that underpin and maintain the modus operandi of many current-day food banks.
Black environmental geographies scholarship has made significant strides in expanding the ways we understand ecologies and ecological relationships interweaving the lives of black communities across the black diaspora. In this article, I review the analytical interventions in this field that press the bounds of traditional environmental injustice framings of black ecological experiences and relations. Drawing on black studies, this literature, first, helps us to position present racial ecological landscapes within historical and long-standing logics of race, colonialism, and imperialism. Moreover, it breathes nuance and life into discourse that overrepresents black ecological relationships as lack, decay, and containers of pollution and death, with very little everyday living. Building on these interventions and understanding the dialectic relationship between death-dealing and life-affirming socio-ecological processes at work in black environmental geographies, I call attention to interdisciplinary methodological approaches that bring together black environmental geographies and critical environmental science to behold the complex enmeshment of social and biophysical relations and the entanglement of life and degradation that interweave the two.
In the current moment of parallel queer, environmental, and racial crises, geographers have begun to tackle how fiction has become a way to envision and enact change that addresses these crises simultaneously and works toward creating just futures. This chapter explores how Black queer works of speculative fiction, specifically in the climate fiction genre, present imaginative possibilities for confronting climate change by exhibiting three key elements: envisioning resistance, creating community, and fostering empathy and accountability. Speculative fiction is a genre of possibility and can be seen as a process of future-making and space-making that reimagines our current and future world. The two novels, Tenea Johnson’s Smoketown and Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, are the primary examples of speculative fiction texts where I extract these three key themes. Considering speculative fiction as a practice of future space-making can enable geographers to work toward futures that privilege the experiences and imaginaries of queer people of color—the type of stories best positioned to address the combined projects of racial, climate, and queer justice.
This agrarian geography of Kentucky begins on the streets of the state's largest city, in the throes of antiracist struggle. It tracks the state's lingering colonial settler power dynamics through the racism of plantation, extraction, and carceral geographies. It then traces how resistance to these exploitations take root in place-based agri-food initiatives unfolding through urban-rural solidarity against white supremacist policing, prison systems, labor exploitation, and extractivism. It begins with a brief overview of the scale of reference of Kentucky itself. Situating the state entails addressing the trauma and topophilia (love of landscape) of its agrarian past and present. It draws upon bell hooks’ literary invocations of Kentucky-based agrarian visions, as well as place-based political ecology scholarship (seven years of Kentucky Agrarian Questions practitioner panels at the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference at University of Kentucky). Following Black and abolitionist geographies, this agrarian geography traces rural and urban shared struggles for food sovereignty, environmental justice, and liberation from racism of carceral systems. It introduces Kentucky grassroots projects connecting and uniting rural and urban struggles against carceral violence and the racism therein, such as Hood to the Holler (a political initiative emerging from Black Lives Matter mobilizations for Breonna Taylor). The essay ends with reflections on the political-ecological contradictions and imperative of working through and beyond a settler-colonial-state scale of reference like Kentucky. To extricate from and dismantle plantation modes and carceral legacies, abolitionist agrarian geographies recover the reality of Black and Indigenous agrarian history, presence, and futures. As such, rooted in place-based reckoning, resistance, and responsibility, they offer hope.
For decades Chicanx/Latinx feminists have mobilized important alternative onto-epistemologies and methodologies like testimonio that subvert dominant forms of knowledge production. Yet, these contributions have not been meaningfully engaged in the discipline of geography. This article seeks to address this gap by bridging methodological lessons across feminist geography, Chicanx/Latinx Feminist Studies and testimonio. Drawing on my experiences as a Latina feminist geographer doing research with my community, I critically reflect on how Chicanx/Latinx feminisms and testimonio create crucial openings to work towards a more ethical, relationally grounded, anti-oppressive praxis in geography.
African Americans’ memories of the Great Migration and urban displacement surface in popular film and culture as a desire to return to rural homeplaces while retaining access to opportunity in urban meccas. The author argues that real examples of this “limbo imaginary” are relevant to research on Black meccas. Findings from the author’s ethnographic study of rural Freedom Colonies (settlements Black Texans founded 1865–1920) showed that, for African Americans, embodying urban-rural liminality is an existential space of opportunity and ingenuity. Urban baby boomers in the study call Houston and rural Black meccas (Freedom Colonies) home, holding dual senses of belonging and commitments to place preservation. These baby boomers performed liminality during homecoming celebrations where they commemorated ancestors and reconnected descendants’ ties to settlements severed during the Great Migration. The article recommends that researchers and urban planners help communities identify liminal spaces appropriate for catalyzing inter-generational bridging and bonding of urban-rural social capital to preserve endangered communities of color.
[Open access article at: https://acmejournal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1683] How are Black food geographies, both geographies of emotional slow violence and resilience? Dominant directions in health-related food research emphasize how Black food choices cause (slow) death from diabetes, hypertension, and other medical conditions. Emphasis on individual behaviors can overlook how a felt sense of the food landscape matters (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes Conroy 2016). Through the frame of slow violence and racial trauma, I consider racial surveillance in the context of Black food geographies. Biomedical studies note the attritional effects of racial trauma on overall wellbeing, while other research and media continue to document racial profiling in food spaces. For this exploratory piece, I bear witness to testimonies of racial surveillance and food geographies using GIF-making, healing arts, and autoethnography. Testimonies drawn from interviews, media, and my personal experiences underscore how surveillance and its effects are very much visible and felt for African-American and Afro-Latinx testifiers as they navigate “food while Black.” Beyond countering the “invisibility” of slow violence (Nixon 2011), I explore affective and arts-based approaches to (re)presenting and feeling through Black food geographies. Building on Black geographies, I engage with Black life (not only death) by considering testifiers’ strategies for personal and collective resilience (White 2018).
Today, there are only about 18,000 black farmers in the United States. Declining by 98 percent since 1920, they have suffered losses due to public policy, economic pressures, and racial oppression. All of these factors must be addressed if African American farmers and their communities are to thrive. In this article, we use Census of Agriculture data and a follow-on survey in one Mississippi Delta county to review the current situation of black farmers. We introduce the concept of "returning farmers" to suggest that a significant number of black farmers, who are not defined as "farmers" by the Census, still own land and want to farm again. The first section of the article provides a brief overview of the historical and current trends in the U.S. The second section discusses Delta County, drawing upon our interviews and the Census of Agriculture. The third section discusses the implications of civil rights violations by the former Farmers Home Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the resulting class-action lawsuit. Finally, we conclude with a policy recommendation to slow the drastic decline of African-American farmers.
Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer are aware of the testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer are familiar with the speeches she delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer’s speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. This book presents twenty-one of Hamer’s most important speeches and testimonies. It includes speeches from the better part of her fifteen-year activist career delivered in response to occasions as distinct as a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, and a summons to testify in a Mississippi courtroom. The book includes brief critical descriptions that place Hamer’s words in context. The book also includes the last full-length oral history interview she granted, a recent oral history interview with Hamer’s daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources. The book demonstrates that there is still much to learn about and from this valiant black freedom movement activist.
African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction explores the history and circumstances of African American religion through three examples: conjure, African American Christianity, and African American Islam. It argues that the phrase “African American religion” is meaningful only insofar as it describes how through religion, African Americans have responded to oppressive conditions. This bold claim frames the interpretation of the historical record of diverse religious experiences in the African American community. The common tendency to racialize African American religious experiences as an inherent proclivity towards religiousness is rejected and instead the focus is on how religious communities and experiences have developed in the African American community and the context in which these developments took place.
During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life, highlighting African-styled voodoo as an essential element of black folk culture. A number of researchers converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to seek support for their theories about “African survivals,” bringing with them a curious mix of both influences. The legacy of that body of research is the area’s contemporary identification as a Gullah community. This wide-ranging history upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by refocusing the observational lens on those who studied them. Cooper uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during the interwar years, the black studies movement, and black land loss and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country. What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people's heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly divergent ends over the decades.
Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents.
In From Here to Equality, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, Darity and Mullen offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen--slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination--makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore.
This paper is based on the 2018 Neil Smith Lecture presented at the University of St Andrews. It considers the plantation past/futures of Sapelo Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Islands forming an archipelago along the US Southeastern coast. I work through the abolitionist efforts of the Saltwater Geechee’s who have resided there since at least 1803 to better understand how we can mobilise an emancipatory politics of land and property and to produce commons that work to repair and heal the violence done through enslavement and ongoing displacement. I weave together a series of historical threads to better situate linked ideas of abolition democracy and abolition geography, and to extend the notion of abolition ecology as a strategic notion to connect Eurocentric based political ecologies with the emancipatory tradition of Black geographies.
In this book, Ashanté M. Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents’ navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation’s capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members’ stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese’s geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.
In the late 1960s, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
This paper examines Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms, a 1969 farming cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Specifically, this paper interrogates how Hamer's identity as a Black southern woman influences her formulation and daily activities at Freedom Farms. Theoretically, this paper situates Hamer as an expert agrarian labourer and knowledge producer who exists within a history of Black women who have always been utilised for their agrarian knowledge, but given little credit. Hamer's knowledge is a part of her body. This paper argues that Freedom Farms is a Black radical geography operating at three scales: the body, the farm and the southern agrarian landscape. This paper utilises Hamer's speeches, interviews and other archival documents to understand Hamer's efforts. Hamer's agrarian landscape is wrought with pain, but also the insistence in the economic opportunity that exists for Black people in agrarian spaces.
Debates around urban land—who owns it, who can access it, who decides, and on what basis—are intensifying in the United States. Fifty years after the end of legally sanctioned segregation, rising rents in cities across the country are displacing poor people, particularly people of color. In this article, I consider debates around land in Detroit. Building on work in critical race studies, indigenous studies, and decolonial theory, as well insights from community activists, I introduce and develop what I call a “historical diagnostic.” This justice-oriented analytical approach illuminates the racialized dispossession that haunts land struggles and foregrounds the historical antecedents to and aspirations of contemporary land justice movements. Drawing on research conducted in Detroit between 2010 and 2012, I analyze instances when the moral economy of land becomes visible, including a truth and reconciliation process, the period when the state of Michigan placed the city under emergency management, and a tax foreclosure auction. An examination of these events reveals alternative ways of knowing and being in relation to land that we might build upon to confront displacement in cities today.
Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. After years of combing library archives, government documents, and private collections across the country, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck have selected twenty-one of Hamer's most important speeches and testimonies.As the first volume to exclusively showcase Hamer's talents as an orator, this book includes speeches from the better part of her fifteen-year activist career delivered in response to occasions as distinct as a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, and a summons to testify in a Mississippi courtroom.Brooks and Houck have coupled these heretofore unpublished speeches and testimonies with brief critical descriptions that place Hamer's words in context. The editors also include the last full-length oral history interview Hamer granted, a recent oral history interview Brooks conducted with Hamer's daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamerdemonstrates that there is still much to learn about and from this valiant black freedom movement activist. © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi. All Rights Reserved.
Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the two-centuries-old conflict between the African Americans and planters in the Mississippi Delta. Woods traces the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debates, showing the ways in which African Americans in the Delta have continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice despite having suffered countless defeats under the planter regime. Woods interweaves the role of music in sustaining their efforts, surveying a musical tradition that embraced a radical vision of social change.
Black churches have received little attention in geographic scholarship. This article employs archival and textual research, extensive participant observation, and semi-structured open-ended interviews with volunteers to examine the day-to-day actions and overall goals of a historically prominent black Protestant church in Atlanta, GA, USA. Specifically, the volunteer-run emergency food program is understood as a black geography riddled with contradictions that reveal the complexity of black people more broadly. ‘Emergency soul food’ is an imperfect yet complicated short-term solution for those coming in to be served. Outside of the food program, volunteers’ hopes and dreams for Auburn Avenue are based on a romantic remembrance of the neighborhood. Ultimately, their prescriptions for the future are a mixture of black socially conservative values and visions to create an alternative black geography with affordable housing for all.
North American food scholars, activists and policymakers often consider how to make a community food project more inclusive to “vulnerable populations” to increase participation in local food efforts. Drawing from qualitative research conducted with two community food organizations in Seattle, Washington, I argue that inclusive efforts are not addressing the power asymmetries present in organizations and within communities. Engaging with black geographies literature, I reveal how a black food justice organization grapples with violent histories of slavery and dispossession rooted in a black farming imaginary, and works to re-envision this imaginary to one of power and transformation. The spatial imaginaries and spaces of each food organization acknowledge racial histories differentially, informing their activism. Black geographies possess knowledge and spatial politics that can revitalize community food movements, and I consider how white food activists might reframe their work so that their efforts are not fueling the displacement of residents of color.
This paper demonstrates how the Nation of Islam (NOI), a well known black nationalist organization, is utilizing notions of community to promote the activities and goals of its farm to other black people. The NOI owns Muhammad Farms in rural southern Georgia, USA. Its stated purpose is to feed all black people in the United States. Historically, the NOI has occupied a radical space in the black community by promoting black separatism. I argue that while its stance on separatism has not changed, discourse about Muhammad Farms appeals to more generalized notions of community uplift and self-determination, key components of black community nationalism. The NOI employs these discursive strategies to rally other black people around their message. I utilize archival and textual research along with critical discourse analysis to unpack this dialectical relationship between black racial identity and the farm. I claim that the NOI utilizes and creates black information networks in part to control knowledge disseminated about the farm. They are retelling black agrarian history in a way that mixes fact, fiction and shock value. Validation from others, mainly white people is antithetical to the NOI’s black nationalist principles. Ultimately the organization seeks to recreate the farm as a landscape of liberation that includes tragedy, triumph and hope for the future. The NOI presents Muhammad Farms as a symbol and example of the possibilities if black people return to the farm. Muhammad Farms also serves as a living memorial to black agrarian history.
Under the banner of food justice, the last few years has seen a profusion of projects focused on selling, donating, bringing or growing fresh fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods inhabited by African Americans — often at below market prices — or educating them to the quality of locally grown, seasonal, and organic food. The focus of this article is the subjects of such projects — those who enroll in such projects `to bring good food to others,' in this case undergraduate majors in Community Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz who do six-month field studies with such organizations. Drawing on formal and informal communications with me, I show that they are hailed by a set of discourses that reflect whitened cultural histories, such as the value of putting one's hands in the soil. I show their disappointments when they find these projects lack resonance in the communities in which they are located. I then show how many come to see that current activism reflects white desires more than those of the communities they putatively serve. In this way, the article provides insight into the production and reproduction of whiteness in the alternative food movement, and how it might be disrupted. I conclude that more attention to the cultural politics of alternative food might enable whites to be more effective allies in anti-racist struggles.
Although the concept of food sovereignty is rooted in International Peasant Movements across the global south, activists have
recently called for the adoption of this framework among low-income communities of color in the urban United States. This
paper investigates on-the-ground processes through which food sovereignty articulates with the work of food justice and community
food security activists in Oakland, California, and Seattle, Washington. In Oakland, we analyze a farmers market that seeks
to connect black farmers to low-income consumers. In Seattle, we attend to the experiences of displaced immigrant farmers
from Latin America and their efforts to address their food needs following migration. In both cases, we find that US based
projects were constrained by broader forces of neoliberalism that remained unrecognized by local activists. In Oakland, despite
a desire to create a local food system led by marginalized African Americans, emphasis on providing green jobs in agriculture
led activists to take a market-based approach that kept local food out of the economic grasp of food-insecure neighborhood
residents. In Seattle, the marginalization of the immense agroecological knowledge of Latino/an immigrant farmers rendered
local food projects less inclusive and capable of transformative change. Taken together, these very different cases suggest
that a shift towards food sovereignty necessitates a broad acknowledgement of and resistance to neoliberalism.
KeywordsFood sovereignty–Food justice–Community food security–Social movements–Neoliberalism
A hard-hitting look at the story behind California's famous scenery. The beauty of the California landscape is integral to its place in the imagination of generations of people around the world. In The Lie of the Land, geographer Don Mitchell looks at the human costs associated with this famous scenery. Through an account of the labor history of the state, Mitchell examines the material and ideological struggles over living and working conditions that played a large part in the construction of the contemporary California landscape. The Lie of the Land examines the way the California landscape was built on the backs of migrant workers, focusing on migratory labor and agribusiness before World War II. The book relates the historical geography of California to the processes of labor that made it, discussing not only significant strikes but also on the everyday existence of migrant workers in the labor camps, fields, and "Hoovervilles" where they lived. Mitchell places class struggle at the heart of social development, demonstrating concretely how farm workers affected their social and material environment, as well as exploring how farm owners responded to their workers' efforts to improve their living and working conditions. Mitchell also places "reformers" in context, revealing the actual nature of their role in relation to migrant workers' efforts-that of undermining the struggle for genuine social change. In addition, this volume captures the significance of the changing composition of the agricultural workforce, particularly in racial terms, as the class struggle evolved over a period of decades. Mitchell has written a narrative history that describes the intimate connection between landscape representations and the material form of geography. The Lie of the Land places people squarely in the middle of the landscapes they inhabit, shedding light on the complex and seemingly contradictory interactions between progressive state agents, radical workers, and California growers as they seek to remake the land in their own image. "It is important that the story of the migrant workers is told and Mitchell tells it well." Transactions/Area "The Lie of the Land opens up new and rich possibilities to help prod our thinking about the processes involved in understanding the changing morphology of landscape. This is an important book. Mitchell's lucid examination of the role of migrant workers in shaping and reshaping California's agricultural landscapes brings new meaning to the creation of the sometimes sublime, yet always complex, rural landscapes in places like the Salinas Valley, the Central Valley, and the Imperial Valley. For many historical geographers and others fortunate enough to read this book, the vision and study of landscape evolution will never be the same." Historical Geography "For anyone wishing to go beyond such movies and novels that do address Californian labour history before the Second World War, this is an excellent integration of all too often disparate approaches and materials. It should be required reading far beyond the confines of labour history." Labour History Review "The Lie of the Land is an important contribution to the study of landscape, to cultural geography, and more generally to critical geography. The book should be held up as a model for students and researchers in the field." Environment & Planning A "In The Lie of the Land, Don Mitchell represents a new, interdisciplinary, cultural geography, using such disparate fields as art history and labor history. He looks at migrant workers in California from the Wheatland riot of 1913 to the Bracero Program of 1942." Western Historical Quarterly "What he discovers is that the image of California as an agricultural Eden, as initially witnessed by John Steinbeck's Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, never matches the reality of a land that is tightly controlled by corporate growers, a land that exploits the labor of waves of migratory workers from the late 19th century on. Mitchell looks behind the pastoral charm of fertile fields and neatly tended farmhouses to reveal the brutal working conditions and squalid living conditions of the migratory camps. Along the way, he acquaints the reader with a century of labor history and the fact that Anglos, Filipinos, Japanese and Chicanos have all taken their turn at working--and fighting against--the California agricultural landscape." Journal of the West "Mitchell, who teaches geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder, describes the labor struggles of the migrants with clarity and grace. The Lie of the Land is, in many ways, a valuable contribution to the study of California labor relations." Los Angeles Reader "Amidst the array of studies about California agriculture, geographer Don Mitchell offers a singular analysis. His study is a carefully researched and closely reasoned interpretation of the interaction between the place, the people, and the agricultural plenitude which together, he contends, have contributed to the evolving morphology of the California landscape." Agricultural History Don Mitchell is assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Peace be Still:” Rediscovering My Spirit through Agrarian Fieldwork
- P Mccutcheon
Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America
- E M Townes
Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability
- A H Alkon
Prophetic Black ecologies: Liberatory Agriculture on Beulah Land Farms
- P Mccutcheon
Black Christian Nationalism: New Directions for the Future
- A Cleage
A Black Theology of Liberation-Fortieth Anniversary Edition
- J Cone
F (1845) From courage to freedom
- Douglass
The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song
- H L Gates
A Burst of Light: And Other Essays
- A Lorde
Heaven on Earth: Race, food and space in black religious food programs
- P Mccutcheon
Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies and Markets
- R Slocum
- A Saldanha
Womanist Theology. Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America
- E M Townes
- Carney J
From courage to freedom
- F Douglass
The Federal job guarantee-A policy to achieve permanent full employment
- M Paul
- Darit
- Wjr
- D Hamilton