Brian Williams | Mississippi State University (original) (raw)
Publications by Brian Williams
The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography, 2020
Colonial and racial regimes of property - including territorial dispossession and slavery - conti... more Colonial and racial regimes of property - including territorial dispossession and slavery - continue to haunt the present. These racialized geographies have often been considered through the analytics of “landscape”, which considers the construction, reproduction and consumption of the imaginaries of race and nature attached to particular places. Landscape, therefore, acts as a key technology of racialization and property control through representations of the relationship between people and land. In this chapter, we call for sustained attention to the politics of land in studies of racial capitalism. Land, we argue, is central to historical geographies of racialization, and a key site of struggle over racial property regimes, often with visceral bodily and ecological consequences. The white, self-owning, land-owning subject at the presumed center of capitalist modernity is a product of colonization and enslavement--as racialized systems of owning and controlling land and people. For us then, grounding the theoretical discussions of racial capitalism in the materialities of race and land introduces new questions about the relationships between survival, community, and belonging. Control over land often underwrites the control over life and labor; but such control alone is not sufficient to produce freedom, nor just and sustainable futures. We engage with Black mobilizations for land and freedom in Jamaica and in the southern United States to reveal the limits of land ownership under racial capitalism and point to land ethics which provide alternatives to liberal freedoms. Attending to the materiality of race and land in conceptualizing racial capitalism, we argue, opens opportunities to identify and better understand the factors that might constitute liberation in grounded struggles.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020
This article examines the shifting ways in which the dispossessive and toxic effects of agricultu... more This article examines the shifting ways in which the dispossessive and toxic effects of agricultural chemicals have been encoded as agrarian best practices. I develop the concept of agrarian racial regimes, based on the work of Cedric Robinson, to examine how constructed hierarchies of human worth are made central to the sale and usage of chemicals. A focus on the politics of pesticides in the Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the U.S. South, elucidates the ways in which agrarian racial capitalism has been reproduced through shifting antiblack conceptions of racial difference and technological progress. Two key conjunctures serve to draw these dynamics into relief: the development of the application of pesticides by aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s and the shift toward nearly complete mechanization and chemicalization of cotton production in the 1950s and 1960s. Analyzing film and advertisements in this period in the context of the material relations of agriculture and race, I argue that dispossession and toxicity are encoded as best practices through antiblack representations of agrarian whiteness. In the first period, chemicals were positioned as the height of progress through racist depictions of Black workers in the fields. In the second period, in response to Black challenges to white supremacy, the notion of “clean cotton” was deployed to represent Black absence as the height of technological progress and possessive agrarian masculinity. In both instances, racial representation has served to justify unstable and toxic relations of unequal power and profit.
Environment & Planning E, 2018
This article situates pesticides as technologies marked by both continuities and discontinuities ... more This article situates pesticides as technologies marked by both continuities and discontinuities from previous modes of agrarian racism in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the United States South. Attention to the historical-geographical specificity of pesticide intensification, I argue, provides the means to understand pesticide intensification as a mode of what I term agro-environmental racism. Anti-Black racism shaped the politics of pesticides, underpinning policies and material practices that were destructive of both the environment and human welfare in the Delta and beyond. The structures and ideologies of plantation racism helped position the Delta as one of the most pesticide-intensive sectors of U.S. agriculture during the mid-20th century—a particularly consequential period for both the intensification of pesticides and the formation of contemporary environmentalism. Pesticides were defended by agro-industrial interests as technologies supporting agricultural production—and particularly that of cotton, the most pesticide-intensive commodity crop. Simultaneously, they were figured as technologies crucial to a normative way of life. Although pesticides were articulated without explicit mention of race by the 1960s, I argue that the freedom struggle activism of the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and Fannie Lou Hamer provide context necessary to explain the pesticide politics of the Delta's plantation bloc. These mobilizations to enact more just, sustainable, and livable geographies were an indictment of a plantation politics which put the health of cotton and profitability of plantations above all else.
Southeastern Geographer, 2017
In this paper, I focus on the 1908 book Studies in the American Race Problem, a collection of ess... more In this paper, I focus on the 1908 book Studies
in the American Race Problem, a collection of
essays by Mississippi planter Alfred Stone and
Massachusetts statistician Walter Willcox, in
order to examine the ways in which agricultural
industrialization was articulated as a racial project in the early 20th century. Notions of development and competition in agriculture were closely
tied to plantationist racial conceptions, and Studies in the American Race Problem evidences
the articulation of white supremacist racial
conceptions with liberal statistical practices which
examined race as a population-level phenomenon. This agrarian epistemology, articulated as
the interplay of individual racial defiiency and
population-level demographics, provides evidence
of an anti-Black investment in the notion of industry. Acknowledging anti-Blackness in the very
genealogy of agro-industry, I suggest, provides a
means to better understand subsequent agricultural development.
With this special issue, we give due to Black geographies scholarship and seminal geographies of ... more With this special issue, we give due to Black geographies scholarship and seminal geographies of race which helped bring about the formal creation of Black geographies as a subfield of the discipline of Geography. We curate a selection of articles from the past quarter century of the Southeastern Geographer, each providing distinct and vital insights into key geographic themes like the production of space, the importance of region, and questions of justice. In this introduction, we draw out some of the key themes and insights of the papers included here, situating the work in relation to the historical developments and scholarly antecedents which
gave impetus to Black geographies. Finally, we reflect upon a few of the many generative routes of Black geographies as scholarship and practice.
Environment and History, 2018
Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral ... more Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral history remain underutilized in environmental history and environmental studies more broadly. Through a reflection on work in environmental history and associated disciplines, this paper presents a case for the strength and versatility of oral history as a key source for environmental history, while reflecting on questions of its reliability and scope. We identify three major insights provided by environmental oral history: into environmental knowledge, practices, and power. We argue that rather than being a weakness, the (inter)subjective and experiential dimensions of oral accounts provide a rich source for situating and interrogating environmental practices, meanings, and power relations. Oral history, moreover, provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal—and deepening—of the radical roots of environmental history. Furthermore, as a research practice, oral history is a promising means of expanding the participatory and grassroots engagement of environmental history. By decentring environmental expertise and eroding the boundaries (both fictive and real) of environmental knowledge production, oral environmental histories can provide key interventions in pursuit of a more just, sustainable world.
Introduction to Special Issue of "Southeastern Geographer" on Black Geographies (2017)
Discourse analysis is a powerful and versatile methodological tool, informing a diverse body of c... more Discourse analysis is a powerful and versatile methodological tool, informing a diverse body of critical geographic scholarship. Too often, however, discourse analysis remains unexplored, operating as a " black box, " underelaborated and hence undertheorized as to just what it offers. In this article, we articulate discourse analysis as inherently processual, by which we mean both that it should be understood as a process and that it can play an integral role throughout the research process. This article is derived from a meta-analysis of an exercise that invited early-career geographers to conduct discourse analysis on commentary centered on the 2013 U.S. federal government shutdown. The reflexive research process highlights the iterative, emergent, and dialogic properties of a processual engagement with a text. We suggest that recognizing these qualities enriches the role of both the analysis and the analyst(s) and expands the valence of discourse analysis as a productive and versatile component of critical human geography.
Teaching Documents by Brian Williams
What is “the South”? How did it come to be as a region? And why does it matter? This course inves... more What is “the South”? How did it come to be as a region? And why does it matter? This course investigates the relationship between histories and representations of geographical and social difference in the South, and examines the implications for present and future geographies of inequity and racial justice. Throughout the course, we will focus on socio-spatial structures, processes, knowledges and practices which contribute to and challenge uneven southern geographies.
We will focus on the following questions:
• How have people articulated the relationship between past, present, and future in the region?
• How and why do representations of southern spaces and places matter for present-day geographies of the South?
• What do geographies of the South reveal about the social and spatial dimensions of environmental change?
This class overviews key concepts and themes in cultural geography, a sub-field of human geograph... more This class overviews key concepts and themes in cultural geography, a sub-field of human geography that investigates the relationship between culture, space, and the environment. The course introduces a variety of ways that cultural geographers think about the relationship between human meanings (the way people make sense of the world), practices (the way people engage with the world) and power relations (the forces shaping and constraining social action). This course operates under the assumption that all human affairs are both cultural (concerned with the production and sharing of meanings) and spatial (occurring in, and shaping, places and the material environment). We work toward an understanding of culture as a set of processes which are actively constructed and unequally experienced. In particular, the course investigates the relationship between modes of social difference-particularly race, gender, and class-and the role of cultural meaning-making in contesting or reinforcing spatial power relations.
Course Objectives: Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 1. Discuss the concept of culture, and critically evaluate its various uses as an explanation for socio-spatial dynamics and differentiation. 2. Understand and explain the importance of key debates in cultural geography. 3. Apply the conceptual tools of cultural geography to interpret the relationship between meaning and power in the construction of space and place. 4. Articulate the role of meaning-making practices in the reproduction and contestation of spatial relations.
Book Reviews by Brian Williams
Environment and History, 2019
Papers by Brian Williams
Environmental Humanities, 2022
This article examines how racial capitalism has shaped the ecological and technological dynamics ... more This article examines how racial capitalism has shaped the ecological and technological dynamics of cotton production in the United States South. Cotton's destructive dependence on chemicals and on the extraction of lives and resources was animated and enabled by anti-Blackness, which sanctioned a systematic hostility to life that encoded environmental violence in plantation landscapes from the seed to the root. Agrotechnological notions of scientific progress and development conceived places, plants, and Black people as interchangeable parts. Tracing these trajectories during slavery and after abolition, the article focuses on two dynamics: the use of chemicals to augment soil fertility and manage cotton's ecologies, and the deployment of chemicals to protect cotton monocultures. In both instances, the manipulations of cotton's ecologies and biophysical properties helped maintain plantation profitability and dominance in the face of conjoined crises of political-ecological and racial control. Racialized conceptions of chemical-scientific "innovation," relations of indebtedness, and notions of threat also siphoned capital gains from Black workers and communities. By converting waste products into fertilizers and poisons, planters and industrialists continued to render Black communities, their labor, and their land as fungible but necessary components in the industrialization of racial capitalism.
Podcasts by Brian Williams
Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019
In this episode, the members of the Antipod Sound Collective introduce themselves and discuss the... more In this episode, the members of the Antipod Sound Collective introduce themselves and discuss the origins of Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast.
Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019
In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of ou... more In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of our first season. Hosts Brian Williams and Akira Drake Rodriguez walk listeners through a series of clips from a panel on Clyde Woods’s posthomously published work Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations of Post-Katrina New Orleans, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Brian and Akira comment on the use of Woods’s “blues epistemology” framework to contextualize the ongoing making and re-making of Black geographies in New Orleans. Covering themes from dispossession to displacement to the fallacy of “natural” disasters, this episode challenges traditional notions of urban planning and privileges what Woods’s calls “the visions of the dispossessed.” Clips from this episode are from an “Author Meets Critics” panel at the Community Book Center in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, a space of continuity for pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans residents. The participants in the discussion were: former Woods student and activist-poet Sunni Patterson; Khalil Shahid, Senior Policy Advocate at the National Resource Defense Council; Anna Brand, Asst. Prof at the University of California at Berkeley; Shana Griffin from Jane’s Place, New Orleans’ first community land trust; Sue Mobley, who, at the time of the panel, was the Public Programs Manager for the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane University; and Jordan T. Camp (editor) who at the time of the panel was at Barnard College, and is now the Director of Research at the People’s Forum in New York.
Episode 1 is hosted by Akira Drake Rodriguez and Brian Williams.
The episode was mixed and edited by KT Bender and Brian Williams.
This episode was produced by all members of the Antipod Sound Collective.
Book Chapters by Brian Williams
Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, 2020
With this intervention, we aim to resituate Pigford -- the landmark case recognizing financial di... more With this intervention, we aim to resituate Pigford -- the landmark case recognizing financial discrimination against Black farmers -- within a broader account of the Black farmers’ movement. Rather than simply celebrate the Pigford settlements, we argue for an approach that recenters land ownership and refuses financial compensation for dispossession
as an end goal of struggle. The paper begins with a critical review
of the Pigford litigation, highlighting how lawyers and politicians
transformed the injustice of land dispossession into a case about
financial compensation. Then, in order to disrupt the notion of
federal malfeasance as bookended within a finite timespan, as the
lawsuits mandate, we highlight a history of Black resistance that
predates the Civil Rights era. Third, drawing on Indigenous and postcolonial critiques of regimes of recognition, we address how the forms of recognition affected by liberal legal orders normalize commodified social relations and foreclose more radical visions of Black liberation. Finally, while we support Black farmers’ acceptance of financial compensation, we argue that a radical Black agrarian politics must look beyond the teleological finality of compensation and the individualistic notions of landownership to which it is tied. We conclude the chapter with an epilogue that returns to Pigford and positions compensation claims as a tactical but not a strategic recourse, with the goal of agrarian struggle being land restitution and the development of communal forms of Black land use and
ownership.
The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography, 2020
Colonial and racial regimes of property - including territorial dispossession and slavery - conti... more Colonial and racial regimes of property - including territorial dispossession and slavery - continue to haunt the present. These racialized geographies have often been considered through the analytics of “landscape”, which considers the construction, reproduction and consumption of the imaginaries of race and nature attached to particular places. Landscape, therefore, acts as a key technology of racialization and property control through representations of the relationship between people and land. In this chapter, we call for sustained attention to the politics of land in studies of racial capitalism. Land, we argue, is central to historical geographies of racialization, and a key site of struggle over racial property regimes, often with visceral bodily and ecological consequences. The white, self-owning, land-owning subject at the presumed center of capitalist modernity is a product of colonization and enslavement--as racialized systems of owning and controlling land and people. For us then, grounding the theoretical discussions of racial capitalism in the materialities of race and land introduces new questions about the relationships between survival, community, and belonging. Control over land often underwrites the control over life and labor; but such control alone is not sufficient to produce freedom, nor just and sustainable futures. We engage with Black mobilizations for land and freedom in Jamaica and in the southern United States to reveal the limits of land ownership under racial capitalism and point to land ethics which provide alternatives to liberal freedoms. Attending to the materiality of race and land in conceptualizing racial capitalism, we argue, opens opportunities to identify and better understand the factors that might constitute liberation in grounded struggles.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020
This article examines the shifting ways in which the dispossessive and toxic effects of agricultu... more This article examines the shifting ways in which the dispossessive and toxic effects of agricultural chemicals have been encoded as agrarian best practices. I develop the concept of agrarian racial regimes, based on the work of Cedric Robinson, to examine how constructed hierarchies of human worth are made central to the sale and usage of chemicals. A focus on the politics of pesticides in the Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the U.S. South, elucidates the ways in which agrarian racial capitalism has been reproduced through shifting antiblack conceptions of racial difference and technological progress. Two key conjunctures serve to draw these dynamics into relief: the development of the application of pesticides by aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s and the shift toward nearly complete mechanization and chemicalization of cotton production in the 1950s and 1960s. Analyzing film and advertisements in this period in the context of the material relations of agriculture and race, I argue that dispossession and toxicity are encoded as best practices through antiblack representations of agrarian whiteness. In the first period, chemicals were positioned as the height of progress through racist depictions of Black workers in the fields. In the second period, in response to Black challenges to white supremacy, the notion of “clean cotton” was deployed to represent Black absence as the height of technological progress and possessive agrarian masculinity. In both instances, racial representation has served to justify unstable and toxic relations of unequal power and profit.
Environment & Planning E, 2018
This article situates pesticides as technologies marked by both continuities and discontinuities ... more This article situates pesticides as technologies marked by both continuities and discontinuities from previous modes of agrarian racism in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the United States South. Attention to the historical-geographical specificity of pesticide intensification, I argue, provides the means to understand pesticide intensification as a mode of what I term agro-environmental racism. Anti-Black racism shaped the politics of pesticides, underpinning policies and material practices that were destructive of both the environment and human welfare in the Delta and beyond. The structures and ideologies of plantation racism helped position the Delta as one of the most pesticide-intensive sectors of U.S. agriculture during the mid-20th century—a particularly consequential period for both the intensification of pesticides and the formation of contemporary environmentalism. Pesticides were defended by agro-industrial interests as technologies supporting agricultural production—and particularly that of cotton, the most pesticide-intensive commodity crop. Simultaneously, they were figured as technologies crucial to a normative way of life. Although pesticides were articulated without explicit mention of race by the 1960s, I argue that the freedom struggle activism of the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and Fannie Lou Hamer provide context necessary to explain the pesticide politics of the Delta's plantation bloc. These mobilizations to enact more just, sustainable, and livable geographies were an indictment of a plantation politics which put the health of cotton and profitability of plantations above all else.
Southeastern Geographer, 2017
In this paper, I focus on the 1908 book Studies in the American Race Problem, a collection of ess... more In this paper, I focus on the 1908 book Studies
in the American Race Problem, a collection of
essays by Mississippi planter Alfred Stone and
Massachusetts statistician Walter Willcox, in
order to examine the ways in which agricultural
industrialization was articulated as a racial project in the early 20th century. Notions of development and competition in agriculture were closely
tied to plantationist racial conceptions, and Studies in the American Race Problem evidences
the articulation of white supremacist racial
conceptions with liberal statistical practices which
examined race as a population-level phenomenon. This agrarian epistemology, articulated as
the interplay of individual racial defiiency and
population-level demographics, provides evidence
of an anti-Black investment in the notion of industry. Acknowledging anti-Blackness in the very
genealogy of agro-industry, I suggest, provides a
means to better understand subsequent agricultural development.
With this special issue, we give due to Black geographies scholarship and seminal geographies of ... more With this special issue, we give due to Black geographies scholarship and seminal geographies of race which helped bring about the formal creation of Black geographies as a subfield of the discipline of Geography. We curate a selection of articles from the past quarter century of the Southeastern Geographer, each providing distinct and vital insights into key geographic themes like the production of space, the importance of region, and questions of justice. In this introduction, we draw out some of the key themes and insights of the papers included here, situating the work in relation to the historical developments and scholarly antecedents which
gave impetus to Black geographies. Finally, we reflect upon a few of the many generative routes of Black geographies as scholarship and practice.
Environment and History, 2018
Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral ... more Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral history remain underutilized in environmental history and environmental studies more broadly. Through a reflection on work in environmental history and associated disciplines, this paper presents a case for the strength and versatility of oral history as a key source for environmental history, while reflecting on questions of its reliability and scope. We identify three major insights provided by environmental oral history: into environmental knowledge, practices, and power. We argue that rather than being a weakness, the (inter)subjective and experiential dimensions of oral accounts provide a rich source for situating and interrogating environmental practices, meanings, and power relations. Oral history, moreover, provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal—and deepening—of the radical roots of environmental history. Furthermore, as a research practice, oral history is a promising means of expanding the participatory and grassroots engagement of environmental history. By decentring environmental expertise and eroding the boundaries (both fictive and real) of environmental knowledge production, oral environmental histories can provide key interventions in pursuit of a more just, sustainable world.
Introduction to Special Issue of "Southeastern Geographer" on Black Geographies (2017)
Discourse analysis is a powerful and versatile methodological tool, informing a diverse body of c... more Discourse analysis is a powerful and versatile methodological tool, informing a diverse body of critical geographic scholarship. Too often, however, discourse analysis remains unexplored, operating as a " black box, " underelaborated and hence undertheorized as to just what it offers. In this article, we articulate discourse analysis as inherently processual, by which we mean both that it should be understood as a process and that it can play an integral role throughout the research process. This article is derived from a meta-analysis of an exercise that invited early-career geographers to conduct discourse analysis on commentary centered on the 2013 U.S. federal government shutdown. The reflexive research process highlights the iterative, emergent, and dialogic properties of a processual engagement with a text. We suggest that recognizing these qualities enriches the role of both the analysis and the analyst(s) and expands the valence of discourse analysis as a productive and versatile component of critical human geography.
What is “the South”? How did it come to be as a region? And why does it matter? This course inves... more What is “the South”? How did it come to be as a region? And why does it matter? This course investigates the relationship between histories and representations of geographical and social difference in the South, and examines the implications for present and future geographies of inequity and racial justice. Throughout the course, we will focus on socio-spatial structures, processes, knowledges and practices which contribute to and challenge uneven southern geographies.
We will focus on the following questions:
• How have people articulated the relationship between past, present, and future in the region?
• How and why do representations of southern spaces and places matter for present-day geographies of the South?
• What do geographies of the South reveal about the social and spatial dimensions of environmental change?
This class overviews key concepts and themes in cultural geography, a sub-field of human geograph... more This class overviews key concepts and themes in cultural geography, a sub-field of human geography that investigates the relationship between culture, space, and the environment. The course introduces a variety of ways that cultural geographers think about the relationship between human meanings (the way people make sense of the world), practices (the way people engage with the world) and power relations (the forces shaping and constraining social action). This course operates under the assumption that all human affairs are both cultural (concerned with the production and sharing of meanings) and spatial (occurring in, and shaping, places and the material environment). We work toward an understanding of culture as a set of processes which are actively constructed and unequally experienced. In particular, the course investigates the relationship between modes of social difference-particularly race, gender, and class-and the role of cultural meaning-making in contesting or reinforcing spatial power relations.
Course Objectives: Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 1. Discuss the concept of culture, and critically evaluate its various uses as an explanation for socio-spatial dynamics and differentiation. 2. Understand and explain the importance of key debates in cultural geography. 3. Apply the conceptual tools of cultural geography to interpret the relationship between meaning and power in the construction of space and place. 4. Articulate the role of meaning-making practices in the reproduction and contestation of spatial relations.
Environmental Humanities, 2022
This article examines how racial capitalism has shaped the ecological and technological dynamics ... more This article examines how racial capitalism has shaped the ecological and technological dynamics of cotton production in the United States South. Cotton's destructive dependence on chemicals and on the extraction of lives and resources was animated and enabled by anti-Blackness, which sanctioned a systematic hostility to life that encoded environmental violence in plantation landscapes from the seed to the root. Agrotechnological notions of scientific progress and development conceived places, plants, and Black people as interchangeable parts. Tracing these trajectories during slavery and after abolition, the article focuses on two dynamics: the use of chemicals to augment soil fertility and manage cotton's ecologies, and the deployment of chemicals to protect cotton monocultures. In both instances, the manipulations of cotton's ecologies and biophysical properties helped maintain plantation profitability and dominance in the face of conjoined crises of political-ecological and racial control. Racialized conceptions of chemical-scientific "innovation," relations of indebtedness, and notions of threat also siphoned capital gains from Black workers and communities. By converting waste products into fertilizers and poisons, planters and industrialists continued to render Black communities, their labor, and their land as fungible but necessary components in the industrialization of racial capitalism.
Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019
In this episode, the members of the Antipod Sound Collective introduce themselves and discuss the... more In this episode, the members of the Antipod Sound Collective introduce themselves and discuss the origins of Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast.
Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019
In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of ou... more In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of our first season. Hosts Brian Williams and Akira Drake Rodriguez walk listeners through a series of clips from a panel on Clyde Woods’s posthomously published work Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations of Post-Katrina New Orleans, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Brian and Akira comment on the use of Woods’s “blues epistemology” framework to contextualize the ongoing making and re-making of Black geographies in New Orleans. Covering themes from dispossession to displacement to the fallacy of “natural” disasters, this episode challenges traditional notions of urban planning and privileges what Woods’s calls “the visions of the dispossessed.” Clips from this episode are from an “Author Meets Critics” panel at the Community Book Center in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, a space of continuity for pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans residents. The participants in the discussion were: former Woods student and activist-poet Sunni Patterson; Khalil Shahid, Senior Policy Advocate at the National Resource Defense Council; Anna Brand, Asst. Prof at the University of California at Berkeley; Shana Griffin from Jane’s Place, New Orleans’ first community land trust; Sue Mobley, who, at the time of the panel, was the Public Programs Manager for the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane University; and Jordan T. Camp (editor) who at the time of the panel was at Barnard College, and is now the Director of Research at the People’s Forum in New York.
Episode 1 is hosted by Akira Drake Rodriguez and Brian Williams.
The episode was mixed and edited by KT Bender and Brian Williams.
This episode was produced by all members of the Antipod Sound Collective.
Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, 2020
With this intervention, we aim to resituate Pigford -- the landmark case recognizing financial di... more With this intervention, we aim to resituate Pigford -- the landmark case recognizing financial discrimination against Black farmers -- within a broader account of the Black farmers’ movement. Rather than simply celebrate the Pigford settlements, we argue for an approach that recenters land ownership and refuses financial compensation for dispossession
as an end goal of struggle. The paper begins with a critical review
of the Pigford litigation, highlighting how lawyers and politicians
transformed the injustice of land dispossession into a case about
financial compensation. Then, in order to disrupt the notion of
federal malfeasance as bookended within a finite timespan, as the
lawsuits mandate, we highlight a history of Black resistance that
predates the Civil Rights era. Third, drawing on Indigenous and postcolonial critiques of regimes of recognition, we address how the forms of recognition affected by liberal legal orders normalize commodified social relations and foreclose more radical visions of Black liberation. Finally, while we support Black farmers’ acceptance of financial compensation, we argue that a radical Black agrarian politics must look beyond the teleological finality of compensation and the individualistic notions of landownership to which it is tied. We conclude the chapter with an epilogue that returns to Pigford and positions compensation claims as a tactical but not a strategic recourse, with the goal of agrarian struggle being land restitution and the development of communal forms of Black land use and
ownership.