Afterlives of the Plantation

Afterlives of the Plantation is a veritable paradigm earthquake. Turns out, Booker T. Washington’s exhortation to rural Black folk to ""cast down your buckets where you are"" was less a backward-looking compromise than a vision of Black modernity. Backed by meticulous research, Jarvis McInnis recasts Tuskegee as an Atlantic experiment in turning the carceral landscape of the plantation into an engine of Black economic, social, and cultural development—provision grounds for a liberated future. It is time we cast down our analytical sights on the global Black South. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of <i>Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression</i> Afterlives of the Plantation is a groundbreaking, brilliant, and paradigm shifting account of Black modernity that appropriately reconsiders and re-centers the Black South as a key vector in understanding the Black world. McInnis mines neglected archives to re-route and re-root the legacies of the plantation in order to consider not only Black subjugation but also Black imagination and freedom dreaming. This book is a must read for thinkers interested in race, agriculture, ecology, and cultural history. -- Imani Perry, author of <i>South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation</i> What happens, Jarvis McInnis asks, in this compelling study, when the modern is rural? Declaring that Black modernity in the Americas is first and foremost agricultural, Afterlives of the Plantation shows us early twentieth-century subjects who repurposed the plantation for an array of commitments. Working with the concept of the “global black south,” this deeply researched book offers us capacious readings of south-south relations (within the US, and between the US and the Caribbean), as well as rural and agricultural circuits for rethinking Black modernity and Black modernisms. -- Faith Smith, author of <i>Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early 20th Century</i>