Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RACELAND (Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-02-01 bis 2023-01-31
RACELAND fits in a burgeoning field of scholarship on reactionary internationalism and seeks to historicize this phenomenon. At the same time, it challenges the oft-implied link between progress and modernity, unveiling modernity’s “dark side” instead. In contrast with the traditional view that the white US South was fighting a forlorn rearguard battle to maintain its segregationist Jim Crow system after World War II, I argue that southern segregationists were fully immersed in Cold War modernity and actively sought to secure and advance their white-supremacist way of life through interregional and transnational alliances, making their impact global in nature. Once civil rights activists began to contest internal colonization at home and independence fighters challenged white domination in the colonies, southern segregationists began to actively seek white allies to maintain preexisting racialized power structures and narratives in a decolonizing world. What RACELAND does, then, is to take the study of US segregation out of its national boundaries, track the networks its proponents were part of, and explore its economic and environmental impact. We continue to live with this impact until today.
In the fall of 2021, I still could not travel to the States, because of COVID-related delays in visa processing at the US Consulate in Amsterdam. I therefore did my three-month secondment at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) first and then worked with my host institution, the University of Groningen, until I could finally move to the USA in late February 2022. During my secondment I did research in the RIAS archives, gave feedback on PhD projects, organized a two-day workshop with the Rural Imaginations research group of the University of Amsterdam, did a presentation on Cowboy Myths, participated in an online panel organized by the Netherlands Atlantic Youth about polarization in the US, and did a podcast on the Frontier in American History. I contributed to two online classes at the University of Groningen, continued my work with the Decolonize Hub, and joined the organizing committee for the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA) conference themed "A Superpower by Nature: The Environment and American Studies." This conference was originally planned for December 2021, but because of a lockdown we had to postpone it until May the next year.
While in the US, I finished the article for the special issue of the Global South and the chapter for the Planetary Hinterlands book. These peer-reviewed publications will come out in the next months. So far, I conducted research in archives across the US Deep South and did fieldwork and interviewed people in Natchez, Holly Springs, Winona, Clarksdale, Mound Bayou, Mileston, and Shannon (all located in Mississippi). I delivered academic papers at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations conference, the Rural Imaginations conference, the UM Race & Ethnicity Forum, and the Annual Meeting of the Mississippi Historical Association. In addition, I followed trainings in grassroots and heritage tourism and investigative journalism, worked on my management skills as member of the Center Advisory Committee and the Editorial Advisory Board of Study the South journal, and delivered talks for the general public in Oxford, MS and Jackson, MS.