Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation

Informations projet

RACELAND

N° de convention de subvention: 891936

DOI

10.3030/891936

Projet clôturé

Date de signature de la CE 17 Avril 2020

Date de début 1 Février 2021

Date de fin 2 Octobre 2024

Financé au titre de

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Coût total

€ 253 052,16

Contribution de l’UE

€ 253 052,16

Coordonné par

RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RACELAND (Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation)

Période du rapport: 2023-02-01 au 2024-01-31

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

RACELAND examines how exploitation and entanglement upheld the racially segregated "Jim Crow" society of the US South. Southern segregationists not only exploited (and destroyed) human beings, but also the environment — human and natural resources were systematically mined to uphold the ecosystem of Jim Crow apartheid. This resource extraction happened through geopolitics and the entanglement with industries and commercial activities that were not always explicitly racial in nature, for instance the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Europe, oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean sugar trade, the development and application of pesticides and herbicides, and the digging of canals. The overall objective of RACELAND is to understand how racialized social systems work, how they affect the environment, humans, and other-than-humans on the local and global level, and how they manage to stay alive.

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.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

The RACELAND project started in the middle of the pandemic, in February 2021. Travel restrictions and COVID measures were still in place, which made it impossible to go to the US. Until the summer of 2021 I worked remotely, with researchers from the University of Mississippi. Together we studied and discussed scholarly publications from a wide variety of disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, geography, and history. The reading and discussion sessions formed an important basis for the development of the theoretical and methodological framework of RACELAND. A work-in-progress presentation (with a focus on the concept of toxic masculinity) for the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Groningen was also useful in that respect. I did another (online) talk at Tilburg University for students of the Global Law program, about the history of police violence in the US. With regard to public outreach, I built a website with Square Space about my research (www.racelandproject.com) and created an Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/racelandproject/). In the summer of 2021 I submitted a first draft of an article for a special issue of The Global South journal on the Plantationocene and participated in a symposium on Hinterlands organized by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (the Netherlands) and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg (South Africa). This symposium formed the basis for a peer-reviewed chapter in an open-access edited volume on Planetary Hinterlands, which will come out in August 2023 with Palgrave Macmillan. With colleagues at the University of Groningen I set up an anti-racism workgroup that led to the organization of the Decolonize Hub, an initiative to address racialized prejudice in education and the university (https://www.rug.nl/let/decolonize-hub/).

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.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

From a scholarly perspective, the goal of RACELAND is to develop a new conceptual framework to study racial segregation from a transnational and environmental perspective. This framework derives inspiration from various disciplines, in particular cultural and historical geography and environmental humanities. Using concepts such as the Plantationocene, racial ecologies, counter-plantation projects, the metabolic rift, and multispecies justice, I aim to create a better understanding of how in particular racialized large-scale agriculture economies impact people and nature on global scales. As such, RACELAND is not just interesting for academics, but it is also very relevant for the world outside academia, considering the pressing issues that are central to the project: environmental degradation, racialized exploitation, the political threats of authoritarianism, and species loss, but also attempts to counter such destructive tendencies with grassroots sustainable action. Through conferences, public lectures, interviews with various media (e.g. newspapers, radio), podcasts, scholarly articles, investigative journalism pieces, online outlets (YouTube, project website, and project Instagram account), and teaching, I will disseminate the results of RACELAND to a wide-ranging and varied audience, both in Europe and the US.

Stockpiles of sugar cane in Raceland, Louisiana (NARA 1973)