Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

“Stuck In‐Between”: Placing the Underdocumented Youth Movement in Georgia

“…So, too, have innovative practices of Black survival and resistance been inseparable from the production of southern spaces”. The US South also remains subjugated to what Clyde Woods (2017:5) called the “plantation bloc”, a “system of social domination [that] has also guaranteed the spread of mass impoverishment, the erosion of human rights protections, and the increased deadliness of daily life”. This regional power bloc attempts a white supremacist future predicated on the survival of historically and geographically specific racial divisions based in exclusionary ideas and exploitative practices (Wilson 2000), expressed as “racial regimes” (Robinson 1983).…”

Against climate apartheid: Confronting the persistent legacies of expendability for climate justice

“…The intersections of racism and capitalism have also been shown to be intertwined systems of exploitation and oppression that lead to the devaluation and dehumanization of certain populations for the benefit of others (see for example Gilmore, 2002;Marable, 1983;Wilson, 1992;Woods, 1998). Cedric Robinson (1983) explained racialism (the idea that humans are naturally divided into races) was central to the process by which capitalism expanded across world regions through colonization, slavery, violence, genocide, and imperialism.…”

Holding Land, Claiming Kin: The Relation Between Race, Land, and Kinship in the Southern US and Barbados

“…Over 2,000 miles away, the southeastern US is similar to Barbados in that the plantation bloc (Woods 1998) shaped the region. Although the southeastern US is socially, economically, and politically diverse, the early formation of the region as a whole was largely governed and structured by systems put in place by large land‐owning plantation owners growing key commodity crops, such as rice, cotton, and sugar, and using enslaved African labour.…”

“…Although the southeastern US is socially, economically, and politically diverse, the early formation of the region as a whole was largely governed and structured by systems put in place by large land‐owning plantation owners growing key commodity crops, such as rice, cotton, and sugar, and using enslaved African labour. They formed an oligarchy that determined the political, economic, and social structures of the region that have continued through several key historical periods and persist today (McKittrick 2011; Woods 1998). Within this region, a subregion called the Black Belt was so termed both because of its rich soils, which supported plantation agrarian enterprises, and high percentage of African American residents as a result of the forced migration of enslaved Africans to this region.…”

“…By embedding ideas of kinship into property, Black landowners used social custom and the legal system to legitimise and protect narratives and lineages, thus resisting and refuting placelessness and social death. As others have demonstrated, land ownership is not just about land, but about building sustainable and just systems free from physical and systemic violence (McCutcheon 2019; Woods 1998). As McCutcheon (2019:211) points out in her discussion of Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms, Hamer’s agrarian vision went beyond a traditional understanding of property ownership to create not necessarily a utopian space, but “rather she seeks to build a humanly and workable geography that is reflective of struggle and the hope that can arise from it”.…”