Jarvis McInnis (Duke University), “Black Study in the Countryside: Agriculture, Performance, and the Archive” (Black Studies)

Drawing on his new book, Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, Professor McInnis will discuss the Tuskegee Institute as a site of Black study and an early model of Black Studies at the turn of the 20 century. Through the agricultural curriculum, extension program, and George Washington Carver’s innovative research, Tuskegeeans transformed the rural Alabama landscape—degraded by decades of abusive cotton cultivation—into an outdoor classroom and laboratory for cultivating intellectuals of the land, from the student body to the broader African Diaspora. Furthermore, under Booker T. Washington’s leadership, Tuskegeeans 1) assembled and performed a sonic and visual archive that staged the New Negro as at once rural, southern, and sophisticated, 2) produced an archive of data about the challenges, exigencies, and triumphs of Black life and culture in slavery’s aftermath, and, perhaps most critically, 3) worked to disseminate up-todate knowledge and resources to Black folks in the countryside without access to formal education. Ultimately, through Tuskegee, McInnis reflects on the importance of historically Black colleges and universities as progenitors of Black Studies and expands the geography of Black study from the ivory towers of the urban Global North to the regenerated soils of the Global Black South.

 

Lunch will be served.