Afterlives of the Plantation

Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There—and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America—Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures.

Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee’s vision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders—including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey—adapted Tuskegee’s methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil.

Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South

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Reviews

Afterlives of the Plantation is a groundbreaking, brilliant, and paradigm-shifting account of Black modernity that appropriately reconsiders and recenters the Black South as a key vector in understanding the Black world. McInnis mines neglected archives to reroute and reroot 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 South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

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 Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

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 Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century

Afterlives of the Plantation is a magisterial work of cultural analysis, a history of Black modernity that remaps the New Negro movement. With an ambitious history of Tuskegee Institute guiding his study of Black modern print culture, dance and performance, music, film and photography, Jarvis McInnis explains how the industrial education model long considered conservative or accommodationist actually gave shape to experimental projects of regeneration that centered the lives of worldviews of people in the Black south and the global Black south. Seeing Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay through McInnis’s eyes, as students of Tuskegee, allows us to understand the global Black south as “a dynamic geography of contradictions,” a geography in which the plantation was always being turned over. Afterlives of the Plantation is carefully researched and exquisitely written, a gift to a world suffering the ongoing ecological catastrophe that began with plantation slavery.

Erica Edwards, author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire

Afterlives of the Plantation

Reviews

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