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Publications
Reimagining the Plantation Toward More Liberatory Futures: Strategies in Black Self-Determination
On May 15, 2025, the Nottoway Plantation resort was destroyed by fire. Completed in 1859, Nottoway was a whopping 53,000 square feet with 165 rooms, the largest antebellum mansion in the United States. Of course, such obscene wealth and grandeur depended on the exploitation of 155 Black bondspeople who worked its vast sugar fields. However, the website for the plantation-mansion-turned-forty-room-resort-and-wedding-venue makes no mention of the enslaved.
Afterlives of the Plantation Discussion questions
Access discussion questions prepared by Prof. McInnis for Duke University Alumni
5 questions to consider while reading
1. Throughout Afterlives of the Plantation, I emphasize the importance of Tuskegee’s vision of sustainable and regenerative farming in the aftermath of the abusive, large-scale, and monocrop agricultural practices of the slave plantation. As we confront climate change and other forms of ecological catastrophe today, what lessons can we glean from Tuskegee about becoming better stewards of the earth?
2. What are some other ways the plantation and its practices and logics of human exploitation and ecological extraction persist today? Relatedly, what are some plot logics and ethics that we can use to either repurpose the plantation toward a more just and liberatory future or dismantle it altogether?
3. One of the challenges of racial uplift across the Global Black South was the tension between care and paternalism among the Black elite. Although elite Black people desired to help improve the lives of their working-class counterparts, they sometimes held condescending attitudes toward the Black masses and did not always regard them as co-curators of their own futures. What can we learn from this example about more ethical ways to help those who may be less fortunate? Is there a way to empower and show care for others who do not share our privilege, while respecting them as equals and taking seriously their right to self-determination?
4. Claude McKay honored the experiential knowledge of Black farmers in Jamaica, regarding them as intellectuals of the land. Who are some people in your life who may not be formally educated, but have a wealth of knowledge about their respective industries or areas of expertise? How does this invite you to think differently about the relationship between formal and informal education?
5. Zora Neale Hurston worked to validate Black vernacular culture as dynamic, innovative, sophisticated, and worthy of preservation. In doing so, she challenged the false dichotomy between high and low culture that structures the Western artistic canon. How might Hurston’s approach—her insistence that difference does not connote deficiency—help us to rethink and perhaps disrupt other social and cultural hierarchies that structure our world?
A “Reorder of Things” in Black Studies:
Sacred Praxis, Phono(geo)graphy, and the Counter-Archive of Diaspora
This article examines Erna Brodber's 1994 novel, Louisiana, as a methodological invitation to the field of Black Studies to query how we do the work of black study. A Jamaican social scientist turned novelist, Brodber finds the tools of social science and notions of Western rationality and reason that undergird it insufficient for the unique challenges of recovering a past characterized by violent rupture and irreparable loss. In turn, she takes up fiction to imagine a new method and field of study to fill in the gaps of black diasporic history.
