Toward “Total Freedom”: Black Ecologies of Land, Labor, and Livelihoods in the Mississippi Delta

Carrie Freshour and Brian Williams

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023, vol. 113, issue 7, 1563-1572

Abstract: We ground this article in the uneven geographies of the Mississippi Delta, a region constructed at the intersection of agro-environmental racism and plantation violence, nutrient-rich soil, and dynamic Black geographies. The processes of containment, dispossession, and commodification of life and land were essential to the construction of the region following a particular agricultural and racial development trajectory dominated by what Clyde Woods calls the Plantation Bloc. And yet, strategies and struggles to make life against and outside of these dynamics also took hold of the region. We reconceptualize the Mississippi Black Freedom Movement and the overlapping struggles for land, housing, healthcare, and new forms of work as movements against agro-environmental racism and the making of a place-based environmental justice rooted in Black ecologies. Drawing on Black and abolition ecologies we trace connections across rural Black organizing in cooperative, farm, and catfish processing communities in the Mississippi Delta. By organizing along modes of collective flourishing and against threats to daily life, these movements provide an alternative trajectory to agro-environmental racism and sought to create a place of stewardship and co-operation.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2022.2103501 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:113:y:2023:i:7:p:1563-1572

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2103501

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().