This article assesses Jarvis C. McInnis’ book Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (2025) with reference to disciplinary developments in U.S. southern studies, Black studies, and American studies. Between 2001 and the late 2010s, the “new southern studies” sought to revitalize American studies by insisting on the Black South’s centrality to the U.S. nation and to transnational (especially hemispheric) models of Black modernity. Afterlives of the Plantation builds on but comes after the new southern studies. McInnis’s remarkable book elucidates the pedagogical, political, and cultural links between the U.S. Black South and the Global Black South by focusing on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, as well as authors including Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston. The article concludes by reflecting on related writing about the U.S. Black South vis-a-vis Denmark. Washington’s account of his 1910 visit to Denmark compares “the Danish peasant” to “Negro farmers in the Southern States,” while Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928) takes place partly at Tuskegee (fictionalized as Naxos) and partly in Copenhagen. Here McInnis’ generative emphasis on Tuskegee’s relationship to the Global Black South can be extended across the (Black) Atlantic.
Exploitation and degradation, of land and people, have long been tied to crop cultivation under western, and now global, capitalism. It has been difficult to disaggregate this exploitative relation from the sustaining and balanced activity of cultivation that is necessary to human, animal, plant, and planetary survival. This essay attends to how historical shame and class prejudice influence resistance to cultivation and considers eco-ontological approaches to land relation that eschew the logics of chattel enslavement and capitalism, insisting instead on balanced futures. It highlights the intra-racial, interregional class distinctions between urban and rural that have animated Black communities’ conversations about our relationship to land and exploitation for generations before and after the colonial encounter. The essay argues for the purging of shame and the choosing of our mother, the earth, in our continued strivings towards self-determination and liberation.
Throughout his corpus, Fred Moten insists on a unique temporality: sociality is always primary, both temporally and logically. Power arrives to individuate this primary sociality, dividing it into subjects, but it survives fugitively as a struggle against power. At numerous points in their work, Judith Butler also posits sociality as primary, but with a crucial difference: power's arrival enacts a totalizing constitutive force onto subjects, erasing any possibility of accessing the sociality that preceded and gave life to both power and subjects. This essay elaborates on this fundamental temporal disagreement between two of today's most influential critical theorists.
This introduction lays out the program undertaken by the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness project (CCDGB) at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute. Underway since 2022, the project has invited key speakers to converse with the Duke University community on the contexts and impact of climate change, embedding its understanding within the long durée history of global development engineered and sustained through 500 years of ongoing colonial modernity and modernization as the principal pathways to progress and development. CCDGB’s three interrelated critical themes allow us to rethink our relation to the planet—its human and more than human inhabitants and ecologies through the optic of its entangled histories, going beyond methodological nationalisms that bedevil analyses and privilege conceptual orientations based on a fictitious sense of separated geographies, topographies, histories and populations. The sample of essays contained here, reflecting the lively presentations and conversations, gesture to the urgency of thinking through notions of nonlinear time and inseparable (re)existences. The offering here gathers only the initial interlocutors of our project, which in the past 3 years has grown into an increasingly expanding intellectual community, but it nonetheless highlights and summarizes the range of themes, topics, questions, and methodologies that continue to guide CCDGB’s varied activities.
In Singapore, children's education is often presented as "an overriding and all-consuming concern," driven by intense competition for grades and school admissions (Waters, 2015: 290). However, the desire for academic excellence as a pathway to better lives is not as straightforward as it may seem. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Singaporean families, this paper explores parents' affective and productive labor in navigating the emerging tensions between aspirations for academic achievement on one hand, and school-life balance and happiness on the other. It examines how parents actively manage these conflicting aspirations, drawing on Lauren Berlant's (2011) concept of "cruel optimism"-a state marked by significant anxiety over the unfulfilled promises of modernity and neoliberalism. This is particularly evident in affective attachments to fantasies of "the good life," such as upward social mobility, job security, or freedom- understood as a "proactive, hopeful affective force that remains open and indeed seeks out possibilities for change" (Sotirin, 2020: 12). In examining how parents resist, (re)negotiate, and even reconcile these ambivalent aspirations regarding their children's education, this paper explores the affective landscape underpinning vigilance and the reconfiguration of upward social mobility.
