Berkeley Talks: Reconsidering Black America’s relationship to the plantation

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

(Music fades out)

Michael Mark Cohen: Good. All right. Hi, everyone. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Welcome to what is the official launch of the Banned Scholars Project here at African American Studies Department of UC Berkeley. Thank you all for being here. It’s a real pleasure to see you all. My name is Michael Mark Cohen. I’m an associate teaching professor in American studies and African American Studies.

I’m going to kick things off for us, and I just want to begin with our land acknowledgement, which is to say that we join you today from the campus of UC Berkeley, sited on the territory of the xučyun, the ancestral and unseated land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution’s founding in 1868. We acknowledge and pay respect to Muwekma Ohlone ancestors, people today and the Muwekma Ohlone future to come.

One way to make concrete such acknowledgements is through the payment of Shuumi Land Tax, a material way for non-Indigenous peoples living in the East Bay to participate in the repatriation of land to indigenous peoples. With this in mind, the Department of African American Studies began a practice of giving Shuumi quarterly to the indigenous women-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban land trust founded in 2012 with the goals of returning traditionally Chochenyo and Karkin lands in the San Francisco Bay Area to indigenous stewardship and cultivating more active reciprocal relationships with the land. You can find more information on Shuumi land tax at the sogoreate-landtrust.org.

Now just to begin with the Banned Scholars Project, so I’ve already … Again, I’m Michael Cohen. I’m the co-director of the Banned Scholars Project, along with my fabulous colleagues, Nikki Jones, Professor Ula Taylor and Tianna Paschel. The Banned Scholars project was conceived in the face of the current wave of bans on DEI, African American Studies, ethnic studies and women and gender studies education in public universities by right-wing state legislatures across the nation in states like Florida, Texas, Utah  and Indiana. Funded by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, this project was inspired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ claim, the speech announcing that banning the DEI programs and ethnic studies teaching in Florida, that students interested in critical race theory or gender studies should, in his words, go to Berkeley.

Now while we appreciate the governor’s endorsement of our campus, its ongoing influence in these fields and Berkeley’s legacy as a bastion of free speech rights, it clearly comes as an open threat, not just to the teaching of race and gender in Florida, but also to public higher education nationwide. After all, Ron DeSantis is not the first politician, nor will he be the last, to attempt to follow Ronald Reagan’s footsteps by riding a hatred of all things Berkeley into higher office.

And while Ron DeSantis failed in his attempt to turn his war on woke into a serious presidential bid, I blame the shoes, the national drive to ban these essential fields continues to spread across the nation. In the face of this obvious existential threat, not just to these specific and vital fields, but to the entire project of academic freedom and free speech at the public university, our campus leadership has remained inexplicably silent.

From a certain entrepreneurial point of view, Ron DeSantis’ backhanded compliment to Berkeley was easily the greatest missed opportunity for fundraising in Cal’s recent history. Nevertheless, if our campus leadership cannot show a fundamental commitment to defending the public purpose and public good of the public university, then it must fall to us. After all, it is we, principally the inhabitants of the fifth and sixth floor of this building, who do the teaching in this dangerous and increasingly banned field. We are the ones who are explicitly under attack.

Oh, and I am already starting this presentation. And we believe, as this grant affirms, that to be part of the public university must be to defend the public university and that it is our common responsibility to advocate for our students, to defend for the diversity of our staff and faculty and to stand for the greater civic good embodied by African American studies and public higher education in general.

The Banned Scholars Project is an attempt to push back against these divisive, racist, sexist and homophobic state policies with the strongest weapon available to us, solidarity. And so we are committed to inviting scholars from around the country who are facing this threat directly, excuse me, in their classrooms, on their syllabi, with their students and in their daily experience on campus.

So today we welcome Alisha Gaines from Florida State University to kick off this ambitious project. Today will feature her innovative and substantial contribution to the field of African American studies as a scholar, but we hope you will also join us here on Friday when we will, same place, same time, Friday at noon, where we will explore explicitly the politics of this moment in a public conversation between Professor Gaines and Professor Robin D.G. Kelley from UCLA. You can learn more about this project by visiting our departmental website, and pay attention because we have big plans to escalate our activities in the fall.

So just a quick round of thank yous, certainly to Alisha Gaines for being our first Banned Scholar and so warmly accepting our invitation, to Brandi Summers, who will be moderating today’s conversation, to Alexandra and Francesca, our graduate student assistants, to our co-sponsors in the Social Science Matrix, to Berkeley English, the Berkeley Geography Departments, who we’re represented today, to the Social Science Matrix and to Eva Seto, who has helped in hosting us, and of course the Department of African American Studies who is capably held by our illustrious Professor Nikki Jones and her incredible staff support of Sandy Richmond and Maria Heredia.

We want to thank the indomitable organizing talents of Barbara Montano, without whom none of this would actually be happening. And we want to thank for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for paying for all of it. And with that I will hand it over to Brandi who will get the formal introduction started. Thank you.

Brandi Summers: Thank you, Michael. So I have the distinct pleasure of introducing Dr. Gaines today. Gosh darn it. This is easy. OK. Sorry. OK. So I’m also moderating the conversation, which really means I’m taking the Q&A portion, so I probably will have questions myself, so I always do, so I’ll probably jump in there as well.

But to begin, Dr. Alisha Gaines is the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of Arts and Science in the Department of English and Affiliate Faculty of African American Studies at Florida State University. She’s also the co-humanities director of the Evergreen Plantation Archeological Field School, yes, in Edgard. Oh, Louisiana. I didn’t know that. She earned a Ph.D. in English and a certificate in African American Studies from Duke University in 2009. From 2009 until 2011, she held a Carter G. Woodson postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, was published with UNC press in spring of 2017.

The project rethinks the political consequences of empathy by examining mid to late 20th and 21st century narratives of racial impersonation enabled by the spurious alibi of racial reconciliation. Black for a Day constructs a genealogy of mostly white liberals who temporarily become Black under the alibi of racial empathy.

Its genealogy includes the magical racial change of a white senator in the 1947 musical Finian’s Rainbow; journalist Ray Springer’s [sic: Sprigle’s] four weeks as a Black man in the south in 1948; journalist and memoirist John Howard Griffth’s, Griffin’s, excuse me, five weeks as a Black man in 1959, also temporary; Grace Halsell’s stunt as a Black woman in Harlem and Mississippi for six months in 1969; and the families of the Sparks and the Wurgels switching race for reality television show in 2006. The project’s epilogue then turns to the cultural nerve struck by the viral media story of Rachel Dolezal, what’s her new name? Nkechi Diallo, excuse me. Nkechi Diallo, a former NAACP chapter president. (Laughs) Right? Who was outed for claiming she was Black and still continues to hold on to that story.

An award-winning educator, her interdisciplinary teaching interests include African American literature and culture, Black theory, media and performance studies, narratives of passing and Black Southern studies. A student of Black South, she is currently working on two book projects, Playing a Slave: Race and Performance in the Transatlantic Imaginary, and secondly, Children of the Plantationocene, which is going to be the subject of her talk today, so everyone please join me in welcoming Dr. Alisha Gaines.

Alisha Gaines: Hello, everyone.

Audience: Hello.

Alisha Gaines: So before I begin, let me say a lot of thank yous. First to Michael Cohen for a jaw dropping invitation to come to UC Berkeley. Like I literally pinched myself. I’m not kidding. To Barbara Montano, I don’t know where, OK, for making this visit absolutely so easy, and to Brandi Summers for that very generous introduction. I’d also like to thank Chair Nikki Jones, the legendary Ula Y.Taylor, Tianna Paschel and the rest of the team behind the Mellon funded Banned Scholars project, the Social Sciences Matrix, as well as the Departments of English and Geography for their support.

I am overwhelmed by the rich legacy of this place, of the sixth floor particularly, and as we give land acknowledgement, so I have to acknowledge the hallowed ground that we’re standing on. This project represents one of the most material demonstrations of solidarity and forceful defense is a public education I’ve ever experienced in my career. So as a temporary refugee from Florida, I’m honored and humbled to be the inaugural Banned Scholar. Thank you.

OK. Children of the Plantationocene. Bear with me because this starts off with an anecdote about my grandmother and she just passed in September, so bear with me.

One: “What Grammy and Pops know.”

(Gaines reads from Children of the Plantationocene): My 94-year-old grandmother, AKA Grammy, insists our people come from Virginia, and but maybe Georgia, “andbutmaybe,” all one word. It is the ambiguity of our afterlives indicative of migrations great and small from somewhere to Roanoke, Virginia, from somewhere to Whitesville, Georgia, but maybe West Virginia, but maybe is a dislocation and an unknowing shaping the contours of Black Americanness and its complicated relationship to ideas of home. As nanny told Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, “You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots, and that makes things come ’round in queer ways.” Erasure, shame, violence, anger, myth and amnesia conspire to make strangers.

As Saidiya Hartman claims in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Transatlantic Slave Route, others might call us orphans. Searching for a Black American sense of place, to borrow from Katherine McKittrick, can look like an ancestry report on 23andMe, displaying newly adopted flags from countries never visited or wandering through castles and dungeons on the shores of West Africa amidst touristic declarations of, “Welcome home, brother and sister.”

Arguably, no one searched for a Black American sense of place more famously than Alex Haley looking to name his ancestors. Well, everyone else could do the PowerPoint. I don’t know what you did. OK. That search documented in his 1976 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, fed a deep psychic and cultural need, firstly to reframe narratives around enslavement and secondly, that ancestry, belonging and home could be a knowable possibility.

This is not only evidenced by the text spending 46 weeks on the New York Times bestseller nonfiction list and 22 weeks at number one, but also the Roots universe its popularity birthed from the 1977 television miniseries boasting the record breaking 51.1% of all U.S. homes tuning into the series finale and its staggering 37 Emmy nominations, to the televisual spinoffs, Roots The New Generation, 1979; Roots The Gift, 1988; Queen, 1988; and the 2016 History Channel commissioned remake of the original series.

Haley finding his Gambian ancestor Kunta Kinte inspired a generation’s search to find their own. However, while Kunta occupies a large space in the Black American literary and cultural imagination, the novel is what Haley would call faction, a portmanteau of fact and fiction.

Through the years, historians and literary critics have called Haley out for plagiarism, outright fabrication and impossible-to-corroborate details, so much so that while the text is record-breaking, it fails to be canon-making, left out, as Michael Patrick Hearn points out in the New York Times, of the Norton Anthology of African American literature.

Haley tries to anticipate the critiques from these peer reviewers in the last methodology chapter of his narrative. He writes, “To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American’s families’ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents along with the myriad textual details of what were contemporary Indigenous lifestyles, cultural history and such that gives Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in 50 odd libraries, archives and other repositories on three continents.”

I’m not interested in what is true here. I am much more interested in the kind of factional work, the emotional truth Haley models as necessary to understands one’s place as a Black person who descends from the enslaved in the United States. It is what I call Haley’s apocryphal methodology. This is not to dismiss the disciplinary fact-checking work of history, but to recognize how story can operate in the wake of dehumanization, miseducation and archival erasure.

Just as my grandmother’s “andbutmaybe” tries to conjure a geographical orientation for her four grandchildren and eight great-grands, whether Kunta existed as imagined, he exists as imagined and he exists in many ways on both sides of the Atlantic.

Case in point, in 2011, during the Gambian International Roots Homecoming Festival, a heritage week to attract tourists from the African diaspora, the Department of State for Tourism and Culture renamed St. James Island, a site of African European encounter from the 14th to 20th centuries and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Kunta Kinteh Island, Kinteh with an H.

We see Haley’s factional imagination at work again this time in the posthumously published Queen, the story of an American family based on the life of Queen Jackson Haley, Haley’s paternal grandmother, a white-passing woman born the daughter of her enslaver, James “Jass” Jackson III, and an enslaved woman named Easter.

Haley, in collaboration with David Stevens, writes, that Jass had a slave mistress was one thing. That he would now have a slave child, Queen, was something else. It happened everywhere. They were called children of the plantation, a euphemism for bastards got by their white massa, and you saw them running around, coffee-colored replicas of their sis who had no real place in either world. Sometimes paternally shunned and despised, or more often ignored. Sometimes taken in by their white families, they still had no expectation of a future other than slavery. Often they were despised by the Black communities. Slaves and Black, they were also something else, something apart, something separate and different.

The euphemism described here, children of the plantation, is apocryphal. Wikipedia, for example, has a separate entry on the phrase, but no historical record beyond Haley’s citation. However, beyond just the bastards of the novel, I argue the phrase still names a useful way to think about what we inherit in the afterlives of slavery.

The recent increase in popular cultural representations of contemporary Black folk being forced back on the plantation or found still on the plantation well after emancipation, and here I’m thinking of films like Alice, starring Keke Palmer. It’s terrible. Antebellum with Janelle Monáe, and the Hulu adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred signals a sociopolitical anxiety about what could really be at stake by attempts to make America great again. It is an alleged greatness requiring the free extraction of labor from Black bodies.

I would argue as important as re-imaginings of West Africa are to Black placemaking, so too is excavating and reconsidering Black America’s relationship to the plantation.

Do I need to say it? That relationship is complicated. After the world witnessed Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd, sparking our Black Spring and its subsequent whitelash, plantations are a more contested site in our sociopolitical imaginary than seemingly ever before.

In August, 2020, MacArthur Genius, an award-winning historian of enslavement, Tiya Miles, asked in the Boston Globe, “What should we do with plantations?” There were a couple of responses. For example, in May, 2021, Travel Noire, it’s like a digital media platform basically aimed at millennials, published an article entitled “Kirk Brown: The Black Man Shifting the Glamorization of Plantation Homes.” In it, Brown, a Virginia native, describes his 30th birthday trip to Louisiana. Quote, “I wanted to dig deeper into plantation culture. It’s almost like the ancestors were speaking to me. I visited the Whitney Plantation Museum during my trip and I was moved to tears.” End Quote.

When Travel Noire posted the article on the platform formerly known as Twitter, it quoted Brown’s concluding challenge with an added query: “I challenge other Black American travelers to visit at least one plantation home to just absorb it. Get a feel for your history. It does something to you and awakens the conscience. TN fam, have you ever visited a plantation?”

Reactions from the fam were swift and negative and overwhelmed with iconic gifs visualizing their emotions. Michael Jordan was crying. Bugs Bunny was saying no in his cartoonish way. Shannon Sharpe of Club Shay Shay fame pursed his lips and shook his head.

@jelanijames5 tweeted a more emphatic solution to Brown’s invitation to visit a plantation. Quote, “I’d rather burn them all down.” That provocative suggestion received as of this writing 647 likes. The article itself, only 341. With similar resentments, artist and actor Jill Scott went on a plantation tour during summer 2020 while filming on location. While she didn’t want to burn it down, like Twitter’s Jelani, she had other ideas and I’ll let her tell it. Uh oh. I’ve lost the audio. Oh, there it is.

(Gaines plays a video of Jill Scott speaking to the camera): To a plantation. I didn’t know how I was going to feel when I saw it because I actually never saw one before, but we pulled up and I noticed the beautiful trees, and I noticed as we got closer this beautiful white building and there were people walking all around and taking pictures and sitting on the porch in a rocking chair. Sipping lemonade. So pretty. So I decide, I’m going to take the tour. All right. I’m here. Let me take the tour. So I take the tour and they’re walking through the parlor and talking about how they would host guests and serve brandy and tea and have conversation and music would be played and everybody’s going, “Oh no, no, no. Don’t touch the furniture.” And we went through the dining room and all the mahogany chairs and the chandeliers, things such that had to have candles, candle lit, and the draperies and the carpets.

And we go upstairs and we see the bedrooms and how tidy things were expected to be. And then we get back downstairs and oh, I forgot about the, what do you call them? Slop jars? And the lady shows us a picture. It was a bunch of pictures on the wall and she says, “Notice how no one really smiled back then?” And I looked at those faces and I decided that I was going to get away from this tour and take my own little trip. So I did, and I don’t know what happened, but somebody took a long, hot piss on that dining room carpet. I bet whoever it was wishes they had more piss. They make these places into bed and breakfasts that people come from around the world to stay in. They offered me the slave quarters. Oh, oh, oh, it’s remodeled. It’s beautiful. I bet you wouldn’t be going to no bed and breakfast at Auschwitz. Chew on that.

Alisha Gaines: Well, I’m not going to co-sign protests by peepee. Jill’s anger is a valid response to the nostalgia and miseducation operating at the site she visited. OK. And what she describes is very typical, and I say that as someone who’s taken roughly 25 to 30 plantation tours throughout the Southeast, from the river parishes of Louisiana to Savannah and Thomasville, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina, Jacksonville, Florida, Tallahassee, Florida and the iconic spring pilgrimage of Natchez, Mississippi.

Most plantation museums still venerate whiteness at the downplaying or outright erasure of the Black folk who built the cherished big house. As they protect the furniture, writing myths about their own inheritances, who protects the memories of the people who lived and labored in those now beautifully gentrified cabins?

This disregard prompts us to consider Christina Sharpe’s question in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. What does it mean to defend the dead? Understanding the tangled affect of registers of anger, grief and shame animated at these sites for descendants of the enslaved. Sharpe begins to answer that question, insisting that defending the real, fictive and socially dead requires a real uncovering of the remaining present and presence of the histories of slavery on contemporary Black life.

“How does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still?” she asks. Her answer is a theorization of the afterlives of slavery through the promiscuous metaphor of the wake. For Sharpe, the wake includes, quote, “The keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something in the line of flight and or sight, awakening and consciousness.”

Through the wake, Sharpe contextualizes the sobering fact of Black life in the United States, that the project of emancipation is unfinished. In the unfolding of afterlives and aftermaths, Sharpe asks we acknowledge our unfreedom and engage in what she calls “wake work.”

Wake work acknowledges the precarity of freedom in this country while insisting freedom dreaming, to borrow from Robin D.G. Kelley, can and should be an epistemological practice. This is a practice I would insist and not a theoretical exercise. I say this from experience.

As some Black folk rage at the idea of visiting one plantation and others plotted or performed property damage, I was, and this is where Black English is helpful because I struggle to say living, so I’ll say in our vernacular, I stay on a plantation. Here I don’t mean I stay on land once associated with monocropping and forced labor whose histories are now only indexed by cookie cutter subdivisions like Plantation Oaks in Tallahassee, the former cotton seat of Florida. I mean I literally work, sleep, eat and stay on an antebellum plantation.

Seated on the West Bank of the Mississippi River in Edgard, Louisiana, is a marvel of architectural and historical preservation. No, I’m not talking about the white columned neoclassical big house facing the Mississippi River with its cascading double staircase and stately wrought iron gate. If you’ve seen the films Django Unchained, Antebellum, Roots 2, Will Smith’s Emancipation and or The Free State of Jones, you’ve seen that house. Even if you haven’t seen those films, you can easily imagine that house, and you’ll have to because I refuse to show its image. Evergreen Plantation is a still working sugar cane farm situated in St. John the Baptist Parish. Established in the late 18th century, it is the most intact plantation in the Southeast.

Boasting the highest historic designation available, the property is complete with 37 Antebellum buildings, including two big houses, two pigeonniers, two garconnières, stables, a privy and a kitchen, as well as the original agricultural acreage. It stages the iconography of what we want, dare I say, need a plantation to look like, which is why it’s a darling of the film industry. Hollywood loves that house because America’s sense of itself. Our national mythos loves that house and ones just like it.

Instead, what I find marvelous lives roughly half a mile behind that house, down a crushed oyster shell road shaded by an oak alley. Twenty-two original all-still-standing cabins that once housed generations of the enslaved and their descendants from the 1830s to the 1940s. Configured symmetrically with porches facing each other, the cabins are built in the double row double pen style originating in Haiti, meaning they’re essentially one room duplexes with like a double hearth fireplace in the middle. So two hearths, one chimney. And then they’ve got five to six people, strangers and family, housed on each side of the duplex.

The first time I visited those cabins in summer 2021, I was asked to hold a reverential silence as we walked through the quarters. This was to call attention to the sacredness of the place, structural remnants of a neighborhood unlike anywhere else in existence in the U.S. Southeast. The cabins testify to the village of Black folk who stayed there, labored there and made them a home, as well as the resilience of the direct descendant community who can factually and not just factually claim it as part of their own origin story.

Evergreen is a complicated place, admittedly one that has changed my own sense of place and self. It is confounding. It’s beautiful. It’s haunting. It’s haunted. It’s horrible. It’s magical. It’s disgusting. But when I walk its grounds, I wonder if it could be an andbutmaybe of my own, an emotional truth, an incorrect answer to what my grammy both knows and speculates. My visit was not part of a plantation tour. I was consulting on an archeological survey that would eventually become the Evergreen Plantation Archeological Field School, or EPAFS.

The quarters has and will continue to be the force of EPAFS’ work. Excavating near the cabins has taken place over the last three summers in the plantation to plant ecological disaster zone, known by two interrelated monikers, the heritage tourism branding of Plantation Country, and the sickening branding of Cancer Alley.

During my first residential summer, I learned to surface excavate as I pulled shards of glass, pottery, Civil War era bullets, buttons and chainlink out of the ground. The artifacts recovered offered me the opportunity to suture my own training in English and African American studies to the material cultures of the plantation in ways that have deeply transformed my pedagogy, and that summer we realized as a team that Evergreen had a mission beyond the standard one-hour plantation tour typical among the big house museums up and down River Road. There was an opportunity to transform the site into an interdisciplinary and multimodal classroom. We saw it as both an answer to Tiya Miles’ question and wake work, and also a rebuke of the kinds of white supremacist mythmaking failed presidential hopefuls are made of. And it was the boots.

Administered by the Institute for Field Research, EPAFS launched with a full undergraduate and graduate cohort in summer 2023. Unlike some field schools that focus nearly exclusively on the dig, EPAFS is interdisciplinary. Students took a hands-on archeological methods class in the morning, a Black studies course on the plantation in its afterlives with me and a course on the literature of the Afro Gulf South with my colleague from FAMU. As co-humanities director of the program, I insisted our students learn a fuller context for the artifacts found on site.

Another mission of EPAFS is to follow the lead of the local descendant community. For example, as long as anyone can remember, there have been rumors of the existence of a church near the cabins. While the church isn’t on any map of the property, our lead archeologists prioritize these oral histories over the supposed objective truth of the maps.

We invited members of the community, some of which had been born on that plantation and lived in those cabins to tell and show what they remembered. Mr. Simon, called Pops, he’s 90-something years old, he still drives himself. It’s wild. He walked us through the grounds adamant there was a church there in his childhood, and ground penetrating radar proved something was where Mr. Simon indicated.

After days of excavating, the team found not only a brick chimney fall, indicating a former structure, but also a glass candelabra with a mold of a crucified Jesus giving it its shape. And it’s very funny to watch a bunch of scientists yell, “We found Jesus. We found Jesus.” What had once been apocryphal now had its evidence. EPAFS offers a remedy to the current suppression of Black history that has become a feature of this current culture war, and I use that phrase with every bit of hesitation because it does not fully name what it is in actuality, just anti-Black violence.

As an educator at a public university in Florida, I teach African American literature and culture. A 22-minute walk to the Capitol building where a Republican super majority and a despotic governor wages war on women, on queer and trans folks, on immigrants, on teachers, on students, the very notion of education itself, and on us. So when Sharpe asks, “How do we defend the dead?” the import of wake work in this moment becomes clear. Attacks on the dead become attacks on the living.

Two: “What we think we know.”

(Gaines reads from her book): It is not just what we inherit then, but also perhaps what we tolerate, create and sustain. In Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises, Janae Davis and her co-authors use Black geographies to unsettle the Anthropocene and its Eurocentric discourse. They write the Anthropocene suggestion that humanity writ large is responsible for catastrophic environmental change has been the subject of extensive and indispensable critique. Instead it is the notion of Plantationocene that attracts our attention. Initially theorized by Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, but framed in ways ignoring the realities and consequences of racial production, Davis et. al suggest, quote, “The spatial history of the plantation is central to understanding the nature of power in the modern world, highlighting the ways the plantation dynamics have proliferated beyond historical slave agriculture in the Americas.” End quote.

Defined by monocropping, racial hierarchies and attempts to shape the natural world through coercion and control, the Plantationocene names the consequential afterlives of slavery at its enduring permutations and spatial logics, including, I’m citing Clyde Woods here, quote, “Enclosures and reserves, industrial states and mill villages, free trade and export zones, enterprise and empowerment zones, ghettos and gated communities, suburbanization and gentrification, game preserves and tourist resorts, pine plantation and mines and migratory and prison labor.” End quote. The Sharpian unfolding still. So as children of the Plantationocene, how do you defend the dead?

Three: “What saints and prophets know.”

(Gaines continues to read from her book): No one defends the dead like Saint Toni Morrison. Her lyrical novel, A Mercy, published in the most racial, not post-racial, moment of 2008 prefigures the epoch we are calling the Plantationocene, but the signs of its emergence abound throughout the text. It is set in a late 17th century world Morrison describes as, quote, “a mess,” an ad hoc disorganized world the 1705 Virginia slave codes aimed to tidy through acts of dominion and domination at the center of the novel.

Typifying that mess was something akin to but not quite a small family, a mismatched brood all with different investments in and understanding of this American wilderness, including Jacob Vaark, an Anglo Dutch trader tempted by the status afforded by the promises of whiteness and property, along with his contractually obligated, negotiated bride, Rebekka; Lina, a Native woman bought by Jacob; Sorrow, a redheaded white girl most consider strange; and Florens, a Black girl with, quote, “the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady offered to Jacob as payment for a debt.”

Florens opens the novel with a reassurance, quote, “Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you,” before inducting the reader and her hoped-for audience into an ecological literacy.

“Can you read?” she asks. “If a peahen refuses to brood,” I read it quickly, “and sure enough, that night I see a minha mãe standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron. Other signs need more time to understand. Often there are too many signs or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to recall, yet know I am missing much, like not reading the garden snake crawling up to the door saddle to die.” End Quote.

According to Jesse Cohen in Steal Away, Florens defines literacy as the ability to read signs, not necessarily in the sense of the linguistic interplay between sign and signifier, but in the sense of omens and earthly messages what is written onto the natural world.

Florens attempts to read the world around her mostly to understand the people she encounters and the world they all inhabit, particularly because she struggles to understand her relationship to freedom, unfreedom and Blackness without her mother, a minha mãe’s, guidance. Florens believes her mother chose to give her up in favor of an infant son, confusing, as Cohen argues, her own captivity with maternal abandonment.

But Florens wasn’t abandoned by her mother. She was suggested to Jacob to settle that debt in order to save her from the precarity of being a girl child in a family of men, to echo Sophia from The Color Purple, or as she puts it, to be a female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. For a minha mãe, to protect her daughter from that vulnerability, that openness, is the titular gesture Morrison calls a mercy.

Not abandoned, but still orphaned, Florens turns her mother hunger into an obsession with a free Black Blacksmith who did the iron work at Jacob’s never lived in big house. It is to him she tells her story. Although Florens reads expansively in and on the world, as well as more traditionally, since she can both read and write, she still has missing epistemologies.

For example, when tasked with traveling to find the Blacksmith to help save a smallpox-stricken Rebekka, Florens meets a group of workers whose indenture was extended. They are certain their years of debt are over, but the master says no. Florens ponders. He sends them away North to another place, a tannery for more years. I don’t understand why they are sad. Everyone has to work. I ask, “Are you leaving someone dear behind?” All heads turn towards me and the wind dies. “Daft,” a man says. A woman across from me says, “Young.”

Without a language for not just race, but power, Florens cannot distinguish between forced labor and that of someone like her Blacksmith, just as she can’t quite place herself in this burgeoning racial hierarchy. It is not until Florens encounters an overly pious group of Christians, the type that can’t decipher between their own child and a demon, that she experiences a destabilizing shift in her understanding of herself and what the racialized dehumanization of the plantationocene was beginning to rot.

After one of the group declares, “I have never seen any human this Black,” Florens laments. “Each visitor turns to look at me. I’m in danger, as the dog’s head shows. Without touching, they tell me what to do, to show them my teeth, my tongue. They frown at the candle burn on my palm. They look under my arms, between my legs. They circle me, lean down to inspect my feet. Naked under examination, I watch for what is in their eyes. No hate is there or scare or disgust, but they’re looking at me, my body, across distances without recognition.”

She continues: “I am inside shrinking. I climb the streambed under watching trees and know I am not the same. I am losing something with every step I take. I can feel the drain. Something precious is leaving me. I am a thing apart.”

This is Florens’ thingification, the scopic logics withering a Black subject into objecthood in the Fanonian sense of, “Look, a Negro.” He or she becoming a child of plantation, something else, something apart, something separate and different, to again invoke Haley.

And although the ones who investigate Florens for evidence of humanity don’t have a full articulation of race either, they already know how to perform the choreography of difference. As Florens reckons with what she describes as her withering during this traumatic moment of racial consciousness, I linger with her here because of how she can help us imagine and reimagine the legacies of the plantation, particularly for Black America at the very moment it is sharpening into legibility.

For example, wistful for the Blacksmith, Florens lauds his skill. “Your iron work is wondrous to see,” she marvels. “The glory of shaping metal. Your father doing it and his father before him back and back for a thousand years. Your work in the world is strong and beautiful and I think you are also.”

Although readers should take her [inaudible] of the Blacksmith with a grain of salt. When Florens heaps her adoration on him, she urges us to reframe our relationship to the generations of Black artisans, free or not, who labored to create these plantation landscapes, from agricultural and structural engineering to iron work, child rearing, masonry, farming, brickmaking, carpentry, cooking, baking. I could go on and on and on. The truth behind plantation labor is one of expertise and craftsmanship. Some of those skills were newly acquired, some were forced, and still others were like the Blacksmith and inheritance.

Florens, as a proto-Black American, what the Christians called Afric and much more, she did not learn to be ashamed of the kinds of work people who looked like her were tasked to do. And since we can locate Florens in a moment before certain types of mythmaking, she was not burdened by the dizzying, demoralizing work of reconciling this country’s promise of equality with not just its hypocrisy and failures to achieve them, but its gaslighting insistence that no such reconciliation is necessary.

Although most plantations are steeped in bygone era nostalgia and lost-cause ideologies, like the one Jill Scott pissed in, Florens instructs us to think about the generational legacies of Black makers, recovering the plantation as a site of Black creativity, imagination and placemaking.

But let me be clear. I am not being neither romantic or nostalgic here. In this country, romance sedates and nostalgia kills. Florens is not the only character in the novel helping us see our presence differently. Similarly, her maternal substitute, Lina, the Indigenous woman purchased by Jacob after the bio-terrorism of smallpox destroys her tribe, is trying to understand her place in an already apocalyptic world, upturned by dispossession and violence, and also without the precise language of race.

Instead, Lina makes difference of vocabulary of geography. People are either Europes or not Europes. Both Lina and Florens offer Black and Indigenous ways of knowing and critique, and for Lina, critique begins with a prophecy.

So lengthy quote from Morrison, but it’s Morrison. “Her people had built sheltering cities for a thousand years, and except for the death feat of the Europe’s might have built them for a thousand more. As it turned out, the prophet had been dead wrong. The Europe’s neither fled nor died out.

“In fact, said the old woman in charge of the children, he had apologized for his error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapse from ignorance or disease, more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark, with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative God.

“They let their hogs browse the ocean shore, turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again, cut loose from the earth’s soul. They insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans, they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples.”

Here, Lina understands a central aspect of the Plantationocene’s critique of anthropocentric discourse, that not everyone is equally responsible for the horribleness of this chewed world. “We never shape the world,” Lina tells Florens. The world shapes us. That “we” is instructive, a pronoun indexing who will eventually become the Global South, a recognition that there are those who plunder and those plundered, that we don’t all have the same appetite and we don’t all have the same bite.

Or as Davis et al. write, quote, “The Anthropocene is certainly not the product of human nature or humanity as a whole, but rather interrelated historical processes set in motion by a small minority. This privilege cadre provided the preconditions for the development of global capitalism through processes of either settler colonialization and enslavement organized and rationalized by racism.”

Lina’s insight comes from watching Jacob, who Florens and Lina call Sir, reach desperately for dominion. When Mercy brought Sir and Florens together, Jacob glimpsed Jublio, the kind of big house, like Evergreen, still dominating our current plantation imaginaries. Although he had seemingly no interest in the nascent slave trade, insisting flesh was not his commodity,

Jacob had never seen anything like Jublio. Even after judging it and its owner for being tacky, he still concludes, “So mightn’t it be nice to have such a fence to enclose the headstones in his own meadow, and one day, not too far away, build a house that size on his own property.”

Seduced by what a big house meant in the late 17th century and anticipating what it still means now, Jacob dreamt of a grand house of many rooms, and according to Lina, he was a hurricane of activity laboring to bring nature under his control. More than once when Lina brought his dinner to whatever field or woodlot he was working in, she found him, head thrown back, staring at the sky as if in wondering despair at the land’s refusal to obey him. For all of Jacob’s striving, he never moved into that dreamt-for big house. But in true Morrisonian fashion, his ghost did. As Jacob haunts the edifice of his own ambition, Florens haunts as well.

Four: “What Florens knows.”

(Gaines continues to read from her book): Towards the end of the novel, readers discover what Florens leaves behind. Using a nail, she has carved each of her six first-person narratives woven throughout the otherwise third-person text into the floor and the walls of one of Jacob’s empty rooms in the big house.

Morrison writes, “These words cover the floor. From now on you will stand to hear me. I am holding light in one hand and carving with the other. My arms ache, but I have need to tell you this.” She’s writing to the Blacksmith, but then remembers he can’t read. “You won’t read my telling,” she laments. But rather than be detoured by his illiteracy, she continues to mark the walls with her words, creating what she calls the talking room. While Florens never had the full vocabulary to articulate her racialized experience of captive Black girlhood, she instinctively knew her story was valuable and worth preserving, just as much as the house itself.

She left an archive as if she prophetically knew this country would revere romantic plantation past of magnolia blossoms, paternalistic benevolence and gaudy and antebellum decor. Don’t forget the mint juleps.

When Florens scratches her story into the bones of the Milton mansion, she subverts every effort both then and now to silence it. And unlike the traditional slave narrative, her words were not mediated by white editors, anticipated for white audiences, or constrained by a genre meant to demonstrate how Blackness and humanity could be compatible. Hers was a girl’s story about love and sex and loss and abandonment and many fictions of kinship. And yet Florens also understood that even as it was just becoming legible as such in this historical moment, the plantation could be claimed as a Black space, reimagined as a repository of Black story and placemaking and history instead of just a monument to whiteness and power.

As Florens carves her story, she anticipates the needs and wants of those committed to excavating the archive. On April 26, 2020, National Book Award winner and prolific African American studies scholar, Imani Perry tweeted, “Don’t assume the archives of Black studies don’t exist simply because they haven’t been collected. There is much unculled material in the world. This is still an archeological project.”

What Florens leaves behind is what Black study is in constant search for: traces of our liveness. And while those traces are always tinged by an apocryphal andbutmaybe, if we were to approach the plantation with an intention to hold space for the Black people who stayed and labored there, we might see the plantation as another origin story, one of resistance, joy, love, craftsmanship and survival, and not just dehumanization and the porn of Black suffering.

Perry’s archeological invocation is instructive, pointing to not only the ongoing work of the field of Black study, but also the excavation still necessary to tell the full truth of Black people’s lives, histories and legacies in this country. Importantly, her assertion evidences why the attacks on Black history and Black people are so insidious. As Florens suggests, what our country could have made sacred. We should remember her assurance at the opening of the novel. My telling won’t hurt you. So Governor Ron DeSantis, what are you afraid of? Thank you.

(Applause)

Brandi Summers: OK, everyone. We have 20, yes, minutes for Q&A, and Barbara is going to walk around with the microphone for those who are ready to jump in there. Is anyone ready to jump in there for a question?

Maria: I’m only taking the microphone as the first one because I know there will be so many questions afterwards and I won’t have the chance, but it’s hard. It’s hard to talk after everything that you have shared with us. It’s so inspiring. It’s painful. It’s emotional. My 6-year-old talks about double deep emotions. That’s how I have now.

I recently attended … Sorry. I’m Maria. I’m from the School of Education and I don’t know why this room is not full of my people here. I don’t understand. I’ll make sure more people come on Friday because we have to be part of this conversation. We have to work together. And I was in a room full of educators in March. These are people from the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation, and there was a lot of conversation around, and the conversation was mostly led by white women talking about the backlash and how hard it is.

And then when Black women took over the mic, they started saying, “Yes, but we knew. Yes, but this has happened before.” And what they shared that in their context in Florida or Texas, and they are the ones staying. The ones moving away saying, “I cannot deal with this,” and protesting, I’m using … Like leaving as a sign, as protest, it’s along racial lines.

And so I wanted to ask if you have seen that in your spaces, if there is a new conversation about allyship. And you talk about the solidarity, like this being a space of solidarity. How do you see that moving forward? What else is there to do to contest and to resist, but to really resist, because to just leave, that’s not resistance, really. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Alisha Gaines: Maria. Thank you for your question. It’s a good one. It’s one I think about a lot in Florida. I am losing colleagues left and right. And for many, for all the related reasons, right? All Florida-related reasons. But some are leaving academia. Some are just, they’re not leaving for other jobs is what I’m saying, and so to me that is a sign of exhaustion and not being prepared for this fight, and it’s not exactly on racial lines, but not one Black colleague has left in my department, if that says something.

And so of course we’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. Black education in this country has always been, to quote Jarvis Givens, “a fugitive pedagogy.” And so we have to think of alternative spaces when the state is telling us what we can and can’t teach, and I’m teaching illegally in Florida at this point.

It’s not just what you teach, but how you teach it in Florida, and so that’s why Evergreen was a weird answer to this problem because we were unfettered by the state and could write our own curriculum. It didn’t go through FSU. It went through a nonprofit so they couldn’t take it from us. I think there’s been models to use before, models like Freedom Schools and things like that.

I think we have to think expansively about public education, not just happening in gorgeous spaces like this, but in the places where we’re meeting people, to use that quote, “on the ground.” And I think as far as the allyship and solidarity piece, it’s a big question. I have a lot of colleagues who anything, any Florida thing that comes up, they’ll send me the article with big caps that say, “You’ve got to leave right now.” And while leaving is something to do, it is, staying is also something to do, and thinking about standing with each other rather than turning your back on Florida.

I think to turn your back on the Black South is at your own peril, to be honest, because that’s where the most freedom dreaming has ever been done in this country. So we dream again and again and again. Thank you.

Brandi Summers: Welcome, and please tell your name and where you’re coming from.

William: My name’s William. I’m a Ph.D. student in geography. Thank you so much for your talk. As you were speaking, I had two questions and I think I’m going to edit the order of which I was originally going to ask them.

The first was about, as you were speaking, I was thinking about plantations and I was thinking, well, I’m a historian of the slave trade, and one of the things you learn is that the conditions of the enslaved largely depend on the type of crop they were farming. You compare sugar to cotton, for instance, and I was thinking about the sugar plantation because it had both the agricultural aspect and the factory aspect. It’s like C. L. R. James called them the first modern subjects. Right?

So thinking about in terms of the children of plantation, what does it mean to compare, say, a cotton plantation where you could have lineages of families to sugar plantation, which because of the way they were farming, people have an average life expectancy of like seven years, so it meant people weren’t having kids in there and the kids weren’t growing up there. They were just being worked to death. And so I think then that in terms of Black and place, I think it changes that dynamic, right, of actually having kids on the ground versus perpetually kind of feeding through.

And the second thing you were speaking about is I recently started reading Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman, and I was reading the first two chapters and I found it really funny. Like I found it like a satire. She talks about going to Ghana and expecting this grounding, this whimsical, lovely, radical experience. She gets there and they all make fun of her. They call her a stranger. She realized she doesn’t fit and she realizes all of those radical ideals she had doesn’t quite work on the ground.

And so I’m thinking as you are going through those tours of the plantations, as you were thinking about, I’m thinking about the Great Migration, I’m thinking about class, I’m thinking about people coming from the northern cities back to the South, quote unquote, “to visit the plantations.” Do you see those similar dynamics there? Do you see people, as you mentioned, looking for nostalgia, looking for a past, but feeling like an outsider?

Alisha Gaines: That last question is a great one. So when I’m on these plantation tours, and I’m always by myself. My partner’s like, “Absolutely not.” I am largely on plantation tours with white women, overwhelmingly so, and it is, and I’m not trying to be romantic about this at all. Some of these tours are so terrible, I’ve had full panic attacks on some of these plantations because the history is so disrespectful at best, outright lies at worse. And so often the white women on these tours are looking for, how do I say this? They’re trying to imagine themselves as Scarlett O’Hara. I’m so serious. I’m so serious. I’ve witnessed people literally sitting on the rocking chairs on the porch like, “Can’t you imagine?” And then turning to me and be like … Right?

And not every plantation does this, but so the Whitney Museum, for those of you haven’t been there. It’s in Louisiana. Go there. It does not stage the big house. It focuses on the history of the enslaved. But McLeod Plantation in South Carolina does this as well. But most of them are giving you lost cause, old South, this kind of nostalgic thing.

I went to Oakley House Plantation in Mobile, Alabama. This was just two weeks ago. I spent my spring break. Yeah. I need to sleep. Anyway, I spent my spring break and it was high school girls doing the plantation tours in full skirts, and the young woman who was the docent never said the word “slavery” ever. There was a brickmaking operation on that plantation, and when someone asked who built the house, she said the owner and some helpful artisans. So there’s a lot of bad history. There’s a lot of false narratives. There’s a lot of pretending that these are just pretty houses at a lot of these plantations.

And then your first question, which is about the different types of crops grown and how that changes the relationship to the space. That’s a really good one. I find it’s interesting in Louisiana, because it’s primarily sugar and because of the history of those parishes and because they’re Catholic, they just have better records.

So direct descendants, even though the toil is different, they have an archive that most of us don’t have access to because those who were baptized in the church were recorded in the church. So I have to think more about how cotton and sugar produce a different type of placemaking, but the placemaking still exists, the records are still there, and the descendants and the families still claim those spaces as their own. Thank you for your question, William. I have room for a follow-up. Yeah, go ahead, William.

William: I’m just double checking with a moderator. I think one of the most powerful things you mentioned also had a conjunction in it. You mentioned when you went back to the Evergreens Plantation and you were speaking to one of the elders and they were saying they remembered there being a church there, right? And then you mentioned also that you then used ground radar or LIDAR, and you found there was remnants and you found this piece. And for me, that was an important conjunction because if you didn’t find anything, it wouldn’t have nullified that story.

Alisha Gaines: Absolutely.

William: And so I think within it, as you were speaking, I was thinking about this distinction between this material history, right, archeology, and the kind of, not just poetics and literary, but like oral histories. It didn’t matter. They could have found not a single thing in that field …

Alisha Gaines: Yes, absolutely.

William: And that church was there because he said so.

Alisha Gaines: Absolutely. I completely agree with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I completely agree with you, and I was having that conversation with the archeologist, because he kept saying, “What do we need to find to prove?” And I was like, “Um, Mr. Simon is right here.”

Brandi Summers: Right, right, right.

Alisha Gaines: And then I realized the ancestors are not subtle, and so literally it took Jesus for the scientists to be like, “OK, it was a church,” When all the rest of the humanities side of the team, not to denigrate our STEM folks, but the humanities side of the team were like, “We have the evidence.” Right? Mr. Simon is the evidence, but it took Jesus for the scientists to believe it, to be honest. Yeah. But I agree with you.

Brandi Summers: Other questions? Was your hand up? No? Oh. Introduce yourself, please.

Stephen Best: Hi. My name’s Stephen Best. I’m a professor in the English department here. That was really wonderful talk, so thank you so much. Like I said, I think I have a bunch of questions, but the thing I really wanted to mention first or foreground is that Christina Sharpe quote. It reminded me of, we had Barry Jenkins here a few weeks ago. Oh, Brandi? Yeah, Brandi. Brandi interviewed him for one of the … and one the films he showed was this film called The Gaze. Have you seen it?

Alisha Gaines: I have not.

Stephen Best: Oh, you need to try to see it. So when he was making the Underground Railroad, I don’t remember Brandi, you might remember where the location of the filming of the Underground Railroad, he ended up making a film of all the Black, what do you call them, on plantation?

Alisha Gaines: Like historical interpreters?

Stephen Best: Yeah.

Brandi Summers: Oh, the reenactors?

Stephen Best: The reenactors, like the Black, and it’s just the Black reenactors, and the film’s called The Gaze, and it’s about of them looking at the camera. It’s the most lyrical and beautiful piece I’ve seen in a long time.

So I just sort of feel like it is the topic that you shared with us today of Barry Jenkins, what he felt his responsibility was in terms of the plantation. Right? Just representing. It’s non-narrative. The film is entirely non-narrative, and it’s just shot after shot of these kind of Black people looking back at the screen, and I just think it’s textually so in sync with what you’re doing, so I just wanted to mention that. And I mean, I had another thought about the land acknowledgement and the university as a plantation, but …

Alisha Gaines: Yeah. I put a plantation acknowledgement in my email signature now, and it’s only because it’s after being on Evergreen. So it’s the university’s land acknowledgement, and then I add something like, and the seizure of those lands enabled the conditions for the exploitation of the Black folks who lived and labored on the 73 plantations in Leon County, which is where Tallahassee is.

Stephen Best: Seventy-three.

Alisha Gaines: Seventy-three plantations in a very small county. And Barry Jenkins is also a FSU grad. Yeah. So I wonder if he’s thinking about there is no land that is not plantation land.

Stephen Best: … That is not plantation land. Yeah.

Alisha Gaines: Yeah.

Stephen Best: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alisha Gaines: Yeah.

Brandi Summers: I’m glad you brought that up actually, because even with the Underground Railroad, the portraits that he talked about, I don’t know how many of you have seen the series Underground Railroad, but there are several scenes where you just have the actors staring into the camera, and again, it’s silent and they’re just looking. Their faces are still, and so the silence actually is what’s most powerful in the series itself, and then also with The Gaze. It’s that silence and staring back, so it would actually … Is there another question, because I … OK. No, go ahead. I’ll talk about more afterwards. Please. Please.

Tafari: Hi. My name’s Tafari. I’m a student here in African American Studies and Gender and Studies. Yay. I’m a former professor over there, too. Yay. I want thank you so much for this entire, just all of the thinking, many notes.

Last year, last May, I had a trip down to New Orleans for a conference that my school was taking a part in, and we had this artist in residency, this Indigenous photographer-in-residency, and she insisted the importance of doing a plantation visit to know the history. I could get into that, but I won’t here.

But we went to Whitney Plantation and that was probably one of the most embodied moments that I had felt history tangibly, just immediately just turning onto the land. But I wanted to ask, in that experience there was, even though it’s like one of the places that does it more right, like does more justice to that history and talking about the actual people on the land, there were still times where I had problems, critiqued so many just things where I’m like, “OK, this is what doing it justice looks like, but why am I still so viscerally upset?”

And I was wondering, and I think you’ve given a really amazing framework, in terms of talking about In the Wake and Christina Sharpe and these kind of freedom dreamings and imaginings, and I wanted to ask, I guess, in all of the visits that you have done to plantations, what would that look like? And this might be too big of a question to answer. What would that look like if we were able to reframe, like if you could make something, go like, “This is what the history that actually needs to be talked about. These are the people that actually need to be talked about. This is entirely how we reframe the narrative around describing a plantation,” and having someone visit that space in terms of Black creativity?

Alisha Gaines: A great question. I’m not surprised by your reaction at Whitney. I’ve been there many times and always have that same reaction and I have tons of critiques, even though they’re doing it better. It’s the statue of the kids in the church for me. They all have the same face. Anyway, we can chat.

OK, so this is actually a question that I am actively trying to think about, and I just got a grant to do so, working with … It’s a community research partnership grant, working with one of the organizations that sponsors the Field School, which is the Descendants Project out of Wallace, Louisiana. And what they want to do, and I’m simply funneling resources. This is their thing. They’re the ones living in Plantation Country, Cancer Alley. They live in between Evergreen and Whitney, which is owned by the same family.

So they are direct descendants of both of those plantations, and they are trying to put together a rubric of best practices so that plantations in those river parishes can earn the designation of a Descendants Project-approved tour, meaning that you can walk through that tour and not have a freaking panic attack because of how horrible your people are being talked about or literally ignored or erased. So Whitney is doing it better. Whitney’s not doing it perfectly. I don’t think any site will ever do it perfectly, but there are folks on the ground in that place trying to work on this question, and I’m just giving them FSU money to do so. Yeah, the rubric will be determined by the residents of St. John and St. James Parish.

Brandi Summers: So we’re winding down. Yeah, a couple minutes, so I get to go. So actually, I wanted to encourage you, if you haven’t been over to the Art Museum, BAMPFA, there’s a new exhibit now and there’s a particular piece, it’s a film by Allison Janae Hamilton, and it’s called A House Called Florida. She’s from Florida. All her work is focused on Florida. And Al uses this piece to think about the ghosts and how they’ve essentially come and rearranged things in the home, but also environmental and ecological degradation. So the thing about considering plantations is that different disciplines do this kind of archeological work differently.

So if you come and have architects, they’re going to look at it in terms of the materials that were used. Landscape architects might have a different take, thinking about literature and English understanding of the novel. Black studies is able to encompass I think a lot of that work, but really kind of answer and deal with that question. You can pull apart the house, right? You can pull apart the land, and also consider how toxicity and thinking about the industrialized world or the modern world came to impact the home and the land as well.

And so that’s why it’s like I’ve been so interested. My family’s from Louisiana, but not from that Cancer Alley area, but there are areas that are of course being taken over by the petrochemical industry and pushing out these free Black towns, or at least what used to be free Black towns and completely saturating the land. And though it’s not where plantation stood or stand, it still has that kind of resonance as we’re thinking about loss, but also ghosts. I’m just totally into ghosts. So rather in terms of life and living, it’s also the undead, or thinking about the traces that you were mentioning can still exist. The chemical doesn’t kill the ghost. The storm doesn’t kill the ghost. Gentrification doesn’t kill the ghost.

So there might be these ways to capture all of it, while again taking cues from different disciplines and how they understand the structure and the space that I think would go beautifully. I’m not giving you suggestions. It’s just like that’s what’s helped. I love what you’re doing and that’s what I thought about the whole time while you’re talking. So anyway. Yeah. No, no problem. Well, can we put our hands together and warmly thank Dr. Alisha Gaines for coming? Thank you. Wonderful. And we’re right on time.

(Applause)

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