Jarvis McInnis is an associate professor in the Department of English. (John West/Trinity Communications)
Looking South for the Roots of the Harlem Renaissance: Jarvis McInnis Examines “Afterlives of the Plantation”
Jarvis McInnis, associate professor of English, is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American and African Diaspora literature and culture. His first book, “Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South,” was released by Columbia University Press in May. In it, McInnis rethinks the plantation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a repurposed site of agrarian worldmaking and a critical space for the reimagining of Black futures.
We caught up with McInnis to find out how the repurposed plantation played an important role in Black modernity and what experiences inspired him to undertake this research.
Please tell us about the genesis of this project. What inspired you to rethink the space of the plantation in this way?
The kernel for this book began when I was an undergraduate at Tougaloo College mulling over a conundrum that I could never quite resolve. Like Tuskegee, which is the focus of “Afterlives of the Plantation,” Tougaloo is a historically Black college founded on a former cotton plantation. As I roamed Tougaloo’s hallowed grounds, I tried to reimagine the landscape as it might have looked during the antebellum period: Where had the enslaved people lived? Were there still remnants of their lives buried on campus? Where was the evidence of their existence?
This search for the material afterlives of slavery and the plantation was often bound up with more existential questions. I wondered: What does it mean that I am being educated on the very same grounds where my ancestors were once enslaved? Was repurposing a plantation into a school for newly freedpeople an act of resistance? Was my presence there nearly 150 years after the abolition of slavery a metaphor for the ongoing inequities African Americans face in this country?
We know that after the abolition of slavery, white Americans crafted new modes of racial subjection to prolong African Americans’ second-class citizenship through sharecropping and tenant farming, vagrancy laws and debt peonage, the “prison industrial complex,” land dispossession and lynching. These are the most common ways for understanding how the plantation continued to haunt and restrain Black life materially, juridically and ideologically.
But schools like Tougaloo and Tuskegee point to a different story, a different afterlife of slavery and the plantation, of how Black people transformed and repurposed plantation geographies into something that was much more life-giving.
But schools like Tougaloo and Tuskegee point to a different story, a different afterlife of slavery and the plantation, of how Black people transformed and repurposed plantation geographies into something that was much more life-giving. In short, Tuskegee allowed me to tell a story of global Black Southern resilience and ingenuity against unimaginable odds and to begin answering some of the questions I’d been wrestling with since my undergraduate days at Tougaloo.
How can Black modernity be understood as agricultural and centered in the South, as well as urban and centered in the North?
I argue that Black modernity began in the Global Black South because that’s where enslaved Africans were first “conscripted” into the modern world, to borrow from David Scott: stolen and sold from Africa and transplanted to labor on the plantations of the Americas.
Much of what we associate with modernity began with the colonial plantation system. In his book, “The Plantation,” Edgar Tristram Thompson, a former sociology professor at Duke, put it this way, “The history of the plantation is bound up with the discovery of new lands and the expansion of commerce, with the steamship, the railway and other new means of transportation. It is bound up with the growth of colonies and cities, and of a world market.”
If plantations, however violent and destructive, were among the chief technologies of the modern world order, then the enslaved Black people forced to labor on them to produce agricultural staples for the world market (cotton, sugar, tobacco, rice, etc.), were necessarily modern as well.
In the United States, and often within Black Studies, Black modernity is associated with the political and cultural advancements Black people made after emancipation. And given the barriers to Black freedom and equality in the South that followed the end of Reconstruction through the emergence and codification of Jim Crow segregation, Black modernity has also come to be associated with migration away from the region toward urban, global northern metropoles, such as Harlem and Philadelphia, London and Paris.
As I considered the plantation’s, and thus the Global Black South’s, fundamental modernity, I came to realize — building on the foundational work of numerous Black Studies scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Eric Williams and Sylvia Wynter — that Black modernity began with the slave trade and is both southern and northern, agricultural and industrial and rural and urban. Enslaved Black people forced to perform agricultural labor on the plantations of the Global Black South were conscripted into and treated as the fodder of this modern world, yes, but they were modern nonetheless.
Why do you expand the geography of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement to include the Global Black South?
When I first encountered Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic studies, “Mules and Men” and “Tell My Horse,” I thought: Here is this maverick of a Black woman in the 1920s and 30s traveling between the U.S. South and the Caribbean, theorizing the connections between Black people in the region.
Despite the oppressive conditions of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South and colonialism and imperialism in the Caribbean, Hurston recognized and celebrated Black people’s humanity, intellectual sophistication and aesthetic innovations. She especially validated southern African American vernacular culture as legitimate and argued that it shared important similarities with Afro-Caribbean folk cultural practices.
This completely overhauled how I viewed my home region and made me want to delve more deeply into what it would mean to consider Black modernity from the South as opposed to an exclusive focus on the U.S. and global North. I thought, what if, like Hurston, we (the field of Black Studies) shift our geographic and epistemological focus southward? What new knowledges might emerge?
For instance, the Harlem Renaissance was no doubt singular and important, but where did many of its chief figures hail from? They came from the South and the Caribbean by way of the Great Migration. So, how might engaging the South from a Hurstonian perspective allow me to tell a different story about my native region?
Quite unexpectedly, this curiosity brought me to the work of Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee. I found that many of the defining characteristics of Black modern subjectivity attributed to the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 30s were already being experimented with a decade or so earlier at Tuskegee and other educational and cultural institutions throughout the Global Black South: in music, theater and performance; photography and film; education and labor; and transnational political and economic exchange.
I found that many of the defining characteristics of Black modern subjectivity attributed to the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 30s were already being experimented with a decade or so earlier at Tuskegee and other educational and cultural institutions throughout the Global Black South.
Furthermore, starting in 1898, Tuskegee began recruiting and enrolling international students and inspired generations of artists, intellectuals and political figures from across the African Diaspora — including Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Guyana, Puerto Rico and South Africa — as a model of Black self-determination, as they contended with the afterlives of slavery and the plantation and/or the new realities of Western colonialism and imperialism. Much of the scholarship on Black transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and diasporic relations in the early twentieth century emphasizes the Great Migration to the urban, Global North. But, as the historian Frank Guridy reminds us, Tuskegee was a diasporic epicenter two decades before Harlem emerged as the Black Mecca. So, through Tuskegee, I have been able to tell a more dynamic story about the Global Black South as a transnational cultural intellectual hub in the early twentieth century.
Please explain the tension between the “plot and the plantation” that you outline in your book.
In many ways, the plot-plantation dichotomy is indicative of the Black modern condition. The plot, also known as provision grounds, refers to small garden plots allotted to enslaved people throughout the Americas to grow food to nourish themselves because slave owners rarely provided sufficient sustenance. The plantation, of course, was a system of coercive labor organization used to exploit enslaved Africans and the earth through extractive, monocrop agriculture.
Several scholars have theorized the significance of the plot for enslaved people, but it is the work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter that has been most useful for me. Wynter describes the plot as a site of “cultural guerrilla resistance” to the plantation system because it is where enslaved people not only grew food to nourish themselves but also retained aspects of West African communal values and cultural practices such as cosmological and spiritual beliefs, folktales, music, dance and foodways.
Importantly, the plot was not a utopic space. Although it was how enslaved people nourished themselves, that nourishment also empowered their bodies to continue laboring and thus prolonged their exploitation. Also, because slave garden plots were located either on plantations (near the slave quarters, for example) or on the margins of plantations, they were never fully separate from the plantation system. The plot and the plantation are inextricably linked, materially and metaphorically.
Throughout “Afterlives of the Plantation,” I understand Black people’s efforts to do something otherwise with the plantation to which they were fated — to draw out its affordances and repurpose it toward a more just and liberatory future — as indicative of a plot logic and ethic.
Take for instance the work of renowned agricultural scientist and Tuskegee faculty member George Washington Carver, who used Tuskegee’s agricultural experiment station — known locally as the experiment plot — to regenerate southern soils degraded by the abusive monocrop agricultural practices of slavery and sharecropping. He then translated and disseminated this knowledge among poor Black farmers to teach them how to grow healthy, nourishing foods for their families and to become more economically independent of the plantation system. This is the epitome of a plot act.
Throughout “Afterlives of the Plantation,” I understand Black people’s efforts to do something otherwise with the plantation to which they were fated — to draw out its affordances and repurpose it toward a more just and liberatory future — as indicative of a plot logic and ethic.
How does your research speak to modern ecological crises and the value of agriculture for liberation and self-determination?
My book reminds us that there is a long tradition of Black liberatory agriculture throughout the Americas, wherein Black people stewarded the earth sustainably. And that even in the years and decades immediately following slavery, where Black people had recently been coerced to perform agricultural labor, many still found joy, pleasure and purpose on the land. Their relationship to farming wasn't solely based on its profitability; rather, they enjoyed coaxing plants from the ground, caring for animals, etc. In short, farming, agriculture and rurality are not anti-modern, and they certainly aren’t legacies to be ashamed of.
I hope this book helps readers recover this often-overlooked aspect of Black history and culture, and to become curious about the ways Black people’s past engagements with the natural world — such as Carver’s soil regeneration experiments — can still serve us today. Within these histories, I am convinced, are models of land stewardship, mutual aid and political solidarity that can aid us as we confront the ongoing social and ecological crises wrought by the plantation and the modern world order.
Want to learn more? Jarvis McInnis discussed “Afterlives of the Plantation” at the African American Legacy in Gardening and Horticulture Symposium held at the Hayti Heritage Center in Durham, NC (March 2025).
