Plotting the Global Black South

Join interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, and Assistant Professor at Duke University, Jarvis C. McInnis, as he charts a new account of Black modernity by centering the Tuskegee Institute’s vision of agrarian worldmaking.

McInnis has researched the significance of farming and agriculture for southern African American and Afro-Caribbean peoples in the late-19th-to-early-20th centuries as modes of intellectual production, subject formation, aesthetic innovation, and self-determination. Notably focusing on Booker T. Washington and his school, Tuskegee Institute, McInnis’s research shows how generations of Black artists, intellectuals, and political leaders adapted Tuskegee’s model of racial uplift to forge new theories and practices of racial progress in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica, among other locales.

In conversation with Richard Smith, Director of NYBG’s School of Professional Horticulture, McInnis will share insights from his new publication, Afterlives of the Plantation—which explores how he establishes the Global Black South as a geography of Black worldmaking and transnational exchange that preceded and contributed to the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

Copies of Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South will be available for purchase and signing.

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