How to Plant Food: Black Feminist Care in the Anthropocene

• In Event: Children’s Pedagogies of Care: Listening, Planting, Sensing, Dignifying, Playing, and Kincrafting

Abstract

This presentation explores the tensions between multiracial liberalism’s notions of care and black feminist ethics of care. Though the normative canon of care theory has been critiqued by leftist-structuralists for its “ahistoricism, cultural bias, and obliviousness to systemic power relations” (Thompson, 1998), I wonder about how the practices and ideas of care that arise from acknowledging systemic injustice work to reproduce that very system. Liberal notions of care have centered on emotional labor with individuals in the quasi-private sphere (such as schools). This over-emphasis on the individual, the quasi-private, and the emotional, sits in contrast with black feminist ethics of care that stress “not only emotional labor, but also political labor, physical labor, and intellectual labor” with community (Thompson, 1998). This study investigates how the emotional labor involved in identifying systemic injustice serves as an alibi for multiracial liberal practices of care in a resistant, progressive youth-centered urban farm project.

Thinking with abolitionist anthropology as a practice of “reparative caring” (Shange, 2021) that seeks to be responsible for what is overlooked in social change projects, this presentation recognizes a River City farm, its young urban farmers and gardeners, as aberrations within the “progressive dystopia” (Shange, 2021) of urban greening projects. Through interviews and participant observations with young black/latine urban farmers and gardeners, I make sense of how multiracial liberal notions of care are put to work in social justice coalitions. My fieldwork reveals how these practices of care enable antiblack racism and sexism even as they pursue social justice. By attuning to the schemes of care and learning between/within/beyond young black/latine farmers and gardeners, I work to understand a black feminist ethics of care and pedagogy that centers on detecting the anti-black-girl structure of the Anthropocene and (re)orienting black youth, in pragmatic and strategic ways, toward communal survival and social transformation.

I invite attendees to (re)story this North-eastern River City as an “embodied self-in-relation” (Styres, Haig-Brown, and Blimkie, 2013) to colonization, slavery, and indigenous and black onto-epistemologies (Nxumalo, 2019; Cairns, 2021). We will work to sense the animating force of (urban) Land through its sounds, vibrant colors, textured pavement, metal, and greenery, and pursue the political dimensions of care that are needed rather than possible. By looking at and sensing the ordinary flooding and decaying foodways of this River City, we will contend with what care must, rather than can, be for urban youth living in complex learning ecosystems. We will ask, how do outdoor-encounters in the bustling streets, towering buildings, and diverse cultural spaces of the city stimulate our senses and trigger our emotions and responses thus shaping our understanding of (urban) Land. We will consider how a self-assured and shy black girl’s insistence that the River City community “learn how to plant food” runs counterintuitively to the social reform project of the urban farm where care is limited to the individual, the quasi-private, and the emotional, consequently foreclosing care practices that labor politically, physically, and intellectually for communal survival and transformation.

Author

• Elaysel German, Rutgers University - Camden