'Quilting in the Black': Black Women's Work and Agency in the Rural South

• In Event: 20881 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: The Materiality of Labor

Abstract

By utilizing methods of critical auto ethnography, ethnographic research methodologies and archival research I use a socio-historical analysis of Black women’s agency building Black land cooperatives, mixed raced alliances that help to build up the postbellum south. Quilting in the Black is a theoretical conceptualization I use to uncover strategies of Black people building cooperatives, growing food and building infrastructure for their community, as they contended with dispossession and precarity, during the Reconstruction era. This project will help to give us a more complicated understanding of how to delve into understudied geographies of the Black rural south, while contending with the dispossession of Black land, indigenous people and the gendered and racialize ways that it converges over generations. This work is new and ongoing,

This foregrounds Black Women’s experiences in the rural south from reconstruction until the 21st century, the methodologies they have offered, the life, the world building. I am here to 'Quilt in the Black.' Using the methodologies passed down to me from my rural living grandmothers, patching together old clothes and fabrics and other forms, but sustaining this as they sustain the folkways, medicinal ways, food ways and knowledge ways of their people. I pull together qualitative methodologies of autoethnography, ethnography and in person interviews, using sound, pictures, and maps to delineate amore multi-dimensional way of uncovering Black life with the connections of the historical and digital archives found with census records, probate files and more to outline Black land ownership, is contentions and constraints from Black reconstruction until now in Collation County, South Carolina.

Author

• Shaneda L Destine, University of Tennessee-Knoxville