Black Benthic: Exploring Submerged Matters in the Santee-Cooper Basin

• In Event: Ecological resistance spirituality and community

Description for Program

From 1938 to 1942, the South Carolina Public Service Authority diverted rivers and constructed dams, canals, and spillways as a part of a New Deal infrastructural project, the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project. Hoping to create an industrial empire on “virgin land,” promoters of the project promised to bring electricity, improve economic conditions, and eradicate malaria. However, their imagined virgin land was far from untouched. Thousands of black residents lived throughout rural hinterlands of the area.To make this land anew thus required more than a land engineer’s abstract willingness to clear land, remove trees, and flood fields.
This paper explores how the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project necessitated anti-black and anti-ecological practices to carry out rural redevelopment. By examining the processes of the removal and inundation of over 8,000 graves, mostly belonging to enslaved Africans and their descendants, this essay illustrates how “progress” disturbed the interwoven ecological, spiritual, and epistemic traditions held by black South Carolinians. Drawing from the fields of black ecologies and black religious studies, this paper proposes “benthic” as a concept essential for examining how infrastructural projects submerged rural black ancestral uses and knowledge of the land and water.

Author

• Kelsey Moore, Georgetown University