Landscape as Archive: Ecology of Jim Crow Era Cemeteries in the Rural Mid-South

• In Event: New Horizons in Black Geographies: Charting Unexplored Terrains of Diaspora, Ecology, and Resistance

Description for Program

As I went looking for family, the trees told me where they were.” This paper draws from ongoing empirical work mapping the spaces and the biogeography of Black American cemeteries founded during Reconstruction and Jim Crow in the rural Mississippi and Arkansas Alluvial Basins. Assessing the state of black cemeteries today can shed light on how historical geographies of racial difference may manifest in contemporary ecological patterns in the landscape. I reflect on how a capacious and critical approach to geography, attuned to the historically-specific everyday lives of working-class black agrarian folk from the region, sensitive to interventions from black studies, black geographies, and now black ecologies, might incorporate and or append approaches from physical geography. In tracing black presence through the remains of cemeteries, this paper aims to address not only potential unevenness in heritage preservation, but also the role of the physical sciences in exacerbating optics of erasure. Blending a reflection on the present with the earlier writings on cultural landscapes from the Berkeley School, and more recent works on decolonial science, Black and Native Studies, this paper asks how landscapes can reveal interdependence and difference in human-environmental relationships, without reproducing ‘damage narratives.'

Author

• Maria Pettis, UC Berkeley