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Session Submission Summary

Navigating the Currents: Ecologies of Land, Labor, and Liberation

Thu, October 30, 8:30 to 10:00am, Marriott St Louis Grand, Westmoreland-Kingsbury

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

This panel gathers perspectives on the relationship between ecological knowledge, racialized regimes of labor and capital, and the lives and afterlives of the plantation in the circum-Atlantic World. Where African peoples were enslaved as conscripts of plantation and extractive economies from the fifteenth through nineteenth Centuries, this condition of bondage did not evacuate the capacity of enslaved peoples and their descendants to form and propagate expertise in practices of cultivation and science that permitted them to navigate ecological conditions and hazards, and sustain sacred and practical connections to their environments. As contemporary debates over the Anthropocene often render a monolithic and destructive “Anthropos,” this panel challenges such framings by centering the differentiated experiences of enslaved and working-class African-descended peoples. By situating their environmental practices within broader histories of diasporic rupture and resistance, we illuminate how ecological labor, maritime practices, and spiritual engagements with landscapes and waters have continuously shaped Black freedom struggles. In particular, we consider how the plantation as both a material and symbolic site, intersects with waterways and other ecological forms to produce new modes of solidarity, fugitivity, and environmental thought. Together, these perspectives contribute to a genealogy of Black ecological resistance that reimagines the relationships between labor, nature, and the human.

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