Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South

by Jarvis C. McInnis

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There—and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America—Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures.

Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee’s vision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders—including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey—adapted Tuskegee’s methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil.

Genres: History

465 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 13, 2025

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Afterlives of the Plantation is about how Black folks repurposed the plantation, post-slavery, to help Black folks, vocationally, economically, culturally, etc. Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee University take center stage as one of the prime examples of this concept of repurposing. Tuskegee was a former plantation that was turned into a university to teach agricultural and technical education to Black students. This book also tells a lesser-known story about how the Global Black South (i.e., the Caribbean) benefited from this innovation, as well as how three literary and political descendants (Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marcus Garvey) of Washington/Tuskegee's pedagogy extended its legacy into other fields.

I was fascinated to learn more about how George Washington Carver taught Tuskegee students and local farmers how to regenerate the soil. Specifically, he taught them counter-plantation logic, showing them how to maximize yield from the land with the least financial expense and minimal soil damage. This repurposing was not limited to agriculture but also to innovative technologies of the time, such as photography. McInnis's use of the archives brings to light many relatively unknown pieces of Black history. I found the chapters on Tuskegee's work with Caribbean students fascinating, from the description of what school life was like for them compared to their home lands to what they did with the knowledge they gained when they went back home. Lastly, McInnis' chapter on Zora Neale Hurston and her work in Jamaica was eye-opening. I especially enjoyed reading about the unknown Jamaican newspaper references to Zora's stint on the island.

This book is very well-researched, and you will definitely come away with a different outlook on this topic.