Afterlives of the Plantation by Jarvis McInnis: Faculty Bookwatch

Five interdisciplinary scholars will respond to Jarvis C. McInnis's groundbreaking new book, Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, wherein he establishes Booker T. Washington's school, Tuskegee Institute, as a site of agrarian worldmaking, modern black subjectivity, and diasporic formation in the early 20th century. The book illuminates how a host of black artists, intellectuals, and political leaders-including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey, among others-adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation across the hemisphere, from the US South to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Mining the ruins of the plantation, these figures forged new theories and practices of black self-determination, aesthetic innovation, and freedom in slavery's aftermath.

Panelists:

• Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry, English, and African & African American Studies, Duke University
• Chris Ernest Ouma, Associate Professor of English, Duke University
• Norbert Lance Weston Wilson, Professor of Food, Economics and Community, Duke Divinity School, Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, and the Director of the World Food Policy Center, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
• Sharon P. Holland, Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Danielle Purifoy, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Moderator:

• Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies, Duke University

Q&A session, reception, and book signing will follow the panel.

RSVP at https://Afterlives-of-the-Plantation.eventbrite.com

Co-hosted by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and the Duke University Libraries. Co-sponsored by the Department of English and the the Department of African & African American Studies.