Jarvis McInnis Marks FHI Return with ‘Afterlives of the Plantation’

During a visit to the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Jarvis C. McInnis presented his latest book, Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, and the feeling was that of a homecoming rather than simply passing through. Though framed as one event in a series hosted by the FHI, the Faculty Bookwatch, the moment carried more meaning at this point in his career.

And it’s because some of the very ideas that would become chapters and key concepts in his new book were fostered during an earlier research presentation at the FHI. The feedback he received wasn’t just helpful but is now central to how McInnis, an Associate Professor of English at Duke, understands the finished book.

“The FHI is one of my favorite institutions at the university,” McInnis said. “When I was applying for jobs, it was one of the centers that made Duke feel like a place where the humanities were genuinely valued.”

What mattered just as much was the institute’s philosophy, one that was rooted in human thought, explored wide-ranging subjects, and was widely shaped by scholars he admired and with whom he wanted to engage.

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Its intellectual openness drew McInnis to the FHI from the start. In 2021, during a tgiFHI event, he shared unfinished research—ideas that later grew into Afterlives of the Plantation—as they were beginning to take shape.

The questions he received while there, and the care with which the discussion was held, helped him see that those ideas could sustain deeper attention. Returning to the Faculty Bookwatch with a finished product felt like a full circle moment.

The series is designed precisely for that kind of return. Each gathering promotes interdisciplinary conversations on notable recent books by Duke faculty in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Instead of siloed discussions, the writer joins thinkers from different fields and disciplines, and in McInnis’ case, Black diasporic literatures (Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Sharon Holland, and Christopher Ouma), geography (Danielle Purifoy), and agricultural economics (Norbert Wilson) joined him. 

McInnis says this setup mirrors Afterlives of the Plantation. Its ideas move across diasporic geographies, literary genres, and cultural modes (i.e. music, photography, and performance), in pursuit of a more transnational and dynamic understanding of Black modernity in the late nineteenth-to-early-twentieth centuries with the Global Black South as its center. 

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Where it finished was nothing like where it started.

McInnis initially set out to think differently about the US South, particularly in relation to the Black diaspora. There was no shortage of research and scholarship on places such as Harlem or Paris as sites of black transnational exchange, but he noticed scholars had paid scant attention to how Black people in the rural regions of the Americas, especially in the US South, contributed to diasporic practice and thought.

His path then led him to Zora Neale Hurston’s work, which was transformative. From her ethnographic studies came a way of thinking about migration and culture, tied deeply to Southern roots and Caribbean life alike.

“She was exploring questions of diasporic connectivity but with the US South and the Caribbean as her focus in ways I had never considered,” he said.

Encountering the importance of agriculture and farming for the Black diaspora was another important turning point. They weren’t at all what he meant to explore. Nor were places like Tuskegee or figures like Booker T. Washington. Yet they were ubiquitous in the archive, refusing to fade from old pages and files. 

As McInnis navigated through personal notes, press clippings, and official papers, a pattern emerged. That place—Tuskegee and, by extension, the US South—once narrow in thought, now stretched outward, linked to Havana, San Juan, Colón, Port-au-Prince, Kingston, and beyond.

The idea shifted without announcement.

It hit home one day, changing how he viewed the old plantation grounds. Not just because of what happened there long ago, but because it played a part in building today’s world order. With the invaluable insights of Caribbean and New Southern Studies in tow, his thinking shifted when he began seeing plantations as hubs linking the American South with regions now called the “Global South.” 

The fact that Tuskegee Institute (now University) was established on soil once worked by enslaved people kept that idea front and center. McInnis’ time at Tougaloo College was crucial as well; a place built on land shaped by the same brutal history yet transformed into a renowned educational institution for the formerly enslaved and their descendants.

“Writing Afterlives of the Plantation required an ongoing process of unlearning,” he shared. “The research challenged my assumptions about rural life, mobility, and intellectual sophistication—assumptions I had encountered both in scholarship and in everyday life.”

The book opened McInnis’ eyes. Figures like George Washington Carver showed new angles on farming, ones rooted in renewal but built through patience. Rural Black wisdom suddenly made deeper sense, and knowledge once ignored now stood firm.

These questions resonated beyond literary history.

Now, McInnis is acutely aware of the current climate surrounding higher education, which he describes as marked by an assault on expertise and a growing mistrust of scholarship itself. He worries about how easily knowledge is dismissed when it conflicts with political ideology, and about what it means to teach and write under those conditions.

“How did we get to a point where hard-won scholarly expertise, earned through years of deep study, is wholly dismissed simply because it doesn’t align with a political administration’s explicitly biased and shamelessly bigoted worldview?” he asked. 

“Unfortunately,” McInnis continued, “we’ve seen a version of this before in the racial retrenchment that followed Reconstruction, the period where Afterlives of the Plantation begins. So, it’s my hope that readers can draw inspiration from the practices of Black self-determination outlined in the book, wherein our ancestors grew their own food, shared resources, and engaged in other modes of mutual aid to counteract state violence and neglect, to meet and overcome the challenges of our current political crisis.” 

What stands out most is how McInnis puts contradictions at the center of his work, whether he is in the classroom or working through research. Instead of smoothing things over, he invites students and readers alike to linger where answers clash, letting opposing insights stay in tension without forcing a resolution.

Afterlives of the Plantation embodies that practice. It does not offer a single story about the South, the plantation, or modernity. Instead, it traces overlapping histories and asks readers to think with, through, alongside, and against them.

“Bringing my book to the Faculty Bookwatch series wasn’t just about its publication,” he said. “It was about placing it back into the kind of shared intellectual space that helped make it possible. A space where scholarship is not isolated, but tested, complicated, and sustained through earnest conversation.”