Black farming, Black agrarianism, environmental justice

Jan Beneš’s chapter focuses on the ways in which Natalie Baszile’s novelQueen Sugar (2014), a rare modern Black agrarian novel, utilizes the power of storytelling to dramatize and celebrate the lived experiences of multiple generations of Black farmers as well as the ethos of Black agrarianism, especially its social and justice dimensions. The contribution argues that Queen Sugar engages—through its story of a Black woman farmer’s transformative journey from a novice alienated from the land to a full-fledged farmer, landowner, and steward—in environmental justice on at least two levels. First, Baszile gives voice to a historically discriminated group of Black (sugarcane) farmers, dramatizing their experiences, and celebrating their agricultural and botanical knowledge and practices. Second, Queen Sugar thematizes environmental racism in the form of land dispossession and variousdiscriminatory practices, while also highlighting the strategies—such astransgenerational agrarian knowledge, cooperative economics, and an ethical interracial model of farm labor and management—which its Black farmer characters adopt to cope with environmental burdens such as hurricanes and flooding to which they tend to be disproportionately exposed as a result of environmentally racist practices. In this way, this Black agrarian novel both elucidates the little-known history of environmental injustices perpetrated against Black farmers and underscores the resilience, resourcefulness, and hopefulness, which set the novel’s characters on the road toward potentially achieving environmental justice.

Jan Beneš’s chapter focuses on the ways in which Natalie Baszile’s novelQueen Sugar (2014), a rare modern Black agrarian novel, utilizes the power of storytelling to dramatize and celebrate the lived experiences of multiple generations of Black farmers as well as the ethos of Black agrarianism, especially its social and justice dimensions. The contribution argues that Queen Sugar engages—through its story of a Black woman farmer’s transformative journey from a novice alienated from the land to a full-fledged farmer, landowner, and steward—in environmental justice on at least two levels. First, Baszile gives voice to a historically discriminated group of Black (sugarcane) farmers, dramatizing their experiences, and celebrating their agricultural and botanical knowledge and practices. Second, Queen Sugar thematizes environmental racism in the form of land dispossession and variousdiscriminatory practices, while also highlighting the strategies—such astransgenerational agrarian knowledge, cooperative economics, and an ethical interracial model of farm labor and management—which its Black farmer characters adopt to cope with environmental burdens such as hurricanes and flooding to which they tend to be disproportionately exposed as a result of environmentally racist practices. In this way, this Black agrarian novel both elucidates the little-known history of environmental injustices perpetrated against Black farmers and underscores the resilience, resourcefulness, and hopefulness, which set the novel’s characters on the road toward potentially achieving environmental justice.