environmental justice, Black agrarianism, Black farmers, Queen Sugar, Farming While Black

“[T]here is more to the story of the modern black farmer” than existing research suggests, argues Leslie Touzeau in her 2019 study. This chapter argues that Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom, along with Natalie Baszile’s novel Queen Sugar (2014) represent ideal material for studying the modern Black farmer. The texts function as empowering, healing recordings and also fictional, uplifting imaginings of generations of Black farmers and farming communities as well as of the ethos of Black agrarianism. Specifically, these texts theorize, articulate, and bear witness to how Black farmers of different generations and genders have (re)built their relationship to and found consolation in the land through stewardship. Additionally, by providing what Leah Penniman calls “dignified narratives of our relationship to the land,” and by addressing African American’s historical trauma of being enslaved, dispossessed, and disenfranchised, as well as by rewriting harmful stereotypes about working the land, the texts also perform environmental justice. The texts by the Penniman sisters and Baszille harness the reparative and healing qualities of literature and land as they address “black people’s complex relationship to the land” and interpret black farming and land stewardship as morally and economically uplifting, as resistance to and healing for the wounds of white supremacy and environmental racism.