Black geographies, Black farming literature, Natalie Baszile, Queen Sugar

Black agrarian spaces, argues Priscilla McCutcheon, are those where “Black farmers seek to work within the constraints of nature to sustain Black life and create Black futures of liberation.” As central points in the framework of Black ecologies, these spaces highlight what Ashanté Reese describes as “geographies of self-reliance,” which “call attention to how spatial, historical, and racial dynamics intersect and insist that Black folks navigate inequities with a creativity that reflects a reliance on self and community.” This creativity and self-reliance are then reflected in the historical ideology and ethos of Black agrarianism, which is defined by the freedom of self‑determination, to follow agrarian knowledge and practices, to build communities, and becoming free of the stigma of and alienation from working the land—all in the face of decades of racial discrimination and dispossession in a hostile rural southern landscape. However, although Black farming, as Jay Fiskio posits, represents “both a space of imagining a different world and a real place to grow freedom,” few African American novels have addressed and depicted the lives, practices, and experiences of Black farmers or their visions and articulations of freedom through creating and stewarding Black agrarian spaces. Adopting the wider Black geographies framework, this contribution therefore analyses the ways in which three of these rare texts, Lalita Tademy’s Cane River (2001), Margaret Wilkerson’s The Revisioners (2019), and Natalie Baszile’s Queen Sugar (2013) – set on Louisiana plantations-turned-Black-owned farms – dramatize, celebrate, and imagine the journeys of Black women farmers to owning and stewarding land to provide liberated, safe, and self-reliant agrarian spaces for their communities in the Deep South. In telling stories of Black women farmers’ repeated resistance to dispossession and displacement alongside constant attempts at place-making and freedom, the novels attend to intersections between race, gender, and the environment inherent to the fraught history of Black agriculture. The novels’ characters also embody what J.T. Roane and Justin Hosbey describe as “alternative worldviews,” characteristic of the ethos of Black agrarianism, as the novels’ communities in their pursuit of freedom foster interracial economic cooperation, environmentally just land stewardship, and equitable models of labor management. They seek to recreate Southern agrarian spaces burdened with histories of slavery, racial capitalism, and oppression into material representations of liberation, freedom, and social and environmental justice.