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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:01.919)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Jarvis McInnis, Associate Professor of English at Duke University. And we're here today to talk about his book, Afterlives of the Plantation, Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South. Dr. McInnis, wonderful to have you on today.
Jarvis McInnis (00:20.76)
Thank you so much, PJ, for having me. I'm really excited to speak with you this morning.
PJ Wehry (00:26.818)
So Dr. McInnis, why this book?
Jarvis McInnis (00:30.296)
You know, I wrote this book because, well, it really emerges from my personal background and experience. I'm a native Southerner, U.S. South. I was born and raised in Gulfport, Mississippi. And then when I went on to pursue graduate study,
I migrated to New York City and I began to learn so much about the richness of Black culture in the US North, especially in the 1920s and 1930s and 40s during the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance. But then I began to wonder about those
Black people who, like my family members, who did not migrate, right? We know that across the 20th century, the majority of Black people in the United States migrated out of the South, right? They were pushed and pulled by economic factors, inability to find work, and certainly also pushed and pulled by Jim Crow segregation and violence, right? But there were people like my grandparents and great-grandparents who did not migrate to Chicago or to New York or to...
or did not travel abroad. And I began to wonder about their experiences. And so this book emerged out of a desire to understand why they stayed, right? And especially in a place like Mississippi. And also how is it that their decision to stay and the cultural production that they helped to develop
the intellectual contributions that they made to Black life in the South, how can I rethink those? Because as I moved throughout New York City, and I would tell people that I was from Mississippi, their faces would scrunch up and all of the biases that the country holds against the South and Mississippi in particular came to the fore.
PJ Wehry (02:32.979)
Ha ha ha!
Jarvis McInnis (02:39.87)
And so I began to really think more critically about that. I said, well, this wasn't my experience growing up there. Obviously, I grew up well after integration and so forth and so on. So I had a different Mississippi experience. And my book is actually set squarely within Jim Crow segregation. In fact, it begins in 1881 before legalized the codification of separate but equal and ends around the 1940s.
And so, you I'm not making the case, right, that the South was not the site of violence and oppression that it absolutely was during that period. But I also knew that there was a fund of cultural richness and intellectual richness that we weren't really talking about in those conversations about migrating out of the region. And certainly I knew that
HBCUs, historically Black colleges and universities, helped to contribute to that intellectual and cultural richness. And I knew that there was a global story to tell from the US South that we don't often capture when we focus squarely on migration to New York or Chicago or Paris or London and these other really important sites of global Black.
international and sort of intellectual exchange, right? So I became curious about what black folk were doing in the rural country districts of the US South and the Caribbean, those folks who chose not to migrate and also those folks who migrated and went back to the region.
PJ Wehry (04:24.245)
So you're from Mississippi, but you chose to start in Tuskegee. Is that my saying it right?
Jarvis McInnis (04:26.252)
I am.
Jarvis McInnis (04:31.438)
Yes, that's right. Tuskegee. Yes. Yes.
PJ Wehry (04:34.271)
Tuskegee. And so why start with Tuskegee?
Jarvis McInnis (04:38.102)
Yeah, that's really wonderful question. So I'll answer it in two parts. So the book is entitled Afterlives of the Plantation. And I begin the book by thinking about what it meant for Booker T. Washington, who is the founder of Tuskegee Institute now, Tuskegee University, to establish a school on the grounds of a former cotton plant plantation.
Tuskegee was founded on the former Bowen Plantation. And Booker T. Washington writes about purchasing that property in his autobiography, in his neo-slave narrative, excuse me, in his slave narrative, excuse me, up from slavery. He writes about finding that property and deciding that it was the perfect place to plant a school.
And I became really curious about that in part because I am a graduate of Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, or really the Tougaloo community, which is right outside of Jackson. And Tougaloo is also established on the grounds of a former cotton plant plantation. And so when I was a student there, when I was an undergraduate student there, I often thought about the irony of what it meant to be educated on the grounds of this site of violence where Black people had been enslaved.
And in Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, he writes about the fact that where he planted Tuskegee, the big house or the mansion house had been burned. That was not the case at Tougaloo, right? So the big house is where the slave master would have lived, right? And so he says, well, the big house had been burned, and so that was the perfect place, right? And so I think about that imagery. He's hoping that the
that the violence and the degradation and the anti-Blackness, right, that the big house that it represented had been burned away. And so he tried to establish something on top of that, right, that would contribute to educating Black people and improving the lives of Black people in the aftermath of slavery. At a place like Tuskegee, however, excuse me, a place like Tougaloo, the big house was not burned.
Jarvis McInnis (06:59.616)
In fact, it's still very much on campus. still in the center of campus. And it has been used as an administration building. It's been used as a dormitory. It's had all of these other purposes, right? And so I became really interested in the ways that historically Black colleges and universities across the United States and even
universities in the Caribbean as well, such as the University of the West Indies in Mona, the Mona campus in Jamaica, that they're often established on former plantation grounds. And what did it mean for, what did we do with the fact that black people, these were the only lands that were often available to them, and that they took these sites of degradation, took these sites of violence.
and tried to repurpose them into something that was future oriented that contributed to the prolongation, the propagation of Black life, the improvement of Black life. so Tuskegee gave me a way to begin to understand my Tougaloo experience, a way to begin to answer this question that I've been wrestling with since I was an undergraduate there. The other reason that Tuskegee is so important is because or why it became the centerpiece of the story.
And I have to say, I did not want it to be a centerpiece of the story, not because I'm from Mississippi, but because Booker T. Washington is such a difficult figure to write about. His reputation, right, in Black Studies in particular, but in American history in some ways as well, has become associated with that of a...
PJ Wehry (08:26.144)
Mm-hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (08:41.07)
of an accommodationist, someone who accommodated to segregation. His goal initially when he gave the now infamous Atlanta Exposition Address in 1895, his goal was initially to compromise with the white South so that Black people would have economic opportunities.
PJ Wehry (08:43.403)
Mm-hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (09:07.116)
to improve the material conditions of their lives. These are people who had been really abandoned by the federal government and by state governments after enslavement. And so his goal was to ensure that Black people could...
to ensure that they had the material necessities to build a life, right? The foundation. And then from there, they would be able to pursue certain forms of political enfranchisement and so forth and so on. But that was not a project, and rightly so, that all Black people were on board with, right? They wanted and they deserved both economic opportunity and political enfranchisement, right? But he was...
really operating at a very difficult moment in American history, in African American history that's often known as the nadir, the lowest point of Black history. Lynchings are on the rise, anti-Black violence is on the rise during this period. it's the case that segregation is becoming more codified. So rights are being stripped away at every turn.
right? And so this was a compromise to try to ensure that Black people at least had food to eat, at least had land that they could purchase, at least had the material needs and concerns met, right? So I didn't want to write about Booker T. Washington because his legacy has been associated with that, right, has been reduced to that. But because of the, as I delved into the archive and I read through Booker T. Washington's papers,
PJ Wehry (10:37.131)
You
Jarvis McInnis (10:49.204)
letters from students and from parents and political leaders from across the Black world in places like Haiti and Cuba and Puerto Rico and Jamaica and South Africa, I realized, wait a minute, Tuskegee had an international footprint that I was not aware of. And then I wonder if Tuskegee was so important to Black people in all of these other different parts of the world, what was it that they saw in that program, right, in that model of education that seemed
viable to them, right? From a 20th and 21st century perspective, from a post-civil rights perspective, we've been very critical of Tuskegee. And we should be critical of Booker T. Washington's shortcomings. What I argue in the book is that I approach Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee both critically and generously.
Right? I am critical of the short-sightedness of his vision for Black people, and I try to be generous and to try to understand what he imagined himself to be doing at this particular juncture of history. And so we should absolutely be critical of his short-sightedness. We should absolutely be critical of the hegemony that he amassed over Black politics and his sort of...
people regard him as tyrannical, but I wouldn't say that he was tyrannical, but he was a difficult leader, right, at this particular moment. And so we should absolutely be critical of the race man or race woman archetype or ideology wherein only one person can speak for the entire race because Black people are not a monolith, right? And I demonstrate that throughout the book by writing about the Black experience from
PJ Wehry (12:15.797)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (12:30.057)
Right.
Jarvis McInnis (12:38.51)
the rural working class experience, but also the middle class experience and sometimes the elite experience, right, in different parts of the Black diaspora. And so as a result, I did not want to write about Booker T. Washington or Tuskegee at such length, but I realized that, wait a minute,
Black people at this period saw something really valuable about this institution. So I need to dig into that. I need to try to understand what they saw as viable and important about this particular project. And the last thing that I'll say to respond to that particular question, why Tuskegee? I'm a literary scholar.
And Tuskegee, despite the book, which is very historical, I had to learn how to think like a historian and to engage in historical archives and learn different methodologies in order to write the book. But I'm primarily trained as a literary scholar. And Tuskegee is so important to the African-American literary canon.
because of Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery and because the school just produced so much print culture. The Tuskegee Student Newspaper, Working with the Hand, Booker T. Washington published so many different books and Up From Slavery was actually translated into more than 17 languages in Booker T. Washington's lifetime, right? And so this book had a transnational influence and so that was kind of my way in, right? It's through the literary.
PJ Wehry (13:54.603)
Hm-hm.
Jarvis McInnis (14:22.53)
But then the literary opened up to the historical, it opened up to the political economic, to the agricultural, to the sonic and to the visual as well. and the performative. That was a very long answer to your question, PJ. So pardon me, but I'm really excited to speak with you.
PJ Wehry (14:34.411)
I was gonna ask. No, was great!
PJ Wehry (14:43.839)
Yeah, no worries at all. That was a great answer.
Jarvis McInnis (14:46.114)
Thank you.
PJ Wehry (14:49.191)
I was actually going to ask, and then you made it your final point about the print culture side of it, because what I immediately came to mind is you started off by referencing Up From Slavery, and of course you don't have that kind of extended narrative resource in Tougaloo, right? And so that makes total sense. Is that print, sorry, is that print culture part of the reason why the institution was so valuable overseas?
Jarvis McInnis (14:55.01)
Yeah.
Jarvis McInnis (15:06.488)
Correct.
Jarvis McInnis (15:17.71)
Absolutely, yes, yes. So there's a historian by the name of Frank Gerrity, who's the first person to really write at length about the translation and circulation of Booker II Washington's autobiography up from slavery. And it was actually translated into Cuban Spanish is the term that shows up in the archive around 1902 or three.
by a Boston based reformer by the name of Grace Menz. And so she is doing reform work in Cuba. And so she has 1000 copies of Up From Slavery circulated throughout the island of Cuba. And that inaugurated, and this is happening at the same time or right after the Spanish American War, right? When Cuba is.
when the United States, right, has its tentacles or wants to acquire Cuba, right? And Cuba's sovereignty is really precarious at this particular moment, right? Puerto Rico has become a territory of the United States at this time, and Cuba is trying to resist this at this moment. But they see, because Cuba had recently, because slavery had recently ended in Cuba around 1886, and then Cuba became a
It was still under the Spanish crown and then of course was emancipate or won its emancipation its freedom from Spain through the Spanish-American War in 1898. They are trying to figure out they're facing this very similar conundrum as the United States a few decades earlier, right? What do we do with this mass of black people, right? Who've recently been about emancipated from enslavement, right?
and education of course is a really important mechanism for improving the lives of Black people. And so the translation and circulation, right, of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery into Spanish, it transformed what was possible, the visions of Afro-Cuban modernity in the early 20th century. So he gets hundreds of letters.
Jarvis McInnis (17:35.022)
from parents and from students in Cuba, also in Puerto Rico, wanting to attend Tuskegee, inquiring about the school, asking for copies of the annual catalog, wondering what types of courses are being taught. And it's also the case that they establish in Cuba their own school that's modeled after Tuskegee, the Instituto Booker T. Washington, around 1905.
There's a way that Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee and by extension the US South, they become so significant part of the conversation around Afro-Cuban modernity at this particular juncture. then there's also the, Afro-Savory was also translated into French as well. It did not have the same circulation among among Haitians at this particular time.
mostly among the Haitian elite because they would have been the literate sort of class of Haitians at that particular time. The majority of Haitians at that time would not have been literate and the majority of them would have spoken Creole and not French and so they would not have been able to read the text in translation but it became really important to a number of Haitian intellectuals as well, those who could read French because it
gave them a model of the possibilities of agricultural and industrial education.
PJ Wehry (19:03.627)
I really appreciate this because until I had seen your book, you know, right in the title there says global black south. I obviously knew they had plantations in. mean, I won't say obviously it depends on the level of education that you've had, unfortunately. But we talk about, know, we had I knew there were sugar plantations in, you know, in the Caribbean. I knew that there were
plantations all throughout Africa, but I had never considered their connection, the way that they would have seen a cultural connection with the plantations in the United States South. And I never thought about the way that I knew that most of the world was getting rid of slavery around the same time. mean, there's obviously a long period there, but that the way that they would be looking for models.
across the world, right? Like it's one of those things where even as a kid, I remember being kind of weirded out that Ben Franklin ended up in Paris at one point, know, Thomas Jefferson, you know, like if unless you unless you talk about expressly, you just think they're like running around log cabins like or, know, like they're up and down the streets of Philadelphia. And so that's something that's really I really appreciate is this idea of it's not just that they're
that you're lumping this together for the sake of study, like these connections were there, they were being made, it's being translated into 17 different languages because it was important to people.
Jarvis McInnis (20:39.118)
That's right. That's right. Absolutely. And that's the aspect of the project that I was trying to recover by inviting us to reconsider Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, not necessarily to recuperate. Right? And so that's really important distinction for me is to reconsider it to interrogate what are the aspects of that project that we missed. Right? Yes, we should be critical of his accommodationist politics. Right?
But what are the aspects that we missed? And in my book, I argue that two of the aspects that we missed that are really important are the agricultural component. And I don't think that we missed the agricultural component fully. I think that we were biased against it because agriculture, it pulled Black people back to it reminded us of the history of enslavement. It reminded us of the violence of the South. And so Black modernity, Black
progress has been about moving away from the land, right? In part because when black people attempted to root themselves in the land after enslavement, what happened? More violence, more land dispossession, which is what forced them to migrate away from the South anyway. So there's a lot of cultural trauma that's associated with agriculture and farming for black people. And so when I delved into the archive, I recognized that what
Booker T. Washington was advocating, and not just Washington, really the work of George Washington Carver. George Washington Carver's model of sustainable and regenerative agriculture in the late 19th century has a lot to teach us about our present ecological crisis and how to care for the Earth in this very, very moment. But was doing really ethical work at that particular moment as well by teaching
I rural farmers, both Black and White, right, how to care for the land, right, how to nourish the land, how to engage in crop rotation, how to grow food to nourish their families and to nourish their bodies, right. I realized that we had really missed that part and of course it's there, but it's not the, and when people write about Carver, right, it's there, right. So I don't mean to suggest that I'm the only person to ever write about this aspect of Carver's life and work, but I wanted to
Jarvis McInnis (23:02.912)
allowed that to help us to rethink the importance of Tuskegee as an institution, right? And connect it to its global tentacles, right? Or the global network that it helped to produce and was a really important part of to help us think about Tuskegee as a cultural hub in the diaspora. What does it mean to think about Black people traveling to the South and not away from the South, right? That the South is a place that people are coming to because
PJ Wehry (23:08.971)
Mm-hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (23:32.362)
there is cultural and intellectual richness there that they can then take back to their home communities and then they can adapt it and transform it right and by Connecting it to the values and sort of cultural traditions that are at place in In places like Haiti and Cuba and Guyana and so forth and so on right so so Tuskegee becomes a tool right That means different things for different people
But for most of them, it was a model of Black self-determination. And that's really what I wanted to capture. So earlier I said that there were two ways that I was rethinking Tiskeke. The first is the agricultural. The second is the aesthetic, the importance of music and visual culture and self-fashioning, the way that they style themselves. When you look at the images that, and that was really my way in it, it unlocked something for me.
when I was first embarking on the research for this book. There's a way that we look at these images of these students laboring at Tuskegee. When we first look at them, looks like images from the 19th century. We might think of them as images that are very reminiscent of enslavement, Black people working in fields, Black people working in industrial factories, and so forth and so on.
But if you if you linger with those images a little bit longer and you start to look at the way that they dress themselves, they are dressed in top hats and coats. The ladies are dressed in beautiful white dresses as they are cultivating flowers in the garden. And I thought, this is the pastoral. These are pastoral images. These are not images that seek to keep black people or to depict black people in...
in poverty or in modes of labor that are reminiscent of the slave past, they understood themselves as new Negroes, right? And so through photography and through music, the singing of the Negro spirituals at Tuskegee, they were trying to renovate and regenerate the sounds and the sort of...
Jarvis McInnis (25:49.626)
racial indexicality is what I call it in the book, but really the meaning of Blackness in visual culture. Because in this period, in American popular culture and newspapers, on screen, the predominant depiction of Black people was that of the menstrual.
PJ Wehry (25:59.061)
Mm-hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (26:10.828)
these degraded and debased caricatures of Black people, often initially by white performers who blacked up and they put certain kinds of Black paint on their face or grease, there were other materials that were used. And it was caricatures of Blackness. And they would make fun of Black people and depict them as...
as lazy and as watermelon and chicken eating.
Jarvis McInnis (26:45.346)
Buffoons, excuse me.
PJ Wehry (26:47.424)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (26:49.102)
watermelon and chicken eating buffoons, right? And so, but what Tuskegee is attempting to do, what a lot of black institutions were doing, not just Tuskegee, but I make the argument through Tuskegee, what they're attempting to do is to give us a different depiction of blackness that's rooted in dignity and grace, right? And that's also trying to help the country see that black people are a valuable asset
to the country through their labor, right? Now, that point should need to be made. Right? That point should absolutely not need to be made because they were brought here, right, under coercion to do what? Labor. Because their labor literally built the country. is responsible, it continues to be responsible for the wealth of this particular country, right? But that stereotype of Black people as buffoonish.
PJ Wehry (27:24.683)
Right, right, right, right.
Jarvis McInnis (27:48.422)
that stereotype of Black people as lazy and as unintelligent, right, as backward, as uncivilized, those stereotypes continue to circulate, right, in the public sphere, right? And so as a result, Tuskegee is using aesthetics to project a different depiction of Black people to the world as sophisticated, right? And so that's why they are dressed in these elaborate
Victorian style outfits in these images of them working outside in a field. You know, when I present on this and I show the images, I write about the fact that this is, it's absurd, right? It's ridiculous that you would have a top hat and a top coat and a full suit and tie when you're working outside feeding pigs or feeding a horse. But that was, it says something about the stakes.
PJ Wehry (28:28.211)
Right.
Jarvis McInnis (28:44.48)
a visual culture for Black people at this particular moment, right? The stakes were so high because those negative stereotypes that I mentioned were still the predominant ways in which Black people were being regarded in the U.S. nation-state.
PJ Wehry (28:44.607)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (29:01.739)
Do you see that bias against agriculture continuing into black communities today? Obviously not asking you to ask or speak for all black people, right?
Jarvis McInnis (29:07.255)
I do.
I didn't understand the question. I appreciate that caveat. BJ, traditionally, yes, I think that has been the case, but I think that we are seeing a real return to the land and embrace of farming in that legacy in Black communities all across the country, really all across the world. But I feel more
PJ Wehry (29:13.02)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (29:18.707)
Yeah, yeah.
Jarvis McInnis (29:40.088)
I feel that I can speak more confidently about what's happening in the United States. I'll speak there. But this urban farming movement that we've seen, right, all over the northern cities, northern cities, but also southern cities, places like Atlanta, places like Detroit.
places like New York, places like LA. We see urban farming and gardening and this real desire to ensure that black people have access to fresh foods because so many black communities across this country are located in food deserts where black people don't have healthy foods, which contributes to that and poverty and other forms of systemic racism. It contributes to...
disproportionate rates of diabetes, of heart disease, and et cetera, in Black communities. And so I think that there has been a desire to recover that agriculture and reclaim that agricultural legacy that was too painful to reclaim at one point. Because when you begin to talk about it, it brought up the fact that people's grandparents or great-grandparents had lost their land, had been pushed off their land.
had met with some form of racial violence that forced the family to flee, to leave Mississippi and Louisiana and Florida and South Carolina and Georgia and Alabama and so forth and so on. And so that cultural trauma is still very much there, but I think people are trying to look it in the face now. And I think that because we live in a moment that is requiring all of us to think differently about our relationship to the earth, given the
the
Jarvis McInnis (31:25.908)
dangers of climate change, right? We all have to think differently about what we put in our bodies and our relationship to the earth. And what I have been trying to do, what I tend to do through afterlives of the plantation is to demonstrate how there is a rich legacy of Black liberatory agro-
PJ Wehry (31:27.595)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (31:49.43)
agriculture in the Tuskegee was a really important part of that legacy and how can we reclaim and restore that. Take some of the lessons that Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver and their other faculty in the agriculture department taught students at Tuskegee and taught black farmers in the countryside at that particular moment.
How can we recover that and use it as inspiration? But some of the knowledge is actually still applicable. If you have a farm, you need to rotate crops, right? You need to nourish the soil, right? You need to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, right, from the earth to ensure that your body is healthy, right? And so I attempt to demonstrate that this is a proud legacy to be a part of, even though it's associated with
PJ Wehry (32:16.469)
Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jarvis McInnis (32:40.354)
with so much pain for many people. It's a proud legacy that we can reclaim and not have shame about the history of enslavement or the history of dispossession and violence that happened during the period of segregation.
PJ Wehry (32:58.475)
And if I understand you, because part of the problem was giving up the political enfranchisement piece. you can't give up the control of the food supply. You have to still have, you need to have the political enfranchisement. But if you give up control of your food supply, the political enfranchisement will go as well.
Jarvis McInnis (33:05.62)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (33:15.118)
That's right.
Jarvis McInnis (33:25.186)
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so, you know, and I have to say, Booker T. Washington compromised on that publicly, but he did not compromise on giving up political enfranchisement privately. Privately, he was using his own resources to fund civil rights campaigns, right, behind the scenes. He knew that he could not do that in a public way because it would negatively impact the money and resources that were allocated to his school, right?
and it would negatively impact his leadership, right? And he helped to acquire resources, philanthropic dollars from white industrial titans like the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's and so forth and so on to support black education throughout the country. If you know anything about the Rosenwald schools, he worked with, he worked out an agreement with Julius Rosenwald that Rosenwald would
to resources to help Black communities throughout the United States to establish schools for Black people. And there were, I believe, somewhere between like 3,000 and 4,000 Rosenwald schools that were established throughout the country. And the problem is that, you know, they had to do that because states were not invested in Black education, right? The federal government was not invested in Black education in the same way. So Booker T. Washington understood that he needed to...
publicly compromise in order to make these types of partnerships and collaborations possible. The problem is that he presented it as the only way. It was too hegemonic, right? And that's the issue that someone like W.E.B. Du Bois had with him. Ida B. Wells-Barnett had with him.
William Monroe Trotter, these other Black leaders who said, wait a minute, industrial and agricultural education are important, but they can't be the only forms of for Black people, and we cannot give up the franchise. So Washington says over and over again, I'm not promoting giving up of the franchise, but his speech, it suggested that. We could be as separate as the fingers on a hand and everything purely social, but
PJ Wehry (35:39.051)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (35:44.674)
but work collectively in everything economic, right? And so it was interpreted as Black people not advocating for political enfranchisement. And of course, he was doing that behind the scenes, but had to be very savvy about how he did that publicly, right? And so he was trying to aid the least of these, the Black masses, the Black people who perhaps did not have access to land.
who were sharecroppers and tenant farmers trying to figure out a way to feed their families, to care for themselves, who were really left to their own devices in the aftermath of enslavement and did not have access to forms of formal education.
PJ Wehry (36:27.723)
Now, forgive me for switching tracks here, but I did want to ask, so you're a literary scholar and I had to appreciate you said it's plotting agrarian futures in the global black south and then you have plot one, plot two, plot three. Can you talk a little bit about how you use, there's clearly like this play on words there with the direction, the configuration of a story, but also the tract of land.
Jarvis McInnis (36:31.662)
Hi.
PJ Wehry (36:57.045)
Do you mind talking a little bit about how you used that to tie the book together?
Jarvis McInnis (36:57.122)
Great.
Jarvis McInnis (37:00.622)
Thank you, PJ. This is a wonderful question and one of the elements of the book that I love most. Yes. So I'll begin historically. So the plot is a, as you said, both refers to the plot of land and to the story plot, right? The action of a particular story. And so I...
I'm using it based on the work of a Jamaican cultural theorist by the name of Sylvia Winter. Sylvia Winter wrote this wonderful essay in the 1970s called Novel and History, Plot and Plantation. And what she does in that essay is she argues that she creates this dichotomy between slave garden plots.
The small parcels of land that enslaved people were allotted especially in the Caribbean But it happened in the US South as well, even though it was less less systematic in the United States The small plots of land that enslaved people were allotted to grow their own food, right? Because though the rations that that the that they're that planters at slave masters gave them the the provisions that they gave them the food
provisions, they were meager, right? And so they had to grow their own food to ensure that they had enough food to eat. in that essay, Winter refers, so the provision ground and the plot, they're terms that are used pretty interchangeably. And in that essay, Winter talks about the importance of the slave garden plot or the plot as a site of Black resistance. She says a site of cultural
cultural guerrilla resistance, excuse me. And so the reason that she calls it that is because it becomes a place, it's this little part of land that black people have a little bit of control over. They can control what they grow on it, right? They're not forced to grow sugar or cotton or tobacco or whatever, right? Or they can grow sweet sweet potatoes or yams or okra, right? Some of the foods that came to the Americas from Africa.
PJ Wehry (39:05.556)
Yeah.
Jarvis McInnis (39:21.806)
They grow things that they enjoy and they can prepare them the way that they want to prepare them and their time is their own when they are cultivating those slave garden plots. And so because of that, they can swap stories with them. They can sing their own songs. They can share their own recipes. So it becomes this site.
PJ Wehry (39:45.323)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (39:50.414)
of Black cultural retention and resistance to the plantation system, right? And so now there are some scholars who argue rightly that the plot is not actually a site of resistance or not always a site of resistance because by growing food to feed them their bodies to nourish themselves, what are they doing? They're continuing to make themselves to energize their bodies, right? To labor on the plantation.
PJ Wehry (39:56.427)
Mmm.
Jarvis McInnis (40:20.108)
Right. And so in some ways, the plot suggests that there is no outside to the plantation. Right. It is is is adhered to the plantation. But I am so I find so much possibility in the way that winter theorizes it as a site of resistance, as a site of of reclamation, of rehumanization, right.
PJ Wehry (40:26.027)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (40:49.611)
Mm-hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (40:49.996)
like people through their tilling of the land, through their tilling of the soil, through their retention of African cultural values and knowledges and so forth and so on. And so Winter argues that the plot and the plantation, that that tension between the two are similar to the tension between history and the novel. And let's see if I can.
if I can distill this in a succinct way. But if we think about history as the story of the victors, right? And who are the victors in Western modernity, right? The white planter class, right? But the novel is a form of fiction, is a form of storytelling and story making, right? That is the domain of the
of the stories that enslaved people were able to tell on their plot, we might say, if we want to make that. The novel, it's also the case that the novel as a literary genre emerged because of the plantation system. What do I mean by that? The resource.
PJ Wehry (42:05.961)
Yeah, I've never heard that before, I'm excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Jarvis McInnis (42:10.7)
Winter argues that the resources that Europe was able to extract from their colonies in the Americas helped to contribute to the Industrial Revolution, which then contributed to the rise of the British middle class. And that in the rise of the middle class gave rise to a more...
to a class of people who had more leisure on their hands and that coincided with the rise of the novel, right, as a literary genre, right? And so Winter is arguing that the novel is this adjunct to the plantation, right? It emerges from that history of the plantation, but it is the site of, it's a literary genre that is invested in
the individual, right? And so she's saying, well, in the same way that the plot allows for enslaved people to reclaim their individuality, the novel, right, allows them to do the same thing. And so she makes this association between the novel and the plot, right, and the plantation as a site of violence and history as a site of violence, right? And what do we get with the novel? We get imagination. People can imagine themselves.
right, in different kinds of conditions, right? They can tell stories that allow them to reclaim their African ancestry and history and so forth and so on. And so the novel becomes a way to reclaim and imagine something anew that is not laden, that is not rooted in the violence of the history of the plantation and plantation modernity. So.
Because of that, I wanted to hold on to the plot, right, as a geographic and material site. And I also wanted to think about the ways that at a place like Tuskegee, they received funding in 1896 to establish an experiment plot, an agricultural experiment station. And so there, they used
Jarvis McInnis (44:30.306)
George Washington Carver used the experiment experiment plot or the experiment station to engage in these experiments on the on soil regeneration and how to grow foods that were indigenous to the southern soils and so forth and so on and he used that knowledge to disseminate it right to to black farmers and to into farmers throughout the south right and so I began to think about the ways that Tuskegee's experiment plot is a kind of natural
is a part of that same genealogy as the slave garden plot, We can think about it as a part of that history wherein a formerly enslaved people used this site of land, this plot of land, this large farm to engage in forms of experimentation, to engage in various freedom experiments, right? That are rooted in...
land acquisition that are rooted in cultivating healthy foods and so forth and so on. And so I wanted to, in honor of Sylvia Winter, who asks me to think, who asks us to think at the intersection of literature and land, the novel and the garden plot, I use that as a way to think about the various parts of the book. So the book is divided into three parts.
or three plots. Plot one is dedicated to rethinking Tuskegee along the lines of agriculture and aesthetics, as I mentioned earlier, right? That was my way in to reconsidering the significance of this particular institution. Part two takes us to the Caribbean, particularly to Cuba in chapter three and to Haiti in chapter four, to think about Booker T. Washington's contemporaries,
PJ Wehry (46:08.095)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (46:26.866)
And that initial moment that Tuskegee becomes a kind of viable model for Black people in other parts of the hemisphere. So in the Cuba chapter, I write about Rafael Serra y Montalvo, who was an Afro-Cuban journalist and politician who was very interested in and pointed to the contributions of Tuskegee.
as a model of interracial philanthropic support for Black education in post emancipation Cuba. And then there's Jean-Pierre Smars, who was the foremost Haitian intellectual of the 20th century, who was a father of the Negritude movement, who visited Tuskegee for two weeks in 1904, after the World's Fair of that year, and wanted to take that mode of education back to Haiti because he understood that Haiti was a
a primarily agricultural country, right? And so he wanted to ensure that he wanted to use the Tuskegee model of education to uplift the Haitian peasantry. And so I write about all that was promising and fraught, right, about that particular project, especially leading up to and following, immediately following the US occupation of Haiti in the early
20th century. And then finally, plot three is about Tuskegee students, right? So I'll just say that one of the ways that I said earlier that I'm not interested in recuperating Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee, but in reconsidering them, right? And so one of the ways that I do that is I look, I think about the way, what Tuskegee meant for other black intellectuals. So that's what plot two was attempting to do.
but also what did Tuskegee mean for its students? And this was really important to me because I'm a teacher, I'm a professor, I sit in a classroom with students all the time. And it became, and of course I was once a student myself at a historically black college. And so it became clear to me that, you when I looked at the work of someone like Marcus Garvey,
Jarvis McInnis (48:32.326)
who was very much inspired by Booker T. Washington, but completely mistranslated and misinterpreted what Booker T. Washington, his vision for Black futures, it became clear to me that, a minute, the student story is a really important story to tell because it gives us another sense of the significance of Tuskegee beyond what Booker T. Washington ever could have imagined or meant.
PJ Wehry (48:51.371)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (49:00.438)
I sit in a classroom all the time and I offer my interpretations of certain texts and certain figures and I give my well-thought-out opinions and well-studied observations about texts under consideration. And my students have a choice about whether or not they accept that, right? Or they...
or they challenge it, right? Or they think about it a little bit differently than I do and so forth and so on. So I wanted to capture that part of the Tuskegee story as well, because Tuskegee is not just what Booker T. Washington or the faculty or the staff, right, projected to the world. It's also what its students did. So in that third plot of the book, I write about...
There's a chapter five that focuses on the students from different parts of the black diaspora and the so the US South but also Cuba Haiti, Puerto Rico Jamaica and and and and Guyana and so I attempt to you know demonstrate just how global the institution was with a particular focus on on the Caribbean and the in the Western Hemisphere and then chapters Six seven and eight focus on
Claude McKay, who one of the foremost sort of theorists of Black transnationalism and diaspora studies in the early part of the 20th century, who came to Tuskegee to study agronomy. And what he wanted to be an agricultural instructor in back home in Jamaica. So I show how Tuskegee made that type of student migration network possible.
And then there's Zora Neale Hurston, who did not study at Tuskegee, but was educated at a school that was founded by a Tuskegee graduate in Eatonville, Florida. So she's a Tuskegee student once removed. And then there's Marcus Garvey, who did not attend Tuskegee at all, but read Booker T. Washington's writings, especially up from slavery, and kind of understood himself as a
PJ Wehry (50:50.986)
Okay.
Jarvis McInnis (51:06.254)
as a kind of self-proclaimed student of Washington and someone who was going to, you know, take up the mantle of race leadership once Washington passed away in 1915. And so that student story is the kind of, is at the heart of plot three of the book and gives us another way of understanding, you know, Tuskegee's international influence, but also
how the institution and most educational institutions, right, are, they exceed their missions through the lives and the political desires and political beliefs of their students. And so we would not have something like a Harlem Renaissance or a new Negro movement. Some of the people who contributed to that, like Hurston, like McKay, like Garvey, were,
informed by and influenced by Tuskegee and, you know, in the scholarship, don't talk about Tuskegee as having had that impact. We typically think about Harlem Renaissance as a kind of rejection of the Tuskegee model of education, the Tuskegee model of racial uplift. And I'm saying, no, no, no, Tuskegee made this possible. what we have to recognize is that its students are, because they're living in a different moment, in a different age, right, they are
PJ Wehry (52:10.197)
Yeah.
Jarvis McInnis (52:29.902)
their political desires, their ideas about aesthetics, their ideas about the progress of the race are shifting to accommodate this new period.
PJ Wehry (52:48.043)
I'm a little frustrated because I have so many more questions, but I want to be respectful of your time. let me let me ask this. For someone one, thank you. That was phenomenal, especially I mean, even thinking about making land a character and how that really resists capitalism, exploitation of people and land. Anyways, but that's I feel like if I ask that question, then that's like another like 30 minutes. So that's so.
Jarvis McInnis (52:52.078)
Okay.
Jarvis McInnis (53:08.014)
That's right.
Jarvis McInnis (53:13.804)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (53:17.087)
But thank you, there's a lot to chew on there. There's a lot to chew on about a beginning, middle, and present with plot one, plot two, and plot three. But for someone who's listened to us for the last hour, listened to you kind of expound on this, besides buying and reading your excellent book, which of course I would encourage everyone to do, but besides buying and reading your excellent book, what would you recommend?
Jarvis McInnis (53:38.328)
I'm
PJ Wehry (53:44.363)
somebody do after listening to this, whether it's go read something else or go meditate on something or go do something. What would you recommend to someone who's listened to this?
Jarvis McInnis (53:56.686)
That's a wonderful question. I'll take a moment to think about that.
Jarvis McInnis (54:19.052)
I'd encourage listeners to find your closest historically Black college or university and take a Take a visit to those campuses and to read up on the histories of those campuses, to make a donation to those campuses.
PJ Wehry (54:33.994)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (54:42.045)
Yeah, yeah.
Jarvis McInnis (54:43.31)
because they continue to be underfunded by state governments, by the federal government, and so forth and so on. And they have such rich, important, and proud histories. And one of the things that I, you might recall, PJ, a few months ago, a plantation was burned in, caught on fire in Louisiana. And it was one of the largest plantations in the state, one of the largest remaining ones.
And that plantation was, it was so striking to me that when you, but unsurprising, when we think about the afterlife of the plantation, right, what I argue in the book is that the plantation remains a kind of economically viable institution to this very day, right? And what I mean by that those plantation sites, those plantation tours, the Lara plantation, et cetera, et cetera, they continue to make money off the history of slavery and what they often do,
PJ Wehry (55:29.845)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (55:41.034)
is that they often whitewash the history of racial violence. They refer to the enslaved people who worked on those lands as workers or as servants and not as enslaved people who were there by force, people who were separated from their families, people who met the worst forms of violence than any of us can imagine.
possibly forms of violence that we can't even imagine, right? And so there's a way that that history of the plantation, that continuation of the plantation is what takes up a lot of space in media and popular culture. People are rightly outraged when they learn that people, you know.
PJ Wehry (56:13.556)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (56:33.314)
get married on plantations, right? And that you go to the website for the plantation that burned and you don't see any mention of enslaved people, but you see the names of the 16 trees that have been, you know, named as, have entered the national registry or the state registry of old trees or something like that, right? It's quite infuriating, right? That no one is trying to do the work at that type of place.
to think about the people who were imprisoned there, who were incarcerated there, essentially, right? And so by thinking about the afterlife of the plantation and by thinking about what Black people did with these sites of violence, I'm trying to give us a different story. And it's the story of many of our historically Black colleges and universities, not all of them, right? So hopefully you can, when this comes, it will come up again.
It always comes up, this people being just outraged and rightfully outraged by the fact that plantations have this sort of benign presence in our contemporary society and we're not wrestling with that historical violence.
PJ Wehry (57:30.697)
Yeah.
Jarvis McInnis (57:53.038)
And it really becomes a kind of signifier, a metaphor for the ways that this country refuses to reckon with the violences of the past, the abuses of the past, right, against Black people, both during enslavement and after. And so I think that HBCUs, the HBCUs that were transformed from plantations, right, but even those that were not.
are a wonderful way to think about Black brilliance and ingenuity and resilience and the contributions that Black people have been able to make to this country and those things that they've been able to achieve in spite of their systemic oppression in this country.
And I think that they're a wonderful way to...
Jarvis McInnis (58:58.698)
understand that
Jarvis McInnis (59:10.018)
The afterlife of the plantation doesn't have to be one that white washes that particular history. The afterlife of the plantation can be a...
PJ Wehry (59:13.13)
Hmm.
Jarvis McInnis (59:23.156)
what these institutions ultimately symbolize, right? Which is educational and cultural resilience and innovation and ingenuity, right? And so if they want something to do, give money to those institutions. I'm going to make a plug for Tougaloo College, my own mother, and I'm going to make a plug for Tuskegee, right? Which is the subject of my book.
PJ Wehry (59:33.547)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (59:38.569)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jarvis McInnis (59:51.992)
But you can go there and just see what the ways that Black folks have been able to make a way out of no way, are continuing to make a way out of no way, and how you can contribute to that making a way out of no way so that we won't, these institutions won't always be in those kinds of positions. They're proud histories, they're rich histories. So learn about those histories and contribute to their betterment and improvement. Yes.
PJ Wehry (01:00:18.571)
What a great, it's such an actionable way to end. Dr. McInnis, thank you so much. It's been a joy having you on today.
Jarvis McInnis (01:00:26.082)
Thank you so much PJ. I really appreciate your time.