We may have left the plantation, but the plantation never left us! In this episode Brendane and Alyssa unpack afterlives, the plantation, futurity, and the singularity that continues to shape the present: slavery. In our introduction we take a moment to remember the late Dr. Steven Gregory, Professor of Anthropology and the inaugural Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
What’s The Word? Afterlife. Through the work of Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, we give a brief overview of what people mean when they talk about the “afterlives” of slavery (or other systems or structures).
What We’re Reading Plantation Futures by Katherine McKittrick. Both of the Daughters had this essay on their exam lists so it was a treat to read! We discuss the ways the plantation is still with us, simultaneously holding the history of racial violence and the key to possibilities for Black life, the co-construction of place and identity, the plot and the plantation, and other kinds of afterlives.
What In the World?! Critiquing the Plantationocene, Border Patrol and Black Asylum Seekers, Missing White Women Syndrome. We talk about how the attention to multispecies and regionalization of the plantation flattens difference and erases Black feminist studies of the plantation, the attention to the object (the whip) and the event (border patrol chasing asylum seekers) serve to distract us from the deeper historical and political pattern, and a brief foray into Missing White Women Syndrome.
Zora’s Daughters Podcast: Season Two, Episode Three
Co-Hosts: Brendane Tynes and Alyssa James
Title: 600 Years A Slave
Total Length 1:10:30
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[00:00:27] BRENDANE: Hey y’all welcome back to Zora’s Daughter’s, the podcast where we discuss popular culture with a Black, feminist, anthropological lens. I’m Brendane and I use she/her/hers pronouns
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[00:00:37] ALYSSA: Bel ti bonjou tout moun ! Just kidding [laughter] This is Alyssa, I also use she/her pronouns. And if you’re wondering what I just said, I just said “good morning everyone” in Martinican Creole because I am recording from Martinique. Yay!
[00:00:55] BRENDANE: Period. Period.
[00:00:56] ALYSSA: [Laughter] I arrived last week for a preliminary research trip. Just trying to make connections with people which is next to impossible to do via email. I don’t know what it is about folks here, they won’t respond to your emails no matter how much you try. But if you track them down and get them on the phone, they are super helpful. So, I’ve traded in ambulance sirens for weed whackers. So, if you hear that [laughter] in the background, that’s what’s happening. If you hear birds chirping, waves crashing, just let it relax you, lull you into suggestiveness [laughter].
[00:01:38] BRENDANE: I wish man, I wish. I am jealous. Honestly, truly. Because I’m sitting in this Baltimore fall weather. I’m not wrapped up in the blanket that I was wrapped up in a few minutes ago that my grandma would be jealous of. She would be jealous of this blanket. But I’m so happy that things are moving for you, and I know that you’ve been anxious about starting your project and just getting the ball rolling but I’m so excited to see what comes from this academically, what comes from it spiritually. I feel like the waves and the birds are healing, so [sigh]. [Laughter] Before we get a little too far off track, we wanted to talk about today’s episode which is all about afterlife, the plantation, futurity, the present and the singularity that continues to shape the present which is slavery. And we also wanted to take a pause to honor Dr. Steven Gregory who was a professor in our department who unexpectedly passed. Steven was an amazing scholar and mentor who his academic work and his personal support of students from undergraduate to graduate and beyond created pathways for many Black students at Columbia. So, thank you so much Steven for your generosity, your kindness, your patience, and your presence.
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[00:03:14] ALYSSA: Let’s also give a huge thank you to everyone who has donated to the podcast or engaged with us on Instagram and Twitter. We wouldn’t be doing this without you. So, if you would like to donate, please head to our website, zorasdaughters.com. We also love non-monetary support, so leave us a rating and review on apple podcasts and follow us at Zorasdaughters on Instagram or Zoras_Daughters on Twitter. Also, we really find that the way people hear about our podcast the most is actually through word of mouth. So please share our podcast with your friends, passive aggressively send an episode to one of your workplace allies [laughter], or just casually name drop us in everyday conversation. It would be much appreciated.
[00:04:00] BRENDANE: For sure. And for those of you that have left a review, thank you, thank you, thank you. Alyssa and I actually did a little—we had a little moment where we paused and read reviews. Y’all are just so affirming so just thank you. We do see those, and we are just very appreciative. So, with that, let’s get into today’s episode. Alyssa, what is the word for today?
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[00:04:30] ALYSSA: Alright our word for today is “afterlife.” And we’re not technically talking about what happens or where you go after death, although in some ways we are. We’re talking about circumstances where scholars talk about the afterlives of some system or structure. It’s the world or worlds to come.
[00:04:50] BRENDANE: Right, and I do want to start a bit with religion because—for those of you who don’t know—I, during my youth, was in seminary school for a couple years. So, things tend to always start there for me.
[00:04:00] ALYSSA: Brendane actually has like five degrees [laughter].
[00:05:00] BRENDANE: I’ve lived multiple lives in true Gemini fashion [laughter]. I think that starting with religion and a religious understanding of afterlife might help ground this conversation. So, afterlife, for many of you are familiar with Judeo-Christian teachings, refers to the place where your soul—which is defined as a distinct entity from your mind and your body—enters after physical death. And for protestant Christians who adhere to the bible you believe that you only have two options, heaven where God and Ronald Reagan is, or hell. And whether we acknowledge it or not, this logic structures how we think about the afterlife in secular spaces. There’s this assumption in the afterlife that the before wherever the life—the before life has ended and that the afterlife is the reward for however you lived in the before. So, there’s also this belief that there’s no going back once you’ve died. The death is the end. And so, what I want us to do as we talk about afterlife is to trouble this by thinking about indigenous, African and other cultural teachings that describe death as an ending versus the end. And so, in my opinion, it’s easier to think about afterlife as we’ll talk about it today if you recognize it along the ends of reincarnation or even ancestral influence or something akin to that. It’s not just the remnants of the before that we atone for or live in the aftermath of but also a continuation of it in some form.
[00:06:47] ALYSSA: Interesting. So, in our discipline, studies of the afterlife typically focused on different cultural burial and mourning practices. And anthropologists would travel the world to see how others physically die and how they are remembered by those who survive. And that knowledge was often used to other different cultures as primitive. So, our interest in the afterlife today or “afterlife” is not focused on a physical death and remembrance rituals—though that is important work—you know, like I said earlier, we’re defining what folx might mean when they discuss the afterlife of a system or a structure. So, “afterlife” literally means future life, or life after death, or the later parts of someone’s life. And so, the prefix “after”—and here’s my little word nerd moment [laughter]—it stems from the old English word that means in imitation of. And so usually, when people talk about the afterlife of something, for example the afterlife of slavery, they’re looking into all the ways the transatlantic slave trade continues. And so, Black studies scholars have examined the many afterlives of slavery in In The Wake, which we discussed in episode thirteen, Christina Sharpe calls slavery, the middle passage, and all the violences therein, a singularity, a single point from which infinite possibilities arise. And this is all related to physics and stuff like that, so you all have to listen to the episode if you want more on that. And so, there’s no concrete way to count how slavery has shaped the present though the evidence of it is everywhere. You can learn more about what we’re talking about, the episode is called “The Climate of Anti-Blackness,” go check that out. You can pause, come back, it’s all good [laughter].
[00:08:35] BRENDANE: Right, we’ll still be here [laughter]. So, Sharpe is drawing heavily on Saidiya Hartman’s work among others to conceptualize how we live in the wake or in the afterlife of enslavement. And I know many of you would be very excited for us to do a run through of Saidiya Hartman’s entire body of work. I will tell you now, it is impossible to do that.
[00:00:02] ALYSSA: Yes, I think we have another year of the podcast before I feel like I can really enter [laughter].
[00:08:00] BRENDANE: It’s impossible, we do not desire to do that kind of injustice to her work in our What’s the Word section by doing that, but we will also just give a brief overview of some of the key concepts of the afterlife of slavery to ground our discussion today. So, again, very brief. She has an entire corpus of work for you to explore. Um, but we first encounter Hartman’s theorization of what I would call the psychological, legal, libidinal, and social and sociological impacts of slavery in Scenes of Subjection, which was published in 1997. And in Scenes of Subjection she reads the mundane violence of enslavement to highlight it’s true terror and she also discusses how that terror persists today. So, rather than look to the spectacular things like, “three enslaved people were whipped today and blah, blah, blah,” she reads these kinds of more mundane moments that are usually gendered to render a theory of enslavement. So, she talks about slavery as not just being this horrific event that forcibly displaced and dispossessed millions of Africans and their descendants.
Slavery literally changed the world. The way we see the world and the way we see and interact with each other. So Hartman also writes in an essay entitled The Time of Slavery, where she’s relaying her experiences going back to the door of no return, being at the slave castles in Ghana, the relationship to slavery over time. She rights, dispossession is itself an inheritance which tethers us to that event which is slavery. Racial subjection, incarceration, impoverishment, second class citizenship, this is the legacy of slavery that still haunts us. So, slavery left behind socioeconomic poverty largely determined by race, mass incarceration and surveillance which is largely determined by race, inadequate schooling for students of color, poor living conditions in ghettos, reservations, and cities, and so much more. But I’m gonna stop there because I know we’re gonna get into it later in the episode.
[00:11:26] ALYSSA: Right. I would even say that slavery was transformed into those conditions right. I’’s not like the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery, it more so moved it to these different sites, right. It kind of spatialized slavery in different ways. And spatialized – oop, that is related to our next segment [laughter]. So, one of the ways of thinking about the afterlife of an event is to think about its legacy. And legacies are all the ways that we don’t die, all the ways that we remain. There are many other afterlives that scholars study: the afterlife of industrial capitalism, the afterlife of Shakespeare’s sonnets; the digital afterlife, the agricultural afterlife, the afterlife of the Cold War, [laughter] they’re talking about different things than what we’re talking about but, you know, people talk about it [laughter].
And so, all of these—this is not a real thing, we’re just calling it this as a gloss—all of these “afterlife studies,” if you will, focus on what happens after the event. And so, scholars might ask questions like in what ways does that event’s legacy persist, what has changed, how does naming this time as the afterlife of x event mark progress, what does progress mean if the legacy of that event is violent to marginalized people, what does this mean for the future? Some may believe that the future is overdetermined by the past and its afterlives—which means they are inescapable—but that may not be the case all the time. And so, while legacies, afterlives, and futures are intertwined, afterlives do not necessarily predetermine the future. And I think that is again, an excellent segue into our next segment, What We’re Reading.
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[00:13:22] ALYSSA: Brendane, what are we reading today?
[00:13:24] BRENDANE: We are reading “Plantation Futures” by Katherine McKittrick, who actually visited our department—so hey, hopefully when you hear this, hey girl! [Laughter] Katherine McKittrick is Professor in Gender Studies with joint appointments in Cultural Studies and Geography at Queen’s University in Canada. She received her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies at York University. Her writing centers Black life as empirical, experiential, spatial and analytical processes, while also drawing attention to how Black creative texts are expressive of anticolonial politics. These themes are addressed in her books Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle and Dear Science and Other Stories, as well as her edited volume and contribution to the book Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Her research has explored the work of Sylvia Winter, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Robbie McCauley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Willie Bester, Nas, Octavia Butler, Jimi Hendrix, Drexciya, Édouard Glissant, and Dionne Brand. The essay we’re reading today, again entitled Plantation Futures, was published in 2013 in the journal Small Axe.
[00:14:4] ALYSSA: Yes. I also went to York for my masters so I’m even more delighted to be reading this essay which also, of course, was on my exam list. In this essay, McKittrick draws attention to the ways the past configurations of the plantation tracks “toward the prison and the impoverished and the destroyed city sectors and consequently brings into sharp focus the ways the plantation is an ongoing locus of anti-Black violence and death.” Put simply the plantation racially and economically structured the future which is our present. And so she draws on Sylvia Winter and Dionne Brand to show how the plantation as a site of oppression and resistance gives us the opportunity to reimagine or envision a decolonial future. She demonstrates that because the plantation is still with us it simultaneously holds the history of racial violence and the key to possibilities for Black life.
[00:15:39] BRENDANE: You know, this essay was also on my exam list [laughter] I thought it was very cool to come back to it and like see my old, distressed margin notes from like when I had to write my exam essays.
[00:15:51] ALYSSA: Same. I was reading it on the plane and people were probably like, “it already has highlights and has chicken scratch all over it, why is she reading it again.” [Laughter]
[00:15:58] BRENDANE: You know, it’s like you always gotta come back to things. You always see something different and new.
[00:16:05] ALYSSA: That’s true.
[00:16:06] BRENDANE: There’s a lesson in that too. For the baby scholars. You’re always gonna come back to stuff. But anyway, back to the subject at hand [laughter] McKittrick begins with the African burial ground in New York City—which we talked about in episode fifteen at about sixteen minutes—to think about the way that the city, which is a place that is not traditionally thought of as a site of slavery or the plantation, actually opens up a spatial continuity between the living and the dead, between science and storytelling, and between past and present. And that was a direct quote. The presence of this burial ground in downtown Manhattan tells us in a material and symbolic sense of the ways both plantation logics and modes of survival are still with us. She asks, “if the plantation at least in part ushered in how and where we live now, and thus contributes to the racial contours of uneven geographies, how might we give it a different future?
[00:17:04] ALYSSA: It’s really interesting. I think that there’s something hopeful—although, I mean, I know that there are scholars who have troubled the idea of hope—but you know there’s something hopeful or maybe optimistic about this formulation. But it also made me wonder is there a danger in saying, “hey this site of anti-Black violence is also responsible for the things that are special about us as a group.” You know, it seems like it could be turned around to support those wonderful white supremacist fantasies about how Africans needed to be enslaved so they could be civilized. And things like that, you know. So, I think the question that I was thinking about while I was rereading this was, you know, what are the stakes of insisting that plantation geographies have a role in imagining possibilities for life? Right? It seems to imply that what oppresses us also frees us or can free us and I don’t, I don’t know how I feel about that.
[00:18:04] BRENDANE: Right, it’s—I mean it’s not a dialectic, I feel like people overuse that word but it’s definitely like a paradox of some sort.
[00:18:14] ALYSSA: Yeah, which I mean I think is kind of one of the things that is emblematic of Blackness too, right, is this paradox.
[00:18:22] BRENDANE: I absolutely agree and that was also one of the thoughts that I had about this kind of hopeful, as you say, or optimistic formulation. And I think coming back to it this time older and less stressed, I’m like, “oh, this is actually kind of hopeful, this is very interesting.” That kind of reminded me of where my childhood Pastor was like, “Thank God for slavery because without it we wouldn’t have Jesus.”
[00:18:47] ALYSSA: No, no [laughter].
[00:18:49] BRENDANE: No. As a child, you know, it’s like “uhhhhh” [laughter]. You know, as a child, I couldn’t understand at the time what disturbed me about it. But now as an adult I definitely know what was so disturbing about it for me. Um, and I would say for my Pastor, right, it was like the silver lining of slavery was that she could now go to heaven, which I’m sure was not unlike the beliefs of our ancestors, right, who were like, you know, “damn, I’m doing this, but at least I’m gonna get a good reward at the end.” Back to that afterlife I mentioned earlier, right? But I think kind of—not similarly, but along those lines, right, what McKittrick is pushing us to do here is to hold the truth that slavery was unimaginably violent. But in that violence enslaved African people and their descendants still lived. So, it’s not that enslavement totally eclipsed all possibilities for life, right? There was still joy. There were still happiness, resistance in slavery. It just determined the constraints of those possibilities. And so, I read this as McKittrick’s way of saying don’t put me in the camp of people who think Blackness is all about death, honey, I’m living life over here. Which there is a camp of people. But again, I think for me the question is like what is life in confinement and how is that better and/or different then death?
[00:20:16] ALYSSA: Right and I think that this formulation is actually so much more nuanced than the whole like resistance and resilience kind of ideas that that come out of a lot of certain scholars and studies of slavery and the plantation and things like that. So, definitely, let’s just say this is this isn’t a critique, more just thoughts that I, you know, that I had. But what I’m really excited to talk about is the section of the essay entitled “Uninhabitable.” This was the one that kind of like blew my mind. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is so good” [laughter]. And then just as a little side note, we’re going to be talking about—in this section, she talks about the capital “M” man. If you haven’t read Sylvia Winter’s 82—is it 82 or 62? I don’t know it’s a very long paper—
[00:21:14] BRENDANE: Long as hell.
[00:21:15] ALYSSA: —but super, super informative. If you haven’t read “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”—and there’s a longer title to it, but you know—or if you haven’t listened to episode thirteen of our podcast, around minute eleven we explain a little bit more about the capital “M” man. Man refers to the kind of human that has personhood, so it’s the kind of human from which the subject of the Black is excluded. And so, when I say man, or if you know if we say it today or in other episodes, just think the fullest version of humanity. So, in this section McKittrick talks about the way that colonial imaginative geographies were cast onto the people who lived in those spaces, and those people are the damned of the earth in two ways. And let me just say that this part of the essay really had me thinking of Frantz Fanon and The Wretched of the Earth, and how in French it’s Les Damnés de la Terre. And now you could also call it like the damned of the earth, right? But people translate—it’s translated as the wretched.
[00:22:17] BRENDANE: It probably got Christian-ified, you know [laughter].
[00:22:21] ALYSSA: So yes, those people are the damned of the earth in two ways. One, they are geographically segregated. So, for example, the way that we refer to the global South and all of the connotations that come along with it. And then they are condemned to otherness, right? So, they’re excluded from the category of man. And these ideas about the geography become bound and projected onto the people who inhabit those places. So, Europeans believed that Africa and the Americas were geologically newer than Europe, and so the people must be underdeveloped as well. Their ideas, their thought processes their rituals, all those kinds of things, they were primitive and underdeveloped. And so similarly there were descriptions about the Caribbean islands—you know here I am in one—they’re being wild and untamed, and so the indigenous peoples who inhabited those places must be too. So, they need it to be civilized, thus the discourse, not my opinion or idea. And so, the thought process there is that to survive in such barbaric, for example, barbaric conditions precludes humanity. Nobody civilized could live in a place like that. And so, she writes “in our present moment some live in the unlivable and to live in the unlivable condemns the geographies of marginalized to death over and over again. Those who have lived outside what is considered normal and those who continue to inhabit the uninhabitable are so perversely outside the western bourgeois conception of what it means to be human that their geographies are rendered or come to be inhuman, dead, and dying.” And so, I think this point will become important in our next segment so hold on to that one.
[00:24:11] BRENDANE: Jot that down [laughter]. Um, it’s so interesting. It’s like ’cause the way that the Caribbean is, or certain places in the Caribbean are framed now is like places where you relax and let go and be, you know, the whole tourist vibe of things, which to me means that to be civilized means to suffer. But you know, I digress. I digress. It’s interesting and what I also find interesting in this section is to think about the ways that land and geography become ways to kind of naturalize differences among different races of people. And so, we can also think about the way that this happens in reverse, right? So, when Black people move into a neighborhood that it used to be all white, right, property values tend to decrease. And it’s in this way that these colonial logics are maintained. Black geographies or emptied of life and Blackness kind of sucks the life out of particular spaces. But what this does is allow that any space that’s inhabited by Black people or those who are racialized as Black to become uninhabitable and therefore colonizable. I know that’s a little twisted logic. It’s a little twisted but I’m gonna explain.
[00:25:33] ALYSSA: No one ever said that white supremacy was anything but untwisted [laughter].
[00:25:37] BRENDANE: You know. It’s the people who invent rationality who have the irrational things, but you know.
[00:25:47] ALYSSA: Yeah, they make some logical leaps for sure
[00:25:48] BRENDANE: Some logical leaps were made. But just through this process, right, where you say look, this is where the Black people are at, nobody should live here. No human should live here, so we’re going to extract them, right? And then extract the resources from that place. And that is the process that made the plantation possible. But what’s also fucked up about this, right, as I’ve said, is that wild Black spaces are deemed uninhabitable. They are also the sites of the extraction of extreme wealth, cultural capital, and labor. So, I remember being in class with Saidiya Hartman where she called it “negative extraction,” and I’m not sure if that’s her term or she pulled it from somewhere else, but there’s this belief right that somehow Blackness is nothing. But anti-Black systems are literally able to extract everything from Blackness. So, if we think about this in like gentrification cycles, right, where we have white people that inhabit a space, Black people come because they’re working there, they live there etcetera, white people flee, decay sets in, but it’s still cool, right? So white people come back to bring back value or restore safety, whatever they say, right. They come back to the place and then it becomes a place of extreme value where they’re used to be none right. It used to be the place you avoid. And this is based on this kind of geological or geographical, excuse me, construction of the inhabitable.
[00:27:18] ALYSSA: I mean, Harlem is such, such a good example of that right? Like that’s where, when I’m not here [laughter]. God y’all, I’m still excited about being here. You don’t even understand.
[00:27:34] BRENDANE: Look, I’m trying to teleport.
[00:27:36] ALYSSA: But it is, I mean Harlem is a really good example of that. It actually used to be inhabited by poor whites. Black folks moved in. Of course, it was, you know then the site of the Harlem Renaissance. It was just Black people living here, no one, no one cared. No one visited. No one came here for tourism or anything. And now white people are moving back in, or are moving in, I should say, ’cause it’s not really the same.
[00:28:05] BRENDANE: But yeah, they’re taking tours to show like “oh, this is where the Black people used to be.” I like walked up on a group taking a tour one time and I was just like do I hit you with my umbrella or do I wait? [Laughter] I didn’t hit anyone. I’ve never hit anybody.
[00:28:23] ALYSSA: That’s good. That’s a good start, I think. And of course, you know we can. We can mention it. We won’t get into it today, but you know, one of the things we can talk about is how Columbia is complicit, has been complicit in this gentrification process of Harlem.
[00:28:40] BRENDANE: Which was Steven Gregory’s last book.
[00:28:45] ALYSSA: Yeah. Um, but one thing I did want to add to what you were saying earlier is that part of the way—and this is again based on these, you know, European philosophical logics—one way that land has value or procures value is through labor, right? That’s like John Locke’s whole idea, right? And so why is it that—or what I should say is that, when these like white explorers, we’ll say, came upon the new world, you know, when they “discovered” the Americas, they were like, “oh, this place has not been cultivated. It hasn’t been civilized, everything is just running wild, so these people have not labored. They’ve not performed any labor to make this land valuable.” And that was one of the things that also made it colonizable, right. So that is something to think about in the way that like value is given through labor or cultivation of the land and things like that which is something I’m working on in my in my own project.
[00:30:03] BRENDANE: Period [crosstalk].
[00:30:04] ALYSSA: In terms of terms of thinking about identity and you know how people come to be from a place that they were imported to, say. Anyhow, my multiple asides.
[00:30:23] BRENDANE: Lots to say.
[00:30:24] ALYSSA: Um, yes, finally. Finally, we’re like in my wheelhouse, you know, I feel good about it [laughter]. But of course, she’s not the first to discuss the mutual construction of place and identity. Edward Said has a chapter in Orientalism titled “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations.” So, some other text that came to mind and that you all can check out—and it’s definitely going to demonstrate my regional bias, but they deal with this question more extensively. You can check out Consuming the Caribbean by Mimi Sheller, Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean by Christopher Church. Just a super interesting book about how citizenship was denied to people know French Caribbean because of all of their “natural disasters” and the way that like the islands could not be civilized and so they couldn’t be French, the people living there could not be French in the same ways as people on the mainland. And then also Kathryn Yusoff’s book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None also speaks to the geological.
[00:31:31] BRENDANE: There is so much work on this y’all, I will not pretend to be an expert. My expertise is more in like the US city construction, but yes, so much work. And what McKittrick explains, is that the inception of the plantation, which she talks about, basically how it was an early model for a contemporary urban life. So, it, the plantation, was connected to transportation networks for moving bodies and commodities, right? Most well-off plantations were connected to rivers or small creeks where they could move good to easily. They had sites of commerce which were places like the slave auction block. Uh, places of residence which were where the enslaved stayed, as well as other members of the plantation, right? And also, a way for forced laborers to feed themselves. So, in addition to whatever rations they would receive from what they grew in order to prop up the economy of the US and beyond, right? They also, many slaves also had their own separate plot where they grew their own food like yam. Yam is the biggest one, I think, that I can think of right now. So that actually brings us nicely into McKittrick’s discussion of Sylvia Wynter’s 1971 essay, which is Novel and History, Plot and Plantation. I bet y’all didn’t know that novels and plantations are connected, and Sylvia Winter actually makes that connection.
[00:33:06] ALYSSA: It’s a six-page essay. I think it’s six pages or so, but it is thick, it is dense. So, take your time with it, read it multiple times
[00:33:16] BRENDANE: But it’s like it’s definitely illuminating. For Wynter, the plot, which is a small garden where the enslaved were able to cultivate their own food, was a site of Black resistance and creativity that existed within the plantation. And so, the plot also refers to—for those of you who remember high school English, right—the plot is also, what happens in a novel, right, or in fictional books and both of these things actually arose at the same time, right? Because a lot of novels were set in plantations. So, before the novel, most books were related to the Bible in some ways. So, they had this more of a like a nonfiction kind of thing. But the novel really rose with the plantation. So, if you think about it, plot actually has a double meaning, and McKittrick wants to point our attention to the ways that secretive histories can be found in the plots. Secretive histories is Winters word for kind of the history of the plot and kind of the secretive, I guess I’ll call it, the secrets that are kept from us about the ways that people resisted during slavery. And so, both plots on the plantation and in a novel create the space for things that would be considered inconceivable during slavery, which are storytelling and survival. Both plots on the plantation and in the novel create the spaces for things that would be considered inconceivable during slavery, storytelling and survival, right, which happens on physical and cultural levels. And if we bring in the African burial ground as another kind of plot in the secretive history right, we can see another place where African religious or funerary practices were maintained. And so, Winter also argues this right that these secretive histories also lay the groundwork for conceptualization of African indigeneity but that’s a hot topic and we won’t go too deep into that here.
[00:35:23] ALYSSA: [Laughter] Not today, not today, but yes. So, there’s a way in which the enslaved seizes spatial sites to make a life outside the plantation. Because also the plots were not just for feeding themselves, but they also did use some of what they grew to sell to earn money. So, people use that money to purchase their freedom. And so, the plot is figuratively fertile ground for the creative and geographic plotting and plot living that produce plantation futures. And so are present is the consequence of the plot and the plantation, a dichotomy that parallels creativity and survival and violence and domination, all of which created the conditions of possibility for black people in the Americas, in the present.
[00:36:06] BRENDANE: Right, which, I think brings us nicely to the final section of the essay, which is named after the title of the essay itself, “Plantation Futures,” where McKittrick discuss is Dionne Brand’s long poem Inventory. And in this poem, Brand describes and recounts racial violence and death across many continents that are connected through this kind of stream of anti-Black violence. Her recounting is an inventory of death and dying that pushes us to notice how we might have normalized counting bodies, in particularly in the city and in other urban environments. So McKittrick argues that this poem exemplifies a decolonial poetics that demands we engage ethically in the necro politics of our world. So, if you want to learn more about necro politics and episode six, “Deathcraft Country,” around minute 16 so we do our what’s the word? And fundamentally right, we must use this knowledge of the past right that is rooted in anti-Black violence of the plantation to transform our geographic practices and envision an alternate alternative future. So, if the plantation got us here right, it’s secretive histories can get us elsewhere. And I think I left the essay with the question of where is the elsewhere right? Where exactly does this take us? If we’re thinking about these secretive histories and plots that still fall within the legacy of the plantation, right? What are the possibilities for maroonage, a maroon afterlife, right? Or is that also included in this kind of plantation afterlife?
[00:37:48] ALYSSA: What is the literature I know that there’s—I know the literature on maroonage in kind of the Caribbean but what is it in the U.S., North American context. Because I think I think I tend to hear fugitivity more than maroonage.
[00:38:05] BRENDANE: Yeah, and I wonder. I don’t really know how to answer this question. I can only conjecture ’cause I know in South Carolina, like part of the Gullah Geechee—insert word here—is that basically, they were able to live in a place where white people could not live, so they were less surveilled, and so they were able to preserve a lot more of that indigenous African language because they were not surveilled as heavily. So, it was like a borderline kind of maroon thing. And I wonder if the fugitive thing comes is connected to the policing and surveillance versus like it was a lot harder to police people in the Caribbean and in South America than it is in the US. Or at least the policing looked very different on plantations. But I don’t know. If y’all know, let us know.
[00:38:52] ALYSSA: Yeah, definitely let us know. I think, you know, that that situation right there, that question of like fugitivity versus maroonage, it demonstrates that she’s really thinking with, you know, the anglophone plantation, the North American plantation. And then I think that this essay would look differently if it was someone who was working with like the French, Caribbean, Spanish Caribbean—boom losing my words y’all. So, I wonder how this how this essay or this idea of the plantation future, or you know, as you were talking about the afterlife of maroonage, you know, how that would look with someone with a different geographic specialty, right? But I think, you know, thinking back on what I was saying earlier about this optimism is, I read this essay with a working group and Mercy Solomon, who is a professor at Barnard. You know, what she said is that it really shows that capitalism sows the seeds of its own undoing. And I thought that was really powerful, as maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about it as like on the one hand there was oppression and then on the other hand there was resistance. But actually, the fact that the plantation had the plots in order to reduce the burden on the enslaver and on the slaver. That actually was one of the things that led to our resistance and our survival, and so that that in the end is what undid the plantation.
[00:40:32] BRENDANE: Yeah.
[00:40:34] ALYSSA: Something to think about [laughter].
[00:40:35] BRENDANE: Something to think about, right? I mean, as we sustain ourselves, right? That in some circles people preach that sustaining yourself is pushing back against this system. So that’s one way to think about it. And I think I capitalism is becoming undone right before I’ve even as it continuously tries to remake itself. Which I think leads us to our next segment, which is what? What in the world is going on?
[00:41:03] ALYSSA: [Crosstalk] What, what in the world?
[MUSIC]
[00:41:12] BRENDANE: What’s going on? What’s wrong alright?
[00:41:14] ALYSSA: [Sigh] I—Okay. Alright, so I feel like we can’t talk about the plantation without talking about the concept of the plantationocene. you know? I think it’s, ugh, I can’t believe I’m about to do this. But this is, you know, the plantationocene it has picked up a lot of traction. It has gained, you know, it’s been gaining popularity, particularly in the environmental space, environmental humanities. And so, it’s essentially the idea that our current environmental crisis is rooted in the logics of historical plantations. And so, it was coined at a panel that Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing were on, and so it’s supposed to be an alternative frame for thinking about the Anthropocene, which we discussed in episode four. So, they published the transcript of the panel that they were on. I think it’s in—I want to say Environmental Humanities, that might be wrong. That was the name of the journal. But so, they published the transcript and I read it ’cause everyone was like you have to, you know you should engage a little bit with the plantation of seen literature. Ah, I was very unsettled by this transcript.
[00:42:27] BRENDANE: Alright, I already have a feeling about where this is going. You said environmental studies and I was like I heard you, ready [laughter].
[00:42:32] ALYSSA: So yes. So, particularly when Nobu Ishikawa, who is an anthropologist at I believe the University of Kyoto, he said “to me plantations are just the slavery of plants.” Now Anna Tsing agreed and then Donna Haraway added “and microbes.”
[00:42:57] BRENDANE: I mean, that’s one way to be scientific about it, but—
[00:43:01] ALYSSA: I was like, “uhm.” Like I, I was shaken and I’m also not the—I’m definitely not the first to notice that. I remember probably earlier this year, Katherine, Katherine McKittrick also tweeted about it, she was like, “how has no one talked about this,” right? Um, and so I went to this plantationocene conference earlier this year. It was online y’all, worry not. And just the literature that has grown up around the concept for the most part, does not really engage with Black studies, Caribbean scholarship on the plantation, and it’s like, how, though, how, you know?
[00:43:41] BRENDANE: How? Make it make sense.
[00:43:42] ALYSSA: And so instead it does this kind of multispecies ontology thing where the labor of the unfree basically gets flattened and alighted into just one of the many life forms that were exploited, you know, enslaved on the plantation. Right?
[00:44:00] BRENDANE: Oh my God.
[00:44:01] ALYSSA: And so, it’s like [pause] okay, well yes. We’ll just leave it there. That’s one way, that’s one direction that the plantationocene work goes. But then there’s also, you know, more about the ways that plantations operated in a particular country so, there’s like a regional difference. Or, you know, there’s the questions about how plantations have made a “return,” which is interesting because as we just saw the plantation and its logics have never left us and have changed the world. The world as we know it. And so, there’s I mean, there’s this one talk at the conference about how the plantation and this particular country it didn’t endure materially, but it did symbolically. And I was like, “yeah? Yeah.”
[00:44:57] BRENDANE: Say more. Say more about that.
[00:44:59] ALYSSA: We know this. And so, I just, I don’t know. I hate to say it, but like, the plantation in plantation studies, it’s been Columbused. I haven’t—
[00:45:10] BRENDANE: Quite literally.
[00:45:11] ALYSSA: I know people haven’t talked about Columbusing in so long, but like, [laughter] this is it.
[00:45:23] BRENDANE: You know, I mean, “the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy,” or whatever Jesus said. It’s so interesting to me when bacteria and fungi and viruses—that might be a sensitive word now—are mentioned before people. That’s unfortunate, but also very typical. Again, environmental studies. This is a constant, constant issue in environmental studies.
[00:45:59] ALYSSA: And kind of this, you know, in many ways the multi species turn. Look, we’re not the first to say this or address this so [laughter] I am a little bit fearing for my life in saying all of this, but I mean, you know, even Habeas Viscus, that is something where you know he’s talking about the human, the more than human, the less than human, right? And so, this whole like human, nonhuman turn and all of these dichotomies and things like that still don’t encapsulate Blackness. Like they still manage to elide the subject of the black. So, definitely not the first to say this, but I’m just like why are we not—
[00:46:47] BRENDANE: And we won’t be the last.
[00:46:48] ALYSSA: —talking about it more [laughter]? And so actually. I mean, you know, speaking of other people who have critiqued this formulation, in our episode, “Basura en Fuego,” or sorry, “The World is Basura en Fuego,” that was episode four I believe. Yes, that’s what I said earlier. We read Axelle Karera’s essay [“Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics”] that critiques the conceptualization of the Anthropocene. There’s also a really good essay called “Anthropocene, Capitalocene,…Plantationocene? A Manifesto For Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises.” And that essay does a really good job of unpacking the way that this plantationocene scholarship is empty, essentially, without its engagement with Black geographic and ecological work. And particularly in the way that Black folks have been making kin and plotting. This is not new, and we just want you to know that. Mythri Jegathesan, she also published in a paper this year it’s called Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology’s “Regional Closets.” And that one is an essay that calls out the erasure of Black feminist work in plantation studies. And she shows how it is possible to think across regions without doing that.
[00:48:10] BRENDANE: Right because people seem to think that if it’s Black, it’s not universal, so it can only be hinted at or put into a footnote without actually citing the scholars. If the footnote is there at all, which no, no tea, no shade, but we tired of that, you know only tired. I wanted to go back to what you flagged earlier though about. The ways geographies are rendered inhuman and living in those unlivable places makes you deserving of death and the conditions that cause it as a way to help us think about border control agents and how they are on horseback whipping–and again, I know there’s a whole useless debate about whether the whips are real or not which is beside the point, whipping is in action, it’s not a tool [laughter]—that they’re whipping Haitians who are here seeking asylum.
[00:49:07] ALYSSA: Yeah, I mean the whole, “those are not whips, they’re holding the reins.” It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.
[00:49:13] BRENDANE: So how you hold the—how does the reign have a different color and shape, okay, from the thing that’s holding the horse [crosstalk]?
[00:49:20] ALYSSA: But like, you know, I think it’s interesting that the fascination and the attention becomes the whip, right? It becomes the whip. It becomes the event, but not actually the underlying structures that are causing these issues. Like people are always like, people are always super focused on the event which only became an event because something happened that Biden did not expect, which was not the fact that these Border Patrol agents were rounding up and deporting Haitians. That was totally in his plan. What he didn’t expect to happen was that it would be caught on camera. And so that is the reason that it is an event. But this has been going on for a while, right? And it’s like not just in this instance, on that day, right?
It’s like there is an entire history of the mistreatment of Haitians in the past throughout history that has been carried into our present, right, and particularly by America. And so, I just I really want to say plainly, the only thing about the situation that wasn’t supposed to happen, was it being photographed. And so, Edwidge Danticat, she is a Haitian author. She wrote an essay for The New Yorker, and so she explained that the U.S. Embassy in Haiti tweeted a message from President Biden. It was even written, translated into Haitian Creole. And it said, “I can say quite clearly, don’t come.”
[00:51:13] BRENDANE: Well.
[00:51:13] ALYSSA: Yeah. So, this is this is their plan, right? Like this has been going on since the time of Trump instigated by Obama, but I’ll talk about that a little bit later. And now they’re trying to make Guantanamo Bay a migrant holding facility [sigh].
[00:00:00] BRENDANE: So, in addition to it being a torture chamber? Okay.
[00:00:00] ALYSSA: And what’s interesting is that Guantanamo Bay actually originally held Haitian migrants. After the fall, after one of the many falls instigated by the U.S. of course of the Haitian government, and they were again a lot of people fleeing the country. They held them in Guantanamo Bay and then it became what it did following the war on terrorism. So again, we’re seeing these repetitions, right. These repetitions, these afterlives—
[00:52:12] BRENDANE: The backlash lashing back
[00:52:13] ALYSSA: Exactly. And the way that history folds in on itself, and you know, continues into our present and our future.
[00:52:26] BRENDANE: This is real life. This is real life. You were just like, “are you kidding me?” No, this is like literally real life. I think the photographs were definitely intentional, like someone was like, “we need to capture this moment,” but I don’t think the mass circulation was. Like maybe them then becoming a public knowledge was not necessarily intentional, but I do think that the taking of them were. Like I think of it as like the descendant of like the lynching picnic postcard, which was definitely meant to be circulated, right? Or like a cousin to the police killing video, if you will. And these photographs serve as a visual reminder of the myriad ways that slavery comes to us again and again. Which I’m going to pause here and say, please, I know you all—some of you are doing it with good intentions but stop sharing these images of the Haitian people getting whipped up. And maybe it’ll help y’all understand why I say that if I break it down like this, right, seeing Black people get brutalized and/or murdered is actually pleasurable for the people who want to do that but can’t. Or people who want to do that and are doing it, right. It does not incite empathy, true outrage, or change. It actually reaffirms the racial hierarchies that place us at the bottom of this kind of like as the always already dead or dying. And so all they did when they saw the tweet storms and the pictures about the whips and the whippings, right, was they just took the whips away and they took the horses away.
[00:54:08] ALYSSA: Temporarily. It’s temporarily suspended.
[00:54:13] BRENDANE: Temporarily. They would actually rather remove inanimate objects and horses from the violence, right, then actually give Haitians peaceful asylum and I think we need to sit with that.
[00:54:25] ALYSSA: Or actually go and provide aid and proper aid, not where you create a cholera epidemic or where you take control of their gold reserves [laughter].
[00:54:39] BRENDANE: Destabilize governments. Even this whole entire idea of borders and Border Patrol, in their most modern sense, stemmed from plantation logics. Right, one had to mark where and when the enslaved would be free. And then that border had to be heavily patrolled in order to keep the captive. So, as you were saying, right, ain’t nothing new. It ain’t nothing new.
[00:55:04] ALYSSA: One of the reasons it’s it doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t really, it doesn’t incite empathy, or outrage, or change is because people care more about microbes and plants [laughter].
[00:55:17] BRENDANE: Literally.
[00:55:18] ALYSSA: There isn’t, and I mean this is gonna. We’re also going to talk about this later, but it’s one of the ways that white people cannot relate to us. They don’t see themselves in us, so sharing those images, they don’t do shit. That’s all I’m going to say. Actually, and let me also say ’cause people are gonna be like, “oh, but you know, when George Floyd died and everyone saw that video and people were so shocked and blah blah blah.” Things did change. Okay, yes there were some policy changes, but Code Switch on NPR, they recently did a survey and they have found that support for Black Lives Matter and racial justice is actually lower now than it was before the protests and uprisings, so.
[00:56:03] BRENDANE: And then the policy for things that are already on the books. And didn’t it also involves giving more money to the police.
[00:56:15] ALYSSA: Yeah, [crosstalk] alright.
[00:56:16] BRENDANE: Alright moving on.
[00:56:18] ALYSSA: But yeah, going back to the damned geography and its projection onto the people. As many of you my family is Jamaican and like many Caribbean countries, there is a lot of anti-Haitian sentiment. And that was actually the subject of my master’s research that I did in Martinique. And so, people often see these “natural disasters,” “natural weather events,” you know which are in quotation marks, because what the extent to which weather events are catastrophe is kind of, you know, that’s determined by politics in history. And you can learn more about that in our episode, “The World’s Basura En Fuego.” But anyways, all of that the natural disaster, the political instability. There’s this idea that it is divine punishment for their religious practices, particularly voodoo. I’ve heard family members say that Haitians are cursed. And I think that that’s a discourse that resonates throughout the islands and beyond. But as Thierry Lindor tweeted, “Haiti isn’t cursed, it’s targeted.” There’s also, in terms of the natural disasters, ’cause I know people love like these [laughter] divine intervention kind of explanations, but there is a whole ass fault line running through the country okay. There’s that. But like just off the top of my head, just off the top of my head, Haiti took its independence in 1804 through revolution, and then France was like you owe us 150 million francs, which is about $30 almost $40 billion in today’s money, I think.
[00:57:58] BRENDANE: Oh my God.
[00:57:59] ALYSSA: Okay. They were like pay for your freedom or face a blockade. They didn’t finish paying it off until the 1940s. Who collected a lot of that money? The U.S. I think the U.S. actually bought the debt – Citibank, specifically – bought the debt, and so they collected tons of money, both in the fees and in interest. On top of like—what did I say, when they took when they took over the gold reserves and when Napoleon like sold most of America to America, they like all of this stuff. Pretty sure France gave the U.S. money for the revolution which was coming from the wealth of Haitian labor and enslavement. But anyways, throughout the 20th century the U.S. has conducted a variety of operations to destabilize Haiti. I mean, one that I can think of is they flooded the country with rice in the 90s, right? It was like through one of their humanitarian things. But that crop was something that was already produced by Haitian farmers, so it undercut the farmers and basically destroyed the market and that agricultural commodity production. And then of course, you know, let’s not forget that they trained a whole ass military that overthrew a democratically elected president, who’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and then sent him into exile, so. You know, it’s a whole thing. It’s a whole thing. Now Joe Biden, you know, he’s been accepting Central American refugees. And I can’t remember her real name, but Lyneezy—she does the parking lot pimpin episodes, you know—she was talking about how like the people from Afghanistan, just like letting them into the country is enough to assuage their white guilt. So, you know, that’s fine. They’re good enough to enter, right? So, they’ve been taking all of these people in, but deporting Haitians using some law, right? So, all of this then led the U.S. special envoy to Haiti to resign from his post. He said it was “inhumane,” even though Joe Biden himself campaigned on “humane” migration and migrant policies. So let me refer again to plantation futures, “Life then is extracted from particular regions Transforming some places into inhuman geographies.”
[01:00:41] BRENDANE: And in what you just told us it seems like Haiti is instrumental into the making of the modern world in more than one way.
[01:00:53] ALYSSA: 100 percent.
[01:00:54] BRENDANE: 100,000 million percent. And not to dig at anybody but y’all really thought that Biden was going to make a difference [laughter]. Anything else I’m going to say will go to my personal—my journal and personal group chats. So, to quote Haitian American anthropologist Jemima Pierre, who was riffing off the late Glen Ford, “Democrats are the more effective evil.” Hallelujah. Funnily enough, he said that actually about Barack Obama, who was actually the instigator of a lot of the migration policies that Trump perfected. So, the problem is not who is in office, right? The problem is the office and institutional power in and of itself. So definitely check out her essay entitled “Borders, Blackness and Empire,” on the Black Agenda report. And Pierre writes that, “these actions of deportation are actually based on anxiety about the Black,” right. She says, “it is also a fear of the dark and looming specter of Black people flooding across the border better sullying or contaminating the nation. Haitians represent the blackness of Blackness, the primitive placeholder for the primordial threat to white supremacy. The dehumanizing images of Haitian migrants being whipped by US border agents appears to affirm this perception of blackness.”
And Scenes of Subjection lays it out for us, not necessarily clearly, but once you really get in there and read it [laughter] you see, right? Like it is a very dense text is what I mean by that. Slavery and is violences had a libidinal and pleasurable effect for white people. And I think so many of us don’t want to truly believe that slave owners enjoyed holding slaves because then the violence of subjection—it would make less sense to comply, I think, with how we live today, if we really held onto the violence of subjection. And I think many folks like want to call it fear, right? They want to say, “oh, Black people were enslaved because of fear. Colonizers feared us—or our ancestors,” but I don’t believe that. I think fear is a component, but actually exacting anti-Black violence soothes the psyches of those who are in power, right? And I’m not just talking about extreme physical violence like what we talked about today, which is whipping people at the border. These small things like calling us “Niggers” in your head or to your friends or whatever, singing along with the rap music, right? Sabotaging Black people in the workplace, which happens often. Pushing a Black child to the ground in daycare—which I saw a video of that I don’t know if you saw that?
[01:04:01] ALYSSA: No, was it wasn’t an adult who did it?
[01:04:03] BRENDANE: An adult yes. Um, the child came in, and the adult immediately pushed the child to the ground. The child was no more than three years old. Calling on your Black roommate when you have an emotional issue when y’all don’t have a real friendship, right, are all scenes of subjection that are part of the calculus of the unimaginable horror of slavery. And all of these acts have pleasurable payouts for those that engage in them, while the rest of us are left drained, damaged, and/or dead.
[01:04:45] ALYSSA: I mean, in the end, all of those things are exercises of power. But I think Jemima Pierre’s essay, it’s really good one, you know. She raises a lot of really good questions, you know, like are these Black migrants even Haitian? I mean there are a ton of Black people in Central and South America. There are people coming from different countries in Africa, but it’s Haitians who are the most Blackened, right. So, when she talks about them being, you know, the scariest threat, the primordial threat to white supremacy, right, they were the only the first, Independent, Black country that took their—I mean in should say in the new world—that basically took their freedom through revolution. So that was one of the biggest losses in that time period, and so that is one of the things that like stokes that fire of fear.
And so, this is not just a perception in the U.S. either, this idea of like the blackened Haitian, right. During my research, when I asked people, “how do you know if someone is Haitian,”—’cause people will be like, “Oh yeah, I can easily.” Martinicans will be like, “Oh yeah, I always recognize when someone is Haitian.” So, I’d ask them how. And they almost always said that they have dark skin. They have darker skin. There are some other things that were very interesting, but I mean, this is one of one of the things. And so, mind you, Martinique is in the Caribbean okay. There are Black people here of all complexions so that view of the blackened Haitian is widespread. And so, her closing question is the question that needs an answer 2021. Where is our anger toward the ongoing white supremacist U.S. colonial project in Haiti? We’re always so focused on the one thing the whip, the body of a Syrian toddler on a beach, the mask, wearing masks. You know we lose sight of the larger issue and the context and so nothing ever really changes in the long run.
[01:06:38] BRENDANE: Period. Point blank. Pow pow. All that. I want the horns [mimics airhorn].
[01:06:44] ALYSSA: One day I’ll add those to the repertoire [laughter]. We did briefly want to talk about the missing white woman syndrome and the situation with Gabby Petito, you know, and it relates to this phenomenon where this missing white woman, she becomes national news. I remember probably one of the earliest—I’m aging myself here—but one of the earliest major national news stories that I remember—or I should say, not even national, international because I was in Canada—was the disappearance of Jon Benet Ramsey. I’m aging myself here, but that’s one of the earliest things that I remember. And you know, in the meantime there are hundreds of thousands of Black and Indigenous women and girls, trans and cis, that go missing, right? That are missing. Hundreds go missing every year and the only communities that tend to mourn us are our own. And I think what I wanted to relate that to what I said earlier is that there isn’t that same level of empathy for us, right? We’ll just leave it there, ‘cause we’re not going to go deeper into that, but—
[01:07:55] BRENDANE: I feel like that would need a whole episode in itself.
[01:07:56] ALYSSA: [Laughter] Yeah. We were trying to be ambitious with our episode today, but I think that we have done it and we have given you all a lot of information. A lot of texts. But as usual everything will be linked in the episode description and will also be available on the syllabus on our website. So, worry not if you weren’t able to scribble everything down, but next time, you know, bring a notepad and a pen to this episode [laughter].
[01:08:30] BRENDANE: Come prepared. Come prepared to learnt.
[01:08:34] ALYSSA: All right! [Laughter]
[MUSIC STARTS]
[01:08:38] ALYSSA: Alright y’all, well that is our episode for today. Thank you all so much for listening. This episode was produced by me, Alyssa James, and her, Brendane Tynes, and distributed in partnership with the American Anthropological Association. This season of the podcast is generously funded by a grant from the Arts and Science Graduate Council and donations from listeners just like you [singsong].
[01:09:05] BRENDANE: Oh, that was good.
[01:09:07] ALYSSA: Was it? I have no voice.
[01:09:10] BRENDANE: You [singsong]. I like that. Thank you all for your support. If you like this episode, please share with your friends, your family, your frenemies and tell Susie, she might learn something [laughter]. We would love to hear what you have to say about this episode, so be sure to follow us on Instagram at Zorasdaughters and on Twitter at Zoras_daughters. And for transcripts, syllabi and information on how to cite us or donate, visit our website, zoradaughters.com. Every little bit helps. It truly does.
[01:09:45] ALYSSA: And if you’ve assigned one of our podcast episodes to your classes or in a workshop, please just send us the syllabus. It helps ensure impact helps us get more grants so we can keep doing this dope work. Appreciate y’all be kind to yourselves. Bye.
[01:10:00] BRENDANE: Bye.
[MUSIC ENDS]
[01:10:04] ALYSSA: We can talk about the plantation. Without talking about [drill sounds] [laughter]
[01:10:13] BRENDANE: The weed whacker?
[01:10:13] ALYSSA: [Laughter] Alright so we can’t— [drill sounds] [laughter]
[01:10:20] BRENDANE: The weed whacker really came— [laughter]
[01:10:23] ALYSSA: So, we can’t really talk about the plantation— [drill sounds]
[END OF RECORDING]