The year's final meeting of the American Area Seminar, will be held Friday, March 24, from 12:15-1:45 in 106 O'Shaughnessy Hall. Jarvis McInnis will be speaking on "Plantation Futures: Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, and the Literary Economies of the Global Black South."
While it is well known that Marcus Garvey was committed to the industrial and commercial development of the black world, scholars have paid less attention to the significance of agriculture, and particularly the plantation, within his project. Inspired by Booker T. Washington’s uplift philosophy and the United Fruit Company’s vast fruit plantations, Garvey envisioned linking black-owned plantations in the Caribbean and Africa with factories in the US as the basis for establishing a global black cooperative. Drawing on scholarship in Caribbean Studies that establishes the plantation as a site of domination on the one hand, and the genesis of black modernity on the other, this paper will explore what it means that Garvey imagined a black agrarian and industrial future that left the plantation intact.