"This Is A Place of Healing": Ecowomanism and the "Radical Interior" of Black Women Farmers Since the Great Migration
Location
PANEL: Third Year Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Panel
Wilder 101
Document Type
Presentation - Open Access
Start Date
4-28-2023 2:00 PM
End Date
4-28-2023 3:00 PM
Abstract
Guided by Black women writers, historians, and practitioners who center ethics of care in their scholarship, my research seeks to expand on their intellectual tradition to recognize the everyday practices of African-American women farmers as radical acts of self-making, community-building, and agrarian values. Through oral history interviews with Black women farmers from Northeast Ohio, this project tells the story of Black women’s role in simultaneously keeping culture and agricultural practices alive while caring for their community in both the past and present. Grounded in Black Geographies theory and the praxis of “Ecowomanism,” my interdisciplinary approach intentionally transcends white supremacist and capitalist conceptions of time to understand the spatial imagination of Black agricultural workers who migrated during the Great Migration and how their children have come to understand their own relationship with land. My project’s methodology combines geographic and ethnographic analysis of “Rust Belt” cities in the Midwest, experiential “Participatory-Action Research'' (PAR) at Black-owned farms and gardens in Northeast Ohio, and oral history interviews through the lens of Black feminist/womanist praxis. I use Black feminism/womanism interchangeably to emphasize the deeply political and spiritual experience that is not defined by biological gender, but is also specific to Black women farmers’ position at the intersection of gender, labor, and agency. Ultimately, I am arguing that the Black agrarian tradition is a distinctly Black feminist/womanist practice which embraces spiritual connection, healing, and relationality and comes from an inner consciousness of self-worth and agency—which I have called the “radical interior.”
Keywords:
Black agrarianism, Ecowomanism, Great Migration, Oral history
Recommended Citation
Menafee, Vera Grace, ""This Is A Place of Healing": Ecowomanism and the "Radical Interior" of Black Women Farmers Since the Great Migration" (2023). Research Symposium. 1.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/researchsymp/2023/presentations/1
Major
Africana Studies; Environmental Studies & Interdisciplinary Performance Minor; Education Studies Concentration
Award
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship; Oberlin College Research Fellowship
Project Mentor(s)
Charles Peterson, Africana Studies
Jay Fiskio, Environmental Studies
2023
"This Is A Place of Healing": Ecowomanism and the "Radical Interior" of Black Women Farmers Since the Great Migration
PANEL: Third Year Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Panel
Wilder 101
Guided by Black women writers, historians, and practitioners who center ethics of care in their scholarship, my research seeks to expand on their intellectual tradition to recognize the everyday practices of African-American women farmers as radical acts of self-making, community-building, and agrarian values. Through oral history interviews with Black women farmers from Northeast Ohio, this project tells the story of Black women’s role in simultaneously keeping culture and agricultural practices alive while caring for their community in both the past and present. Grounded in Black Geographies theory and the praxis of “Ecowomanism,” my interdisciplinary approach intentionally transcends white supremacist and capitalist conceptions of time to understand the spatial imagination of Black agricultural workers who migrated during the Great Migration and how their children have come to understand their own relationship with land. My project’s methodology combines geographic and ethnographic analysis of “Rust Belt” cities in the Midwest, experiential “Participatory-Action Research'' (PAR) at Black-owned farms and gardens in Northeast Ohio, and oral history interviews through the lens of Black feminist/womanist praxis. I use Black feminism/womanism interchangeably to emphasize the deeply political and spiritual experience that is not defined by biological gender, but is also specific to Black women farmers’ position at the intersection of gender, labor, and agency. Ultimately, I am arguing that the Black agrarian tradition is a distinctly Black feminist/womanist practice which embraces spiritual connection, healing, and relationality and comes from an inner consciousness of self-worth and agency—which I have called the “radical interior.”
