Genealogies of Race, Gender, and Place

Through a case study of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's interventions into the lives of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in early twentieth-century Alabama, I show how gendered and racialized norms of family and family life were used to keep African American farmers tied to the land, thus uncovering a relatively unexamined geography of containment. At stake for the U.S. government, local and regional leaders, and cotton plantation owners were the extremely large profits generated by dominance of the global cotton market, profits made possible only from the labor of indebted African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers. I document, in other words, how a new technology of racial governance, of keeping people in place, was developed and articulated to maintain U.S. economic power. By doing so, I highlight the importance of understanding the interrelated historical geographies of race, gender, and place in the United States, thus demonstrating the contemporary significance of a critical historical geography.