Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery

Abstract

Building on the work of Saidiya Hartman, Black studies scholars have long theorized and analyzed what it means to exist in the afterlife of slavery, which refers to the precarity and devaluation of Black life since chattel slavery. This article draws the natural environment into this discourse to conceptualize the biophysical afterlife of slavery. The biophysical afterlife of slavery describes how the precarity and devaluation of Black life has affected the natural environments in which these lives exist. Slavery left lingering impacts on soil, water, and vegetation regimes as it maneuvered and settled across the earth, but importantly, its ideological and sociopolitical legacies continue to impact Black ecologies today. I argue that to methodologically attend to the biophysical afterlife of slavery there must be a meaningful integration of critical physical geography and Black geographies. As an example of this integration, I suggest that there is a myriad of methods used to reconstruct environmental histories, such as dendrochronology that, when brought together with a Black geographies lens, create mechanisms to analyze the past, present, and future of the biophysical afterlife of slavery.

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