Carceral geographies of pesticides and poultry

Abstract

In this article, we focus on the agro-environmental dimensions of plantation agriculture in the U.S. South, examining the ways carceral relations constrain foodways through the interrelated control of human and non-human life, the racialized monopolization of land, and the production of hunger. Through a focus on the chemicalization of cotton plantation agriculture and the transformation of chicken to poultry, we show how the racialized control of life and labor has been extended temporally and spatially by means of agricultural technologies. In the decades following the abolition of slavery, white landowners enrolled legal structures of racialized coercion and agricultural technologies in the service of continued plantation production. Combining archival and ethnographic methods, we trace these dynamics in cotton and poultry production in the 20th century, we show how technologies putatively oriented toward agricultural “productivity” extended the carceral dynamics of prisons through agro-environmental racism, the control of land and labor, and the production of hunger. Cotton chemicals and poultry plant speedups, we argue, represent racial and spatial relations of material and ideological control and containment that displace nourishing and liberatory ways of living and relating.

Keywords:

• labor
• prisons
• agrarian studies
• land
• plantations
• environmental racism
• slavery
• United States South

Notes

1 See classic work in philosophy and animal studies documenting the cognitive distance produced through the language of “meat” which separates consumers from the concept’s animal origins (Adams 2015; Singer 1995).

2 In the early 20th century, Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina all had vagrancy statutes, directly adapted from the Black codes, explicitly connecting vagrancy to a lack of property (Lanthrop 1916). Some of these remained virtually unaltered for a century or more. In Mississippi a vagrancy law defining vagrants as “All persons able to work, having no property to support them, and who have no visible or known means of a fair, honest and reputable livelihood,” directly derived from the Black codes, remained law until 2018 (State of Mississippi 2010).

3 These laws made no exceptions for people hunting on land they lived on but did not own, or for people travelling with animals they raised but did not own. And of course, they made no exception for people who hunted or “stole” animals as a means of survival.

4 Haley, importantly, emphasizes the intersections of gender, race and class in the rise of carceral institutions and practices in the South.

5 Despite the powerful connections Du Bois draws between the overthrow of Reconstruction and international colonialism, he is largely silent on the relationship between land, white supremacy, and settler colonialism in the US. For engagements with the relationship between settler colonialism, land, and Black freedom, see Hall (2019), Moulton (2021), Tuck, Guess, and Sultan (2014), Williams et al. (2021).

6 These oral histories can be accessed online at: https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL420MA.xml#descriptivesummary

7 Mississippi State University Libraries Special Collections, Boswell Stevens papers, Box 18.

8 Trona Chemicals advertisement in the Delta Farm Press 27(11). March 19, 1970, p. 34.

9 By removing the leaves of cotton to facilitate mechanical picking, defoliants were essential to the successful mechanization of cotton plantations.

10 Since data is only available at the county level, this total is based upon the 9 counties located entirely within the county, where 2,387,172 of the 3,303,661 total acres of surface area are in white-operated farms.