McCaskill, Barbara
TBA
No Classroom Required
ENGL4960R: Land as Liberation in the African American Freedom Struggle
THIS CLASS IS STILL OPEN TO INTERESTED STUDENTS!!!! PLEASE CONTACT ME AT BMCCASKI@UGA.EDU FOR INFORMATION. Your meals and lodging during the residency will be covered a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that partners UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts with the Penn Center on various initiatives.
We will spend the first week of Maymester discussing specific ways in which Black southern farmers and farmlands have informed and been inosculated with grassroots organizing and social justice movements, from William and Ellen Craft’s Reconstruction-era Woodville Farm School outside of Savannah to the Freedom Farm Cooperative established in 1969 in Sunflower, Mississippi by Fannie Lou Hamer; Shirley and Charles Sherrod’s New Communities, Inc. collective farm created in Albany, Georgia in 1969; and the interracial Koinoinia Farm founded by Rev. Clarence Jordan in 1942 outside of Americus, Georgia. During the second week we will examine literature and film that links land to African American’s political struggle and cultural survival.
The last portion of class (June 2-7, 2022) is a residency at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark. Founded in 1862 by Black farmer and future legislator Hastings Gantt as a school for formerly enslaved people like himself, as the first school in the South for formerly enslaved people, Penn Center is nationally and internationally recognized for its continuous and unbroken history of civic activism and social justice, and for its role in sustaining the vibrant Gullah-Geechee communities of the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coasts and low countries. We will study Penn Center’s role as a retreat and planning site for Dr. King, John Lewis, Andrew Young, and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee. We will study its function as a Freedom School, led by civil rights activist Septima Clark, to educate Black community members about the vote, civics, American history, and meanings of citizenship. We will join students this week in residence at Penn from the College of Charleston (environmental photography) led by Dr. Valerie Frazier, a graduate of UGA’s English doctoral program and currently Associate Professor of English and Director of the 1967 Legacy Program; and from Spelman College (Black food studies), led by Dr. Nik Heynen, Distinguished Research Professor of Geography at UGA. Among the activities planned for this week, are workshops on the history of the 15th Amendment (led by Mr. Charles Johnson, former Vice President for External Affairs and General Counsel, Tuskegee University); on the history and revival of indigo production (led by Dr. Heynen and Mr. Maurice Bailey, a resident of Sapelo Island’s Gullah-Geechee community); on the establishment of the all-Black town of Mitchellville; and on Gullah-Geechee history and culture (led by Dr. Emory Campbell, former Director of Penn Center). We will also assist with Penn Center’s community garden or a similar project.
Your meals and lodging during the residency will be covered a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that partners UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts with the Penn Center on various initiatives.
Major Readings:
Penn Center: A History Preserved. By Orville Vernon Burton, Wilbur Cross, et. al. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014. ISBN: 0820351415 (for paperback edition in 2017).
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. By Monica White. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2019. ISBN: 1469663899 (for paperback edition in 2021).
“Agrarian Questions and the Struggle for Land Justice in the United States.” By Eric Holt-Giménez. In Land Justice: Re-Imagining Land, Food, and the Commons in the United States. Edited by Justine M. Williams and Eric Holt-Giménez. Oakland, CA: First Food Books/Institute for Food and Development Policy, 2017. 1-14.
“The Elusive Inclusive: Black Food Geographies and Racialized Food Spaces.” By Margaret Marietta Ramírez. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 47.3 (June 2015): 748-69.
“Growing Black Food on Sacred Land: Using Black Liberation Theology to Imagine an Alternative Black Agrarian Future.” By Patricia McCutcheon. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39.5 (Oct. 2021), 887-905.
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. By Leah Penniman. White River Junction, Vermont, and London: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018. ISBN: 1603587616 (paperback edition).
Mama Day. By Gloria Naylor. New York: Vintage 1988. ISBN: 0679721819 (for paperback edition in 1993).
If I Had Two Wings: Stories. By Randall Kenan. New York: Norton, 2020. ISBN: 0393867404 (for paperback edition in 2021).
Parable of the Sower. By Octavia Butler. Reprint 1993; New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2019. ISBN: 1538732181. Paperback.
Ben Ali Manuscript. Hargrett Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, Special Collections Building.
Assessments and Grade Breakdown (please note modification of final project):
|
Class Participation and Group Discussion Facilitation |
20% |
|
Midterm Essay: Write about how a family recipe or planting conveys meanings of land and nature, power, and cultural survivance |
25% |
|
Final Project: PowerPoint, Essay, or Creative Work: Evaluate themes of land sovereignty, land ownerships, food or environmental justice, land and climate/ecology, or land and culture. Or, submit a group project on these themes that will assist Penn Center in historic preservation efforts:I will provide a template and list of expectations. |
30% |
|
Penn Center Journaling: WordPress Blogs or Cellphone Diaries (300-500 words / 8-10 mins. each) |
25% |