Rendering Speculative Pasts: Visualizing Drowned Towns and Submerged Ecologies

American Anthropologist · 2025-05-24

This article is part of the special section of American Anthropologist titled "On Vanishing Fieldsites."The multimodal accompaniment to this article is

Fixing crisis, transforming landscapes: Social, spatial, ecological, and racial fixes in New Deal South Carolina

Environment and Planning F · 2024 · 2 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science

This article examines the spatial, social, ecological, and racial fixes of the Santee-Cooper Project, a New Deal hydroelectric project constructed between 1938 and 1942 that inundated the homes of 901 Black, Indigenous, and poor White families in central South Carolina. Drawing upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of crisis, and Clyde Woods and David Harvey’s notion of the (socio-)spatial fix, the research underscores how the New Deal attempted to address economic, political, and racial crises by implementing a series of fixes aimed at stabilizing economic markets while reshaping ecological and racial landscapes. This article reveals how the New Deal reconfigured Black geographies and ecologies, displacing communities and ecosystems in the name of progress. By scrutinizing local administrative practices and broader regional consequences, the article highlights the far-reaching impacts of state-initiated development amid crises of racial capitalism. The analysis concludes with an attention to the Green New Deal, pushing back against the fixity inherent in the original public works program, and advocating for a nuanced approach to repair in the face of environmental crises. By reassessing the historical significance of the New Deal and the missteps made in the face of early 20th-century crises, this research informs debates on socio-environmental justice and equitable development, offering guidance for navigating crises in the modern era.

On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction

Routledge eBooks · 2024

• Sociology
• Sociology
• Anthropology

This article introduces swampification, a social and methodological process whereby governments, corporations, and the press socially (re)invented swamplands as spaces of death, disease, and “uninhabitability” to justify their destruction. Using the case of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project in New Deal South Carolina, this article demonstrates how White institutions sought to eradicate Black autonomous spaces and ecological connections. I build on Black ecologies, a subfield that aims to illuminate conditions and relations Black people have with/in ecological and social worlds that comprise struggles for existence and legacies of world building. I propose coupling Black ecologies with moral geographies to bring attention to the sociospatial imaginaries placed on Black people that forced them to the ecological margins, then later extracted them from those very spaces when the landscapes stood in the way of White progress. Swampification did not merely stagnate Black terraqueous landscapes but further perpetuated racial stereotypes of Blackness as out-of-place and pestilent, and situated the presence of non-White others as antithetical to U.S. progress.

On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction

Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2022 · 19 citations

• Sociology
• Sociology
• Environmental ethics

This article introduces swampification, a social and methodological process whereby governments, corporations, and the press socially (re)invented swamplands as spaces of death, disease, and “uninhabitability” to justify their destruction. Using the case of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project in New Deal South Carolina, this article demonstrates how White institutions sought to eradicate Black autonomous spaces and ecological connections. I build on Black ecologies, a subfield that aims to illuminate conditions and relations Black people have with/in ecological and social worlds that comprise struggles for existence and legacies of world building. I propose coupling Black ecologies with moral geographies to bring attention to the sociospatial imaginaries placed on Black people that forced them to the ecological margins, then later extracted them from those very spaces when the landscapes stood in the way of White progress. Swampification did not merely stagnate Black terraqueous landscapes but further perpetuated racial stereotypes of Blackness as out-of-place and pestilent, and situated the presence of non-White others as antithetical to U.S. progress.