Paper short abstract:

In 1971, and again in 1977, hundreds of "white and coloured" fishermen in Walvis Bay in present-day Namibia illegally stopped work to protest "overexploitation" amid declining pilchard catch. How should we "read against the archival grain" to understand this event?

Paper long abstract:

The Walvis Bay fishery for sardines (pilchard) and anchovies in present-day Namibia is a case study in environmental mismanagement, interracial labor activism and archival silences. The fishery was developed in the 1950s and initially managed conservatively, with a quota around 200,000 tons, but in the late 1950s South African capital put pressure on fishery administrators to increase quotas. By 1968 the South West African pilchard fishery was taking 1.4 million tons of pilchard and making record profits (almost none of which stayed in Namibia).

The fishery employed over a thousand white and coloured fishers, and up to eight thousand seasonal Ovambo contract laborers in fish processing plants and related work. In a surprising twist for fisheries history, workers organized multiple labor stoppages framed in explicitly conservationist terms. In 1971 the fishers observed a decline in total catch and increase in time and effort spent fishing; they perceived managers as engaging in as unsustainable overexploitation, and organized a labor stoppage to reduce the quota. In 1977, with the fishery in even more dire straits, another "stayaway" was carried out. The following year the fishery was closed; it did not recover for decades.

This paper explores the voices and silences that emerge in the archive. Much attention was paid to the population of the nonhuman actors - the fish - but little was recorded about the Ovambo workers, while the "strikers" engaged in self-silencing for their own protection. The events have been ignored in both fisheries and historical literature until now.

Paper short abstract:

If researchers cannot rely solely on the Archive to understand the complex histories of Black environmental histories and relations, where else might we look? This paper proposes placed ecological histories as a tool to investigate Black environmental relations to place, community, and resistance.

Paper long abstract:

African Americans’ relationships to land, nature, and place has been a complex struggle of life and death, subjugation and freedom, and labor and resistance since the first ship carrying enslaved Africans landed in the American colonies in 1619. The Archive often illustrates these narratives from the perspective of the oppressor, excluding the complex histories of these groups— particularly the histories of the ways Black Americans made place in nature as an act of resistance. If researchers cannot rely solely on the Archive to understand marginalized environmental relations, where else might we look? Looking to more-than-human spaces and artifacts may provide insights into histories that have not yet been encountered. I argue that decentering the Archive and instead focusing on placed ecological histories integral to Black experiences of community and resistance might begin to uncover these silenced histories. I use the Black Belt region of Alabama as a case study to investigate how placed ecological histories can be an alternative tool to the Archive. More specifically, I examine the ecological impact of soil fertility as a determinant of Black environmental relations in the region. I start with the question, how have the ways soil ecologies shifted due to chattel slavery, racial violence, and capitalism map onto the Black body and continue to impact the Black environmental experience? I conclude with a discussion on the importance of looking beyond the Archive as an anti-colonial practice and as a tool for research into counter-hegemonic ways of knowing, being, and resisting.

Paper short abstract:

What were the politics and imaginaries of enslaved African plantation managers? I propose a scalar relationship between agency and archive to trace the silences and attestations of fragments, urgent as we face environmental collapse and Florida laws intent on distorting Africa-Diaspora history.

Paper long abstract:

This paper problematizes the power of archival silencing in histories of enslavement by examining the narrative fragments in Arabic and English from the 1830s and 40s of Bilali Mohammed and Salih Bilali; enslaved African Muslim plantation managers each of whom organized upwards of 500 enslaved growers of rice and cotton for absentee planters on Sapelo and Saint Simon’s islands off the coast of Georgia. By tracing Bilali and Salih’s narratives of violent displacement from Futa Jallon (Guinea) and Jenne (Mali), and by confronting the pro-slavery and African colonizing projects of the Americans into whose hands these narratives passed, my aim is to historicize African knowledge and practice as important nodes in creating the Atlantic world technologies and ecologies which defined modernity. I seek to conceptualize these historical actors’ accounts of Koranic learning in Africa and complex managerial and community leadership in America in relation to the politics and economies of mangrove and highland rice geographies. Ultimately, I pose a series of questions about how methods rooted in scalar imaginaries might be mobilized to hack the archive and see, as Edda Fields Black has described it, the underlying operations of inheritance, innovation and borrowing at work in the African Atlantic world.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore connections between human and plant absences in the colonial archives of Kew Gardens. Applying literary ecocriticism and plant humanities approaches to volumes about the 19th century Caribbean, I will address these absences, focusing on ackee trees as a symbols of resistance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the connections between human and plant absences in the colonial archives of Kew Gardens in London. Applying literary ecocriticism and plant humanities approaches to volumes relating to the nineteenth century Caribbean, I will demonstrate that close analysis of the language used to describe plants can help to address the absences arising from the colonial origins of these materials.

Using additional sources from travel writing and literary accounts of the Caribbean, this paper will consider the plants and people neglected in the archive, focusing in on provision ground cultivation and ackee trees. A monument to the people enslaved on the grounds of the University of the West Indies campus in Kingston, Jamaica, acknowledges that groves of ackee trees act as ‘botanical markers’ of former slave villages. This use of the ackee tree as a long-term memorial of enslavement exemplifies their role as sites of cultural memory and how ackee became the principal botanical symbol of Jamaican identity. Yet, there is scarcely any discussion of ackee in Kew’s archives. This paper will argue that this absence is the result of ackee’s long association with resistance to colonial exploitation, as a tree bearing a potentially poisonous fruit, growing beyond the colonial spaces of the plantation and botanical garden. The ackee tree thus forms an example of how archival silences can be used to highlight the resistance of marginalised people within and beyond the archive.

Paper short abstract:

This paper critically analyses court proceedings that document the persecution of Afro-Brazilian spiritual communities in the 19th-C., pointing out methodological and epistemological shifts to build a history of human and more-than-human alliances and conflicts in the last years of slavery.

Paper long abstract:

Leaves and roots of Anamu, Tinguaciba, Tiririca, and Bitter Mellon; the bush and the forest; mangrove, river and sea; free, freed, and enslaved black women and men; ancestral beings; roosters and goats: through the crevices and fissures between plantations that carved up the landscape of late 19th-century Rio de Janeiro, sprung alliances between human and more-than-human actors that disturbed the order of slavery and monoculture.

This paper develops a critical analysis of police investigations and court proceedings that document the persecution of Afro-Brazilian spiritual communities between 1859 and 1890. Through the study of cases of spiritual leaders such as Evaristo Antônio da Costa, Juca Rosa and Anna Luiza do Nascimento, I explore the sounds and silences–the possibilities and limitations–of state archives in the building of Afro-Brazilian intellectual and environmental history. These leaders, alongside their more-than-human counterparts, took actions to harbor runaway enslaved workers, poison enslavers, and increase the health and wealth of their communities.

In conversation with the fields of social history, Black studies, decolonial studies and anthropology, this paper points out key methodological and epistemological shifts necessary to a study of the fugitive ecologies human and more-than-human agents formed, challenging the seignorial racial and gendered violences reproduced in the archives.