Perpetual Mobilization and Environmental Injustice: Race and the Contested Development of Industrial Agriculture in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.

Many attempts to explain inequality in the Delta tautologically invoke "persistent poverty" as its root cause, obscuring the continuities between historical exploitation and industrial agriculture in the present day. In contrast, I argue that agro-industry in the Delta is productive of environmental and social injustice, and that this injustice is confronted by black agricultural practice. A careful historical exploration of agro-industrial development avoids historical disjuncture by emphasizing the continuity between injustice in the past and injustice in the present. Food insecurity and environmental toxins are produced along with the regions high yields of cotton, corn, rice and soybeans. Agro-industry presents obstacles to a more socially just agriculture in the Delta—land ownership is highly concentrated, aerial herbicide application kills adjacent vegetable crops and a disarticulated food system hinders marketing possibilities—while producing health and income inequalities. In this thesis, I explore the historical roots of contemporary injustices, showing that the dominance of a particular form of industrial agriculture in the Delta was hardly an inevitability of agricultural 'modernization'. Rather, industrial agriculture in the Delta was developed as a strategic technology of racial differentiation, political control, and economic exploitation. For this reason, the historical opposition of the agricultural development state to black independence shapes the technologies and distribution of environmental injustice in the present day.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Geography

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Williams, Brian Scott

Contributors dc:contributor

• McSweeney, Kendra

• African Americans
• Agriculture
• Black History
• Environmental Justice
• Geography
• agro-industry
• pesticides
• agrochemicals
• black farmers
• Mississippi
• Mississippi Delta
• plantation
• white supremacy
• USDA
• the South
• race
• farming
• Jamie Whitten
• civil rights
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• political ecology

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366218013

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1366218013