Browsing by Subject "global south"

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    A corporate plantation reading public: Labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black South
    (American Literature, 2019-09-01) McInnis, JC
    This essay reconstructs the history of the Cotton Farmer, a rare African American newspaper edited and published by black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world’s largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Mississippi delta. The Cotton Farmer ran from 1919 to circa 1927 and was mainly confined to the company’s properties. However, in 1926, three copies of the paper circulated to Bocas del Toro, Panama, to a Garveyite and West Indian migrant laborer employed on the infamous United Fruit Company’s vast banana and fruit plantations. Tracing the Cotton Farmer’s hemispheric circulation from the Mississippi delta to Panama, this essay explores the intersections of labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black South. What do we make of a reading public among black tenant farmers on a corporate cotton plantation in the Mississippi delta at the height of Jim Crow? How did the entanglements of labor and literacy at once challenge and correspond with conventional accounts of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South? Further, in light of the Cotton Farmer’s circulation from Mississippi’s cotton fields to Panama’s banana fields, this essay establishes the corporate plantation as a heuristic for exploring the imperial logics and practices tying the US South to the larger project of colonial domination in the Caribbean and Latin America, and ultimately reexamines black transnationalism and diaspora from the position of corporate plantation laborers as they negotiated ever-evolving modes of domination and social control on corporate plantations in the global black South. In so doing, it establishes black agricultural and corporate plantation laborers as architects of black geographic thought and diasporic practice alongside their urban, cosmopolitan contemporaries.
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    Latinx Internationalism and the French Atlantic: Sandra María Esteves in Art contre/against apartheid and Miguel Algarín in “Tangiers”
    (The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2022-09) Quesada, SM
    AbstractThis article interrogates the South-South internationalism of two renowned US Latinx poets: Miguel Algarín’s abjection in Morocco in his poem “Tangiers” and Sandra María Esteves’s anti-apartheid poetry for the French Art contre/against apartheid project, which included the controversial participation of Jacques Derrida. Although these poems focus on different contexts of African liberation, both react to French coloniality. For Algarín, his Orientalist evocations of underage child prostitution operate under a French hegemony, coming into crisis when a third world alliance fails. In Esteves’s work, her poetic solidarity draws on Frantz Fanon’s experience of French colonization in Algeria but also comes into crisis when Derrida’s foreword for Art contre/against apartheid is challenged as Eurocentric. Although both engagements with African self-determination exhibit residues of a French hegemony undergirding and undercutting what I term is a poetic Latin-African solidarity, their South-South approach enriches postcolonial studies, in which Latin American, and by extension, Latinx identities have been sidelined.