Uplifting the Man Farthest Down in the U.S. South, the Global Black South—and Denmark

This article assesses Jarvis C. McInnis’ book Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (2025) with reference to disciplinary developments in U.S. southern studies, Black studies, and American studies. Between 2001 and the late 2010s, the “new southern studies” sought to revitalize American studies by insisting on the Black South’s centrality to the U.S. nation and to transnational (especially hemispheric) models of Black modernity. Afterlives of the Plantation builds on but comes after the new southern studies. McInnis’s remarkable book elucidates the pedagogical, political, and cultural links between the U.S. Black South and the Global Black South by focusing on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, as well as authors including Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston. The article concludes by reflecting on related writing about the U.S. Black South vis-a-vis Denmark. Washington’s account of his 1910 visit to Denmark compares “the Danish peasant” to “Negro farmers in the Southern States,” while Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928) takes place partly at Tuskegee (fictionalized as Naxos) and partly in Copenhagen. Here McInnis’ generative emphasis on Tuskegee’s relationship to the Global Black South can be extended across the (Black) Atlantic.