Domestic Plots

This commentary engages Jarvis McInnis’ new account of the Tuskegee Institute in Afterlives of the Plantation , focusing on the domestic plots that undergird Booker T. Washington’s vision of uplift. Rather than static values of marriage and masculine leadership, I contend that domesticity is another kind of plot in the Tuskegee project, a propulsive narrative by which Black people are imagined becoming modern. Revisiting the wide array of materials that McInnis offers—a gesture I call “looking with,” “reading with”—I discuss how the conventions of domestic life and figure of the patriarch grow on Tuskegee’s Alabama campus and as its uplift-model travels throughout the global Black South.