In search of Black southern self-regard: Doing Black Studies without Shame

This essay grapples with Zandria Robinson’s, Kaneesha Parsard’s, and Martyn Bone’s rich commentary on my book, Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South . Just as Afterlives is organized into three plots, I have structured my response similarly. Plot I takes up Robinson’s reflections on how “Black shame” toward the South, land, and rurality continue to shape the affective biases and material realities of contemporary global Black southern life and identity; Plot II addresses Parsard’s analysis of what she terms Tuskegee’s “domestic plots” and the place of Black girls and women within the school’s vision of Black futures; and Plot III contends with Bone’s interrogation of Tuskegee’s affordances through its student, Zora Neale Hurston, former staff member and Harlem Renaissance novelist, Nella Larsen, and the Institute’s ties to Denmark and the Danish West Indies. To conclude, I explore how, at Tuskegee, “Black study” functioned as an antidote to Robinson’s diagnosis of Black southern shame. In doing so, I suggest that the epistemological reorientation toward the Global Black South that I call for in Afterlives might ultimately serve as a “source of [Black southern] self-regard” and a model for doing Black Studies without shame .