We Have Worked the Land for Centuries
Diasporic Memory and Black Environmental Belonging in Urban Green Space
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3019581 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kessie Alexandre (0000-0002-4563-1506, New York University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3-13 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Transforming Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1051-0559 • E-ISSN: 1548-7466 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1086/735079 |
| OpenAlex | W4409059748 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 31 |
This article traces Black environmental relations in the stewardship of community gardens and other green spaces in the city of Newark, New Jersey. It engages with a widely held belief that Black diasporic people, particularly those who live in cities, are alienated from nature or altogether opposed to agriculture as a result of the historical traumas of slavery and its immediate afterlives, including sharecropping and convict leasing. Focused on Black Newarkers with marked roots in the American South and the Caribbean, this essay follows gardeners and other stewards of urban green space as they contend with the legacy of the plantation yet still frame land cultivation and stewardship as a mode of recovery and resistance. It highlights the ways in which Black growers and other green space stewards indeed reckoned with their associations between cultivation and captivity but did so in ways that enabled them to name present-day labor extractions and enact alternative forms of care and self-determination
Economic geography · Geography · Linguistics · Urban green space · Urban space · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Latin American and Latino Studies · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability
How Europe underdeveloped Africa
Mohawk Interruptus
In the Wake
Whiteness as Property
The Black Jacobins
Caribbean Transformations
The Wretched of the Earth
Stuart Hall
Spatializing Blackness
A Permanent Struggle against an Omnipresent Death
The Caribbean Region
We will not perish; we’re going to keep flourishing”
These Bars Can't Hold Us Back
Greening the urban frontier
Animacies
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
Whiteness, space and alternative food practice
A pig and a garden
Returns to a Native Land
"Giving Back" to Jamaica
A Corporate Plantation Reading Public
We Have Worked the Land for Centuries
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe
Non-Sovereign Futures
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |