Visualizing Possibilities: Rural Development Strategies Among African American Farmers in the Southeastern US Open Access
Franzen, Sarah Marie (2016)
Published
Abstract
The industrialization of agriculture within the US has led to increased rural poverty, environmental pollution, and unhealthy food. And this system is being exported around the world, developing a form of global agriculture that will ultimately lead to environmental and social degradation. While many solutions and alternatives have emerged in response, this dissertation explores how farmers and rural populations can confront and change the impact of an industrialized agricultural system. Using the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (FSC/LAF) as a case study, this research explores the strategies and practices developed through grassroots organizing among black farmers in the southeastern US. The FSC/LAF promotes collective organizing among black farmers in particular, and family farmers in general, in order to simultaneously confront the dominant agricultural system and build alternative organizational forms that engender more sustainable and socially just forms of agriculture. Specifically, they utilize the strategies of land retention, cooperative development, and policy change in order to support these efforts. Each of these strategies is aimed at addressing the structural forms that shape black farmers' livelihoods. But structural forms are not discrete entities; they are an assemblage of processes built through ongoing practices. This research explores the practices that arise from, and give shape to, the FSC/LAF's institutional strategies. Drawing on data gathered through a multi-sited ethnography using adaptive co-production (a form of collaborative filmmaking), interviews, participant observation, and oral histories, Visualizing Possibilities traces how embodied practices produce and build spaces of resistance, a sense of cultural heritage and pride, and manifest development goals. This hybrid dissertation, which interlaces films and texts, argues that development is a transformative process comprised of transformative practices. These transformative practices consist of not only material and ideological shifts, but also embodied and aesthetic aspects that constitute visceral development--development that begins as a bodily conviction leading to collective and institutional strategies. This research uses filmmaking to engage these embodied practices that give rise to social change and rural development, and toprovide an applied means of driving ongoing communication and discussion both within and outside academia.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Framing Rural Development and the Case of Black Farmers. 1
Introduction. 1
Road to Epes. 7
Research Questions. 13
Background. 16
Community-based Development. 17
Racial Formation in the US Food System. 24
Ethnographic Filmmaking as Knowledge Production. 32
Methodology. 44
Chapter Outline. 51
Land. 51
Cooperatives. 52
Political Identity. 53
Bibliography. 54
Filmography. 65
Chapter 2. Creative Inquiry: Ethnographic Filmmaking as Adaptive Co-Production. 66
Introduction. 66
Collaborative Filmmaking. 71
Establishing a Collaborative Project. 83
Filming Collaboratively. 86
Ethnography Through Filmmaking. 89
My Project. 92
Observational. 93
Participant Directed. 101
Interviews. 104
Documentation. 108
Bibliography. 110
Filmography. 115
Chapter 3. Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. 116
Introduction. 116
Origins. 120
Rural Training and Research Center. 126
Emergency Land Fund. 129
Organizational Structure. 135
Field Sites. 138
Alabama. 141
Mississippi. 145
Bibliography. 150
Chapter 4: Contested Landscapes: The Construction of Spatial Rights. 153
Introduction. 153
Land as an Asset.159
Space and Place. 167
Film and Spatial Production. 171
Black-Owned Land: A Brief Background. 179
FSC/LAF Strategies for Land Rights. 183
Examples. 186
Ancestral Land. 188
Family Land. 195
Home Land. 200
Conclusion: From Land Rights to Spatial Rights. 207
Bibliography. 212
Filmography. 220
Chapter 5: Visualizing a Cooperative Movement. 221
Introduction. 221
Defining Cooperatives. 223
Cooperative as an Institution. 227
Cooperatives as Practice. 230
FSC/LAF's Cooperatives for Black Farmers. 240
Filming as Practice. 244
Examples. 246
The Southeastern Goat Cooperative of Alabama. 250
Attala County Self-Help Cooperative. 264
Indian Spring Farmers' Association. 278
Conclusion. 288
Bibliography. 291
Chapter 6: Rights and Resistance: Identity Politics and the Black Farmer. 295
Introduction. 295
Politicizing Identity. 300
Cultural Citizenship.305
Sensing the Subject. 309
Finding the Embodied Experience. 312
Examples. 316
Representing the Black Farmer. 317
Becoming the Black Farmer. 324
Growing Young Black Farmers. 329
Teaching Black Farmers. 335
Conclusion. 343
Bibliography. 345
Chapter 7: Conclusion. 349
Visceral Development. 352
Sensory Farming. 355
Aesthetic Expressions. 358
Knowing the Farm. 361
Contributions and Continued Research. 365
Bibliography. 369
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