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      Cotton, Whiteness, and Other Poisons

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      Environmental Humanities
      Duke University Press

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          Abstract

          This article examines how racial capitalism has shaped the ecological and technological dynamics of cotton production in the United States South. Cotton’s destructive dependence on chemicals and on the extraction of lives and resources was animated and enabled by anti-Blackness, which sanctioned a systematic hostility to life that encoded environmental violence in plantation landscapes from the seed to the root. Agrotechnological notions of scientific progress and development conceived places, plants, and Black people as interchangeable parts. Tracing these trajectories during slavery and after abolition, the article focuses on two dynamics: the use of chemicals to augment soil fertility and manage cotton’s ecologies, and the deployment of chemicals to protect cotton monocultures. In both instances, the manipulations of cotton’s ecologies and biophysical properties helped maintain plantation profitability and dominance in the face of conjoined crises of political-ecological and racial control. Racialized conceptions of chemical-scientific “innovation,” relations of indebtedness, and notions of threat also siphoned capital gains from Black workers and communities. By converting waste products into fertilizers and poisons, planters and industrialists continued to render Black communities, their labor, and their land as fungible but necessary components in the industrialization of racial capitalism.

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          Whiteness as Property

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            Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography

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              Geographies of race and ethnicity II

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Environmental Humanities
                Duke University Press
                2201-1919
                2201-1919
                November 01 2022
                November 01 2022
                : 14
                : 3
                : 499-521
                Article
                10.1215/22011919-9962827
                157e1990-52c2-4326-adac-8f5dc1ad7771
                © 2022
                History

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