Juju leaves in the center of a whirlwind: African American nature/culture mediation.

Abstract

Juju Leaves in the Center of a Whirlwind: African American Nature/Culture Mediation is concerned with how environmental relationships were primary in African Americans' early experience in the United States. This work concerns itself with the ways in which capitalism and governmental policy affected African Americans' relationships to the land and how African retained spirituality and resistance emerged as themes in African American cultures. An investigation of these questions reveals how African American cultures in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama between 1830 and 1939 negotiated externally imposed restrictions and demands in relationship to the land. During this period, geographic locations, systems of labor, education, and medical approaches, all transformed in subtle and dramatic ways as economic, political and environmental relationships shifted. As ideologies and practices shifted, African Americans simultaneously asserted multiple ways of maintaining self-defined and counter-hegemonic cultural beliefs and practices. While exploitative environmental relationships were a site of injury in the forms of slavery and sharecropping, many African Americans maintained associations with the land as a way to maintain and achieve economic, physical and spiritual health. Through immaterial and material traditions, some retained from West African cultures, many African Americans significantly influenced American cultural geography. Thus, African American cultures reflect a negotiation of a tangible, material understanding of the environment. At the same time, this material understanding of the natural world is often infused with perceptions of a less tangible, but equally real, immaterial quality. Spatial and literary theory, as well as environmental and labor history, inform this analysis which illuminates how critical environmental and social issues converged between 1830 and 1939. In particular it examines the history of entitlement to and maintenance of land, the possibilities of self-sufficiency, questions of health care, diet and spiritual beliefs, participation in the agricultural economy, and women's relation to production and space. By detailing the cultural traditions and experiences of slavery, reconstruction, gardening, root medicine, Hoodoo and extension agent work, this examination of African American environmental cultures reveals a dynamic and distinctive aspect of American cultures.