Abstract

In this article, we focus on the agro-environmental dimensions of plantation agriculture in the U.S. South, examining the ways carceral relations constrain foodways through the interrelated control of human and non-human life, the racialized monopolization of land, and the production of hunger. Through a focus on the chemicalization of cotton plantation agriculture and the transformation of chicken to poultry, we show how the racialized control of life and labor has been extended temporally and spatially by means of agricultural technologies. In the decades following the abolition of slavery, white landowners enrolled legal structures of racialized coercion and agricultural technologies in the service of continued plantation production. Combining archival and ethnographic methods, we trace these dynamics in cotton and poultry production in the 20th century, we show how technologies putatively oriented toward agricultural “productivity” extended the carceral dynamics of prisons through agro-environmental racism, the control of land and labor, and the production of hunger. Cotton chemicals and poultry plant speedups, we argue, represent racial and spatial relations of material and ideological control and containment that displace nourishing and liberatory ways of living and relating.

摘要

在本文中，我们关注美国南部种植园农业的农业环境维度，通过对人类和非人类生活的相互关联控制、对土地的种族垄断和饥饿的产生，研究了监狱关系如何限制饮食方式. 通过关注棉花种植农业的化学化和鸡变家禽，我们展示了种族化对生活和劳动的控制是如何通过农业技术在时间和空间上延伸的。在废除奴隶制后的几十年里，白人土地所有者加入了种族化胁迫和农业技术的法律结构，以服务于持续的种植园生产。结合档案和民族志方法，我们追溯了 20 世纪棉花和家禽生产中的这些动态，我们展示了假定面向农业“生产力”的技术如何通过农业环境种族主义、土地和劳动力的控制以及饥饿的产生来扩展监狱的监禁动态。我们认为，棉花化学品和家禽植物的加速发展代表了物质和意识形态控制和遏制的种族和空间关系，它们取代了滋养和解放的生活方式和关系。