Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South: (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation)

Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South documents how Black employees of the cooperative extension service of the USDA practiced rural improvement in ways that sustained southern Black farmers’ lives and livelihoods in the early decades of the twentieth century, resisting the white supremacy that characterized the Jim Crow South. Mona Domosh details the various mechanisms—the transformation of home demonstration projects, the development of a movable school, and the establishment of Black landowning communities—through which these employees were able to alter USDA’s mandates and redirect its funds. These tweakings and translations of USDA directives enabled these employees to support poor Black farmers by promoting food production, health care, and land and home ownership, thus disturbing a system of plantation agriculture that relied on the devaluing of Black lives. Through the documentation of these efforts, Domosh uncovers an important and previously unknown episode in the long history of international development that highlights the roots of liberal development schemes in the anti-Black racism that constituted plantation agriculture and illustrates how racist systems can be quietly and subtly resisted by everyday people working within the confines of white supremacy.

About the Author :
MONA DOMOSH is professor of geography at Dartmouth College. Her previous publications include Contemporary Human Geography: Culture, Globalization, Landscape (co-authored with Roderick Neumann and Patricia Price), American Commodities in an Age of Empire, and Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in 19th Century New York and Boston. She lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Review :
This story is an important story to tell, and Mona Domosh does it with nuance and an important eye towards not only the raced but gendered realities of this landscape. With it, she highlights an understudied period in American history. Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South offers an extremely important story about race, international development, and forms of resistance to white supremacist logics and institutions within the regime of Jim Crow domestically and imperial expansion globally that is not well known. The empirical details make for a comprehensive analysis that is both engaging and revealing. Written with care and deep respect, this book seeks to undo the erasure of Black women from farming histories in America by bringing into focus their instrumental role in Black agricultural resistance movements. This is a book for everyone interested in the hidden spaces and rarely recognized geographies of Black women’s struggles. Mona Domosh argues that within the constraints of an economic system designed to maximize the exploitation of Black labor and block upward mobility, African American extension agents offered concrete assistance to rural poor families that improved their standard of living, while leaving the basic structures of racial capitalism intact... Domosh’s analysis is thoughtful and nuanced, paying close attention to the limits of these activities along with their achievements An exceptional example of archival research integrated with theory. . . . Domosh works to gradually expand the reader’s understanding of the larger structural forces shaping Black extension while also refusing to deviate from a focus on the Black agents’ agency in shaping extension at the same time. Domosh should be credited for her explicit discussion of her positionality as a white researcher studying with and writing about Black people and communities, as well as her acknowledgement of the limitations of such acknowledgments while offering a commitment towards deeper engagement.