Research Overview
Across my research, teaching, and public curriculum, I focus on 20th- and 21st-century dynamics of U.S. agricultural and rural governance and investment, U.S. racial capitalism and colonialism, and racial formations within and beyond the United States. Critically, I do so while centering the antiracist, anticolonial, and revolutionary-socialist struggles at the center of such historical and contemporary dynamics.
Independent Book Project |
Verdant Empire:
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My current book project, Verdant Empire: Race and Rural Economies of Containment, begins with the United States’ Cold War-era anxiety that civil unrest across the Third World threatened international public order and property relations. This anxiety framed U.S. policymakers’ fixation on agricultural productivity and hunger across the Third World, and underpinned the surge in international industrial agri-food research, technology, and education transfer programs under the U.S. Department of State’s Technical Cooperation Administration and its successor agencies. Centering the threat to U.S. state power and transnational capitalism posed by diverse Black and Indigenous resurgence movements across the twentieth century, Verdant Empire situates such anti-hunger and anti-poverty interventions across the Third World within the longue durée of U.S. conceptions and practices of development-as-counterinsurgency while accounting for how differential processes of Black and Indigenous racialization have been a mainstay of such efforts.
Beginning with the ascendance of antiracist and anticolonial revolutionary-socialist struggles worldwide, Verdant Empire analyzes the early- to mid-twentieth century administrative and policy archive of U.S. agricultural development programs within the United States and across the Third World. It does so with a key part of the archive of the emerging social science disciplines: the contemporaneous academic and philanthropic field research programs that looked to agrarian labor-capital relations and sociality in order to explain the persistence of Black and Indigenous poverty and unrest, and in order to guide U.S. economic, domestic, and foreign policy reform. Joining both archives, Verdant Empire offers a robust relational and genealogical critique of Black and Indigenous labor-capital and land-based struggles, and the counterrevolutionary repertoires of global agri-food systems.
Beginning with the ascendance of antiracist and anticolonial revolutionary-socialist struggles worldwide, Verdant Empire analyzes the early- to mid-twentieth century administrative and policy archive of U.S. agricultural development programs within the United States and across the Third World. It does so with a key part of the archive of the emerging social science disciplines: the contemporaneous academic and philanthropic field research programs that looked to agrarian labor-capital relations and sociality in order to explain the persistence of Black and Indigenous poverty and unrest, and in order to guide U.S. economic, domestic, and foreign policy reform. Joining both archives, Verdant Empire offers a robust relational and genealogical critique of Black and Indigenous labor-capital and land-based struggles, and the counterrevolutionary repertoires of global agri-food systems.
Project Lead
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California Water Governance, Racial Capitalism, and the Case for Abolition |
Details forthcoming...
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