Research
Trained as an interdisciplinary historian of the environment, I focus my research on how modes of anticipatory governance in moments of “natural” or “ecological” crisis re-entrench historic entanglements of racialization, colonization, and accumulation.
Verdant Empire:
Race and Rural Economies of Containment
During the Cold War, U.S. policymakers’ fixation on global “hunger” and “poverty” framed U.S. anxieties that Third World civil unrest collectively threatened international public order and property relations. These anxieties drove the surge in U.S. interventions into Third World economies, which set out to supersede the limitations of “traditional” farming practices and technologies via capital-intensive agricultural research, technology, and education transfer programs under the U.S. Department of State’s Technical Cooperation Administration.
My first book project, Verdant Empire: Race and Rural Economies of Containment, investigates the largely obscured connections between these programs and the histories of U.S. slavery, settlement, and empire from which they emerged. It analyzes the early- to mid-20th century bureaucratic and policy archive of U.S. agricultural and rural development programs within the United States and across the Third World. It does so with the contemporaneous archive of state-backed academic and philanthropic field research programs and reports, which set out to discern economies of Native and Black dispossession and guide comprehensive administrative and foreign policy reform. Joining these archives, Verdant Empire offers a robust relational and genealogical critique of the imperial repertoires of anticipatory governance.
Historical and theoretical in scope, Verdant Empire is the first book-length project to account for the U.S. agricultural and rural development paradigm as a vehicle for the absorption of a nominal anti-racism and anti-imperialism into U.S. settler colonial and imperial governmentality. Early- to mid-20th century field research programs under the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller-endowed General Education Board, and the Harvard Bureau of International Research involved comprehensive documentation of the destitute living conditions of Native peoples under the supervision of the Indian Service, rural Black people in the U.S. South, and West African peoples. Verdant Empire argues that, in articulating the need for targeted agricultural development and welfare programs, these research programs and assessments fostered the discursive construction of the reservation economy and plantation economy as key objects of knowledge, governance, and state intervention.
Theorizing the reservation and plantation economies as epistemologies of commensurability and differential devaluation consolidated under the U.S. agricultural and rural development paradigm, Verdant Empire ultimately argues that these research programs and subsequent administrative reforms helped shift the terms of U.S. interventions into the Third World away from the conventional racial and colonial criteria of the “White man’s burden” at the turn of the 20th century toward the new economic and cultural criteria of “international cooperation” at mid-century.
My first book project, Verdant Empire: Race and Rural Economies of Containment, investigates the largely obscured connections between these programs and the histories of U.S. slavery, settlement, and empire from which they emerged. It analyzes the early- to mid-20th century bureaucratic and policy archive of U.S. agricultural and rural development programs within the United States and across the Third World. It does so with the contemporaneous archive of state-backed academic and philanthropic field research programs and reports, which set out to discern economies of Native and Black dispossession and guide comprehensive administrative and foreign policy reform. Joining these archives, Verdant Empire offers a robust relational and genealogical critique of the imperial repertoires of anticipatory governance.
Historical and theoretical in scope, Verdant Empire is the first book-length project to account for the U.S. agricultural and rural development paradigm as a vehicle for the absorption of a nominal anti-racism and anti-imperialism into U.S. settler colonial and imperial governmentality. Early- to mid-20th century field research programs under the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller-endowed General Education Board, and the Harvard Bureau of International Research involved comprehensive documentation of the destitute living conditions of Native peoples under the supervision of the Indian Service, rural Black people in the U.S. South, and West African peoples. Verdant Empire argues that, in articulating the need for targeted agricultural development and welfare programs, these research programs and assessments fostered the discursive construction of the reservation economy and plantation economy as key objects of knowledge, governance, and state intervention.
Theorizing the reservation and plantation economies as epistemologies of commensurability and differential devaluation consolidated under the U.S. agricultural and rural development paradigm, Verdant Empire ultimately argues that these research programs and subsequent administrative reforms helped shift the terms of U.S. interventions into the Third World away from the conventional racial and colonial criteria of the “White man’s burden” at the turn of the 20th century toward the new economic and cultural criteria of “international cooperation” at mid-century.
Mobilities of Eco-Fascism:
Climate Change and the State of Empire
My second book project, Mobilities of Eco-Fascism: Climate Change and the State of Empire, turns to 21st-century U.S. authoritarianism, militarism, and differential racialization under climate change and the anticipated rise of climate-induced displaced persons. It begins with two contemporaneous dynamics: First, resistance to redistributive state-led climate mitigation and adaptation efforts that has articulated with a racialized anti-communism and with White settler “blood and soil” claims to place; and second, anxieties over an impending surge of climate-induced displaced persons that have articulated with current repertoires of criminalization and militarization.
Mobilities of Eco-Fascism queries the entangled cultural and legal construction and regulation of migrants, refugees, and Native peoples amidst each dynamic. It does so via textual analysis of recent U.S. Department of Defense, Department of State, and security-oriented “think tank” documents with contextual analysis of “informal” sites of militarization—from recent armed confrontations between land-owners and federal agents to border militias set against “migrant caravans.” By focusing on militarized anxieties vis-à-vis race, place, and migration under climate change, this project puts Transnational American Studies scholarship on relational racialization and imperial repertoires of U.S. political economy in conversation with Critical Refugee Studies scholarship that re-conceptualizes the refugee from an object of rescue to a site of social and political critique.
Mobilities of Eco-Fascism queries the entangled cultural and legal construction and regulation of migrants, refugees, and Native peoples amidst each dynamic. It does so via textual analysis of recent U.S. Department of Defense, Department of State, and security-oriented “think tank” documents with contextual analysis of “informal” sites of militarization—from recent armed confrontations between land-owners and federal agents to border militias set against “migrant caravans.” By focusing on militarized anxieties vis-à-vis race, place, and migration under climate change, this project puts Transnational American Studies scholarship on relational racialization and imperial repertoires of U.S. political economy in conversation with Critical Refugee Studies scholarship that re-conceptualizes the refugee from an object of rescue to a site of social and political critique.
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