Cumberers" of Wealth: Blackness, Global Value, and Climate Determinism after Emancipation

Taking a more macro-approach, Adams examines how racial and environmental theories intersected with fantasies of global value in the postbellum South. Analyzing the blame narrative that developed around free black labor and... [ view full abstract ]

Taking a more macro-approach, Adams examines how racial and environmental theories intersected with fantasies of global value in the postbellum South. Analyzing the blame narrative that developed around free black labor and soil exhaustion, she traces its origins to pro-slavery climate determinism and examines its role in post-emancipation racial capitalism. Adams begins with climate determinism and its construction of African-descended people as subhumans destined for southern agricultural labor. She focuses on the special status of dirt, showing how it was linked to black labor through logics of relation and resemblance that figured enslaved cotton-hands and cotton fields as sources of economic value – or blackness – within an imagined system of global production. Dirt determinism persisted after emancipation. But its tone shifted from optimism to lament, focusing on the “monstrosity” of self-possessed black labor that disrupted the free flow of value. Rendered discontinuous with southern dirt by self-right, black laborers became “cumberers” of the wealth trapped within it. A narrative of black extraneousness, monopolization, and decay accounted for the region’s environmental-economic crisis. Combining archival research with scholarship by Monique Allewaert, Saidiya Hartman, Walter Johnson, and others, Adams links this discourse to the reconstruction of racial capitalism.