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Abstract
Black labor and agricultural knowledge have been exploited as currency forAmerica’s first major economic system-- the plantation. Drawing on geographer
Katherine McKittrick’s notion of plantation futures, the plantation’s role in
perpetuating Black loss and placelessness must be addressed in order to
decolonize food-producing landscapes. Because America has centralized Blackness
at the site of the plantation, this ethnographic landscape design study explores site-
specific suggestions on Sapelo Island, Georgia that may support racial healing and
(re)incorporate African diasporic food crops into a joyful, sustainable act of liberation
from the plantation’s carceral state. Seventeen months were spent immersed on the
island during this mixed-method study. In addition to site-specific suggestions, this
two-pronged project leans into its community-driven approach to offer a new design
process that designers and food activists may use for reimagining racialized
landscapes that have been subjected to colonialism: monocultures, extraction, and
Black invisibility.