Description
Book SynopsisHistorians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming - the ‘Southern enclosure movement’ - to be a watershed event in the region’s history. This book is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism.
Trade ReviewJohn Cable’s framework centering the political economy of race as part of a larger movement of global decolonization puts Southern labor history in conversation with the literatures of political struggles for dignity and autonomy across a range of times and places. Challenging the biracial model of Southern history by applying a settler colonial model effectively connects the Southern struggle for civil rights with global decolonization in a new way, and Cable is the first to view this struggle through the lens of settler colonialism." - Katherine Osburn, associate professor emeritus of history at Arizona State University, and author of
Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830–1977"In superb and often arresting detail, John Cable recasts the post–World War II dispossession and displacement of Choctaw, African American, and poor white people in Mississippi as an instance of settler colonialism. By making substantive and expansive comparisons with white settlers in southern and eastern Africa, he convincingly connects the exploitative and extractive impulse of the white landowning elite in east central Mississippi with settlers throughout the colonial world. He pays equal attention to the powerful resistance of Choctaw and Black people that paralleled and sometimes drew inspiration from African decolonization movements." - Adrienne Petty, associate professor of history, College of William and Mary, and author of Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Land, Labor, and Race in the Prewar Years
- 2. Sea Change: Settler Agriculture after World War II
- 3. Frantic Resistance: Mississippi and the Decolonial Zeitgeist
- 4. Enclosure: Settler Agriculture in the 1950s
- 5. Mississippi’s 1960
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
