The North American Food Systems Network (NAFSN) is pleased to announce its first  webinar of 2017.  It will be onWednesday, January 25, 2017 at 1:00 pm EST (10:00 am PST). The webinars in the NAFSN Good Food Talk series are designed to identify innovations in the field and highlight efforts that promote just and sustainable food systems, giving participants the opportunity to learn and interact with food system practitioners and experts in diverse locations and regions. This fourth webinar in the monthly series will inform participants about some of the recent scholarship pertaining to Black Agrarianism, specifically highlighting two forthcoming books: Food First’s soon to be published Land Justice: Re-Imagining Land, Food, and the Commons, and Dr. Monica White’s Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, 1880-2010.

The webinar will open with a focus on Food First’s Land Justice project, giving participants a chance to learn more about the chapters inside the book and more specifically what African American scholars are writing about the Black Agrarian experience. Joined by Justine Williams of Food First, who will give background on the book’s origins, Dr. Gail Myers will discuss the three chapters in the Black Agrarianism section.  Next Shakara Tyler will offer a preview of a chapter from the section on gender, exploring also role of “womanism” in black Black Agrarianism. The second half of the webinar will be presented by Dr. Monica White. Her research engages communities of color and grassroots organizations that are involved in the development of sustainable community food systems as a strategy to respond to issues of hunger and food inaccessibility. Her publications include, “Sisters of the Soil: Urban Gardening as Resistance Among Black Women in Detroit” and “D-Town Farm: African American Resistance to Food Insecurity and the Transformation of Detroit.”

Topic: Land Justice, Black Agrarianism and the Freedom Movement: Emerging Voices

Date: Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Time: 1:00 pm Eastern Time (10:00 am Pacific Time)

Presenters: 

Gail P. Myers, Ph.D, —  Cultural Anthropologist and Co-Founder of Farms to Grow, Inc.

Justine Williams  — Coordinator of the Food First Land Justice: Reimagining Land, Food and the Commons project, and PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Shakara Tyler – PhD Candidate, Michigan State University Department of Community Sustainability and Underserved Farmer Development Specialist at MSU Center for Regional Food Systems

Monica M. White, Ph.D — Assistant Professor, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Register HERE

Background on the these two books:

1. Land Justice: Re-Imagining Land, Food, and the Commons, by Justine M. Williams and Eric Holt-Giménez (eds)brings the question of land, water and resource access home to North America. Food First (The Institute for Food and Development Policy), started releasing preview backgrounders from this book last year. The edited volume and associated media bring together the voices of activists and scholars working on issues of rural land consolidation, urban gentrification, Black land loss, Native land rights, farm labor, marine and aquatic resources, and more. In it examines the structures of race, class and gender that underlie the U.S. agri-food system and ask how policy, climate change and financialization articulate with them to drive dispossession. With prefaces from leaders in the food justice and family farming movements, the book opens with a look at the legacies of white-settler colonialism in the southwestern United States. From there, it moves into a collectively-authored section on Black Agrarianism, which details the long history of land dispossession among Black farmers in the southeastern US, as well as the creative acts of resistance they have used to acquire land and collectively farm it, in these chapters:

• The Roots of Black Agrarianism” by Owusu Bandele and Gail Myers;
• “Black Agrarianism: Resistance” by Dãnia C. Davy, Savonala Horne, Tracy Lloyd McCurty, and Edward “Jerry” Pennick;
• “Regeneration:” by Leah Penniman and Blain Snipstal.

The next section, on gender, explores structural and cultural discrimination against women landowners in the Midwest and also role of “womanism” in land-based struggles, including this chapter:

• “Womanism as Black Agrarianism: Black Women Healing through Innate Agrarian Artistry” by Kirtrina Baxter, Aleya Fraser, Dara Cooper and Shakara Tyler.

2. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, 1880-2010, by Monica M. White contextualizes new forms of contemporary urban agriculture within the historical legacies of African American farmers who fought to acquire and stay on the land. Using historical and contemporary examples, Freedom Farmersexamines the development of farmers’ cooperatives as strategies of resistance, and documents the ways that these organizations, in general, and Black farmers specifically, have contributed to the Black Freedom Movement.