African Agrotopias

Abstract

Chapter three turns to a black nationalist corpus that considers the West Indies and other non-US sites as possible agrotopias, protected from the threat of extinction, enslavement, and erasure. These writings imagine fertile, independent, black agrotopias outside the US—in the southern Americas, the Texas borderlands, and on the eastern coast of Africa. From Martin Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) and Principia of Ethnology (1879) to Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) and W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” (1920), black nationalist and utopian writings together reshaped and rendered portable the seemingly white, US nation-based agrarian ideal. Combining discourses of reproductive futurism, black nationalism, racial separatism, and agrarianism, these texts imaginatively facilitated the global dissemination of agrotopias—of racially homogeneous, independent farming communities that represented sustainable alternatives to US slavery and racial oppression.