Holding Land, Claiming Kin: The Relation Between Race, Land, and Kinship in the Southern US and Barbados

Abstract

Abstract“Holding Land, Claiming Kin” uses a comparison between the Southern US and the Caribbean island of Barbados to explore the connection between race, property, and kinship. Focusing on the customary practices of family land and the legal category of heir property, we argue that land ownership is used by racially dispossessed populations to name and practise kinship, to assert multiple forms of belonging, and to define their own value systems within racialised, social, and legal structures. Contributing to broader understandings of Black geographies, this work adds to social understandings of land ownership as place making and has the potential to influence US policies around grants, agricultural assistance, and protection of heir property, as well as Caribbean understandings of land as a family resource. Through this comparative analysis we posit dispossession as more than the loss of monetary wealth and land ownership as more than an economic asset.