Robert Greene II: What inspired you to write this book?
Jarvis C. McInnis: Afterlives of the Plantation is my first book, and like many first monographs, it is animated, at least in part, by personal, autobiographical concerns. I am a native southerner, born and raised in Gulfport, Mississippi. I pursued my undergraduate studies at Tougaloo College, an historically black college in Tougaloo, Mississippi, and then migrated to New York City for graduate school. While there, I learned about the richness of the cultural, intellectual, and political contributions of black people from the US South and the Caribbean who had made the Great Migration to places like Harlem, Philadelphia, and Chicago and transformed those cities into crucibles of black modern life and diasporic relation. And while I appreciated, and was even enamored of, the new possibilities Black people had access to “up North,” as a native southerner, I eventually became curious about those black folk who, like my grandparents and many members of my family, had remained in the South or who migrated North and eventually returned South.
Furthermore, as a Mississippian living in New York City, I experienced a profound anti-southern bias both interpersonally and within much of the scholarship I was engaging, wherein the US South, and especially Mississippi, were almost exclusively figured as scapegoats for the anti-blackness that’s, in fact, endemic to US (and Western!) identity and culture writ large. While I would be the last to ever downplay the abhorrent anti-black violence of Mississippi’s or the US South’s history—and am deeply committed to holding them accountable for their crimes against humanity and black people, in particular—I also recognized that there is a fund of a cultural, intellectual, and political capital among Black southerners that’s often overlooked or denied. So, I set about trying to reconcile the tension between race and region, to grapple with the paradox of being both black and southern, and to try to understand where black southerners fit within a discourse on modernity that constantly positions them as anything but modern and as the antithesis of everything associated with it: intellectual, sophisticated, innovative, cosmopolitan, and, ultimately, worthy of (Black) study.