PLANTATION FUTURES

This project is named after Katherine McKittrick’s canonical text: “Plantation Futures.”

Academic Research | Thesis Project

Type

Celina Abba

Project Partner

Rosalea Monacella Advisor

Vacherie, La, USA

Location

2023 - Ongoing

Year Website

Link to website

Our work is guided by the efforts already in motion by local activist groups, descendants’ communities, geographers, poets, and academics. We want to highlight the intragenerational work that the descendant’s communities have undertaken, allowing us, as students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design hundreds of miles away, to begin to help tackle one small part of an extensive, oppressive system: The Plantation System, a system that has disposed thousands of indigenous inhabitants and enslaved peoples of their lands, cultures, and ecologies.

Oak Alley Plantation, located in Louisiana, is the most famous and visited plantation in the United States. Today the plantation is preserved as a cultural landscape reflecting and glorifying the values of the Antebellum era. What is absent at Oak Alley and all the plantations upon which the United States was formed is the recognition of the forged Black landscapes used for refuge, joy, and resistance: the swamp, the ditch, and the plot.

The plantation was a complex of white supremacy that linked the exploitation of racialized bodies and non-human agents to fertile lands and commodities. These landscapes emerged as an economic and political model based on dislocated forced labor, intensive land exploitation, and global commerce supported by land dispossession, labor extraction, and racialized violence.

The thesis questions the concept and practices of heritage in the profession of landscape architecture as it is embedded in the colonial imaginary and its racial legacies. Moments for accountability and restoration are conceived, such as the Citizen Assembly, which holds industry and systems of dispossession to account through new forms of democratic processes and landscape-based evidence collection. Black ecologies emerge through layering archival narratives, poetry, and literature, foregrounding lost narratives within the plantation. These narratives envision radically different futures, where interspecies kinship and empathy surface as new ecologies that point to new Black futurities.

As the project evolves from an academic thesis into an activist endeavor, the project uses design research to incite provocations to the concept and practices of heritage in the profession of landscape architecture as it is embedded in the colonial imaginary and its racial legacies.