Recipients of the Bliss Symposium Award reflect on this spring’s Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium in partnership with the Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies, "Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora.” Awardees were asked to submit either a 1000-word scholarly review of the symposium or a 250-word personal reflection on the event and how it advanced their studies.
Keziah Anderson, PhD Candidate in History, Harvard University
How did enslavement, colonization, and bodily violence impact landscapes in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries? What strategies did displaced, kidnapped, and enslaved Africans and their descendants employ in making lives for themselves in new and changing topographies? In what ways did Africana cultures and land-based belief systems shift, adapt, and reconfigure amid the exploitative monocultural economy of the Atlantic world? How can methodological groundings in place and material experiences shape historical understandings of Black environmental histories?
From May 12-13, 2023, presentations at the Dumbarton Oaks annual Spring Garden and Landscapes Symposium titled Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora explored how Black people in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa recreated and reconceived of the new and changing landscapes they found themselves in amid the turbulence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Presenters explored how European colonization and the mass enslavement of people of African and Indigenous American descent impacted land, water-based terrains, and built landscapes. Symposium presenters underlined that Black people across the Atlantic world reimagined and recreated their landscapes within contexts of violence, coercion, enslavement, and forced movement.
As colonizers from Europe began to exploit landscapes in the Americas, establish plantation monocultures, and kidnap and enslave Africans and Indigenous peoples from the Americas, people of African descent developed intimate relationships with the land on which they lived and worked. People of African descent encountered new plant life, animal species, and Indigenous land-based knowledge systems in the Americas. Black people also brought their African Indigenous spiritual, epistemological, and cultural beliefs. Black people across the Atlantic world made use of the coasts, water-based terrains, plants, topographies, and built structures they encountered to reconstitute, sustain, and establish new Africana cultures, community formations, and intergenerational environmental knowledge systems. In the new landscapes of the Americas and the changing terrains of Africa, people of African descent nurtured existing, creolized, and novel ecological epistemological frameworks with the Indigenous peoples they came into contact with and in the context of European exploitation.
Presenters demonstrated that there was no singular “Black landscape.” Instead, Black Atlantic landscapes throughout history were diverse, based in material reality, local, and specific. Across Atlantic space and time, Black people came into contact with the environment in unique ways. Black Atlantic landscapes were thus shaped by factors as varied as disease, childhood developmental stage, botanic species prevalence, and gendered labor dynamics.
Innovative research methods, archival sources, and analytical approaches are central in exploring landscape, land-based, and environmental histories of subaltern peoples. At the conference, presenting scholars made use of traditional Afro-Brazilian music recordings, maps, paintings, oral histories, medical journals, and archaeological findings to understand how Black people’s cultures, families, and labor were shaped by the exploited terrains they lived with and within. Using novel sources and creative analytical methods, the symposium presenters were able to explore fresh gendered, embodied, and spiritual histories of the environment. Further, several scholars embraced critical fabulation and historical speculation to understand the lived experiences of Black children, women, and men. With these approaches, presenters were able to construct historical narratives of Black resistance, homebuilding, and environmental knowledge production out of sources of colonial surveillance and spatial control.
Presentations underlined how the natural world could be a technology of both exploitation and nourishment. Black enslaved people were both forced to labor in plantations with agricultural monocultures and cultivated their own crops and sacred groves. In these dichotomous relationships with the land, displaced and enslaved Black people developed intimate connections with the botanic and natural worlds and experienced pain and harm within them. Black maroons and enslaved people experienced disease, dangerous animals, and exploitative land-based labor that threatened their family structures, bodily integrity, and child development. Trees indigenous to the Americas were sights of racist killings. Pandemics threatened maroon and enslaved communities.
Black people also strategically made use of the terrains they found themselves in. Maroons navigated the built and natural environments of the slave societies in which they were forced and created their own communities across both Africa and the Caribbean. As the slave trade reshaped the African landscape, Indigenous Africans commanded bees and built indigenous architectural structures like tatas to protect their communities. Enslaved adults cultivated their own plots of land and produced diverse crops. For displaced African people, land and non-human organisms provided means of crafting independence, self-sustainment, and protection.
Because of my attendance at the conference, I will be able to strengthen my scholarship on Afro-Indigenous land-based histories. As I explore the post-land allotment disability and legal histories of Black and Afro-Indigenous members of Native American tribes, I hope to employ geographies, plant life, and intimate environmental knowledge as theoretical tools in analyzing commodification and resistance. The historical approaches explored in the symposium would enrich Indigenous histories outside of Afro-Indigenous contexts as well. The presenters’ attention to how turbulence, land-based labor, and forced relocation affected Black people’s relationships with the environment could inspire scholars who study historical events in Native American history with similar community and environmental impacts, like the Trail of Tears, land allotment, and boarding school removals. In all, the Conference exemplified the value in approaching the histories of enslaved and Indigenous peoples through the lens of natural and created landscapes, embodied environments, and terrains of resistance.
Zawdie Sandvliet, PhD candidate in Social and Economic History, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Shades of Insurgency
The symposium Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora at Dumbarton Oaks was supportive to the phase that I am in as a graduate Student who recently started on his dissertation on land grabbing by the Dutch Empire in 17ᵗʰ-18th century Suriname. In my work I want to tell a history of how Indigenous, Maroon and enslaved people responded to the acts of land grabbing by the Dutch colonial powers. Currently I am thinking a lot about my theoretical framework and methodology. One of the works that is motivating me in this endeavor is the book Black Marxism, by Cedric J. Robinson. Elise Mitchell's presentation titled “The land will not expose their designs” was inspirational in this case. To hear how she is extending the Black radical tradition by making the argument that public healing was and is an important part of the Black Radical tradition is inspiring. Her paper moves and pushes us to think of what other ways of expanding the Black Radical Tradition. In my case, for example, how contestations to Dutch acts of Land grabbing by Indigenous, Maroon and enslaved people could possibly be added to the Black Radical tradition.
Colonial Space, Black Places
Walking around Dumbarton Oaks and reading the plaques on the buildings you get a sense of the colonial history of this space. As a Black Caribbean scholar in the Netherlands in a field dominated by white Dutch scholars it was inspiring to meet Black, Latin and other subaltern thinkers at the colonial space of Dumbarton Oaks and create a Black place within this context. Justin Dunnavant was definitely one of the most inspirational. His purpose, value and ethic in the form of reclaiming our ancestral memory is totally aligned with my project in which I aim to reclaim the ancestral memories of Indigenous, Maroon and enslaved narratives of 17ᵗʰ-18ᵗʰ century Suriname.
During this symposium different scholars were searching for Black and indigenous landscapes/Black places. The topics of the presentations focused on specific localities of the Black Atlantic. From Fort Amsterdam in Accra, to a square in Havana, and to a mine in Southeast Brazil. What could be learned from these different projects that focused on landscapes in these different spaces or as Andrew Apter pointedly asked: what can landscapes tell us? Landscapes as the plot, the plantation, maroon settlements, markets, West African barracoons, west African fortifications to arm against slave hunters, rivers, lakes, swamps and the ocean. What can they tell us? This list mentions material landscapes. While Oscar La Torre pointed out that a landscape is not just a physical reality (what we see), but also a narrative (how we see it). To focus on landscapes shows how complex the history of slavery and colonialism is. So, uncovering insurgent memories of our ancestors from these different landscapes/Black places tells us different stories of colonial pasts/spaces.
Black Epistemologies
A main thread throughout the papers is what Justin Dunnavant called uncovering our ancestors memories. Most of the presentations had that as an objective. Some succeeded better in this than others. Tied to this is the question of which data a researcher can use to uncover these memories. The presenters during this symposium used innovative data imaginatively. Some would use a painting, others a map, and others would use songs. An overarching point one could distill from this is that scholars who work on the intersections of land scapes, the Black Atlantic and uncovering insurgent memories need to be creative with their source material. Related to the use of data is the question of speculation since not all questions can be answered based on the data. There is not a definite answer to the rightful use of speculation and the topic needs to be further discussed. For example on the questions of indigenization and creolization in the Black Atlantic. In other words, what was the relationships between Africans and Indigenous people? Also, to what extent constructed Africans in the Americas their knowledge systems on West-African systems of knowledge and how was their knowledge, for example about the landscape, influenced by interactions with Indigenous people? Much has been said and speculated on this topic and more work needs to be done.
A Black World, Sanctified
One aspect that was missing during most of the presentation was a practical implication of the works. The question ‘What do we do with the knowledge that we produce?’ is important to me. Elise Mitchel mentioned that she wants to push the conversation forward and Justin Dunnavant has as his aim to reclaim ancestral memory and is applying this in his public education projects. I would want to make the case that as a result of this symposium there should also be a practical implication. For example, what does this all mean for communities in the Black Atlantic? Also, how will the symposium change how we practice landscaping in the Black Atlantic? And, most importantly, how will we make a Black world sanctified?
Abiola Ibirogba, PhD Candidate in Archaeology, Columbia University
The 2023 Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium reflects decades of monumental scholarship on the re-imagination of landscape in the Black Atlantic. I am grateful for being nominated as a Bliss Award Scholar this year. This symposium elucidates multifaceted representations of geographies that have often been silent in historical literature. From extractive landscapes of miners and plantation workers, the symposium discusses natural spaces of continuities from Africa to the New World, and then sacred landscapes of performance, the materiality of resistance, and their essence for studying the Black Atlantic.
My primary takeaways from this symposium are engagement with the scholarship on Black geographies and ecologies to problematize Black Life in the Atlantic world as well as in Africa, the use of speculations for providing alternative answers to silences in the archive, and the relevance of bridging disciplinary silos through symposiums that bring scholars across disciplines working on the Atlantic.
Finally, the symposium has increased my network of mentors in other fields outside of archaeology. Connections with art historians and landscape architects have made me envision the agency of African runaways in new ways. I now seek to address runaway geographies as spaces of creativity and continuity, and this will continue to influence my current research on African migrants fleeing slavery and war on the West African coast in the 18th century. Suffice it to say that the different discussions on maroon geographies in the New World remain the most significant contribution of this year’s work to my research.
Anastasia Marie, MLA candidate, University of Michigan
I departed from the Dumbarton Oaks Symposium feeling more fueled and inspired for my applied research and landscape design practice. It was an incredible space – to be in the company of Black scholars and landscape architects. I especially enjoyed Justin Dunnavant’s presentation on the recovery of Black ancestral memory through archeological and interdisciplinary study of Maroon geographies in the former Danish West Indies. He gave me vocabulary through which to better understand my own education and desired practice in landscape architecture and artmaking. For instance, he cited Yussoff 2018 who rethought the framing of the Anthropocene, arguing how Black and brown people have been exposed to its consequences long before it was declared. What inspired me the most about his work is the notion of Maroon ecology. How does it feel to find refuge in ecological community hostile to enslavers but nourishing to those pursuing freedom at any cost? What species are present? What landscape patterns do the maroons encourage and steward? How do Maroon practices overlap with and include Indigenous practices? What does it mean to practice Marronage today while designing landscapes that keep the memory of Maroon geographies alive? How can Black historical ecology inform landscape design? Because of listening to Justin Dunnavant’s presentation and meeting him afterwards, I want Maroon ecology and anticolonial modeling to inform my designs of ecological landscapes of Black joy and wellness. To start, I am looking forward to reading his pending article “Counter-mapping Maroon Cartographies: GIS and Anticolonial Modeling in St. Croix.”
Omokolade Omigbule, PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University of Virginia
As a budding scholar interested in the everyday experiences of people living during West Africa’s Trans-Atlantic period, the conversations at the symposium significantly broadened the projections for my doctoral research. While my initial focus has been on the central part of Yorubaland, southwest Nigeria, the incursions of European slavers and other African states into the communities on the Bight of Biafra offer more potential to explore comparatively the material and ideological vestiges of this period. Notably, the cultural connection between these communities and the diasporic settlements is a great window to examine the questions of cultural continuity in commensurable landscapes and ethnogenesis in incommensurable spaces.
Beyond these new directions, the trans-disciplinary atmosphere at the symposium allowed me to network with scholars whose expertise in cultural landscapes will be pivotal to exploring the questions mentioned above. My conversations with these scholars further engaged me with current concepts and debates across the disciplines. These concepts include Black geographies, morbid geographies, Indigenous ecologies, juvenile agency, and indigenous hermeneutics.
Overall, the symposium engaged a trans-disciplinary approach to discussing the global lived experiences of African and African Diaspora populations in the Black Atlantic (a spatial and ideological location). These conversations concern, but are not limited to, the different forms of cartographic and biophysical violence meted out to the victims of the Trans-Atlantic economy. The speakers called for re-reading the popular narratives and re-storying their afterlives by foregrounding the intellectual voices of the subaltern.
I am confident my future engagements will be influenced by and contribute significantly to these conversations.