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Approaching Material Ecology: Plows and the Landscape Environment in the Lives of Many Enslaved

March 18, 2021, 12:00–1:30 p.m. ET on Zoom | Tony Perry

Illustration of a freed black man plowing a field
“Plowing in South Carolina. – From A Sketch by Jas. E. Taylor.” Illustration of a freed black man plowing a field, which appeared in an issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 20, 1866 (image: Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2004669782/)

This talk foregrounds an approach to conceptualizing enslaved people’s relationship with the environment, particularly the plantation landscape. In it, Perry introduces material ecology as an object-oriented method tooled specifically, though not exclusively, for recuperating the broader environmental history of slavery. As the environment figures little in slavery studies scholarship and as the history of slavery figures little in the field of American environmental history, studying the complex encounters and interactions between the enslaved and the landscape not only brings these fields together but does so to foreground a dimension of enslaved people’s lives that warrants increased attention. In this talk, Perry details key problems that arise when exploring the environment in the lives of slaves, outlines how material ecology addresses these problems, and discusses how cast-iron plows materialize a set of ecological relations that afford insight into enslaved people’s coerced intimacy with the plantation landscape.  

Tony C. Perry is a museum curator and a scholar of race and the environment. His research on the environmental history of slavery in the United States examines enslaved people’s relationship with the environment and how they leveraged this relationship to reckon with their enslavement. Thinking across several dimensions of the environment including the land and landscape, the aquatic, the weather, and the supernatural, he pays particular attention to the many ways the environment was simultaneously empowering and antagonizing in enslaved people’s daily lives.