PLANTATION FUTURES: Foregrounding Lost Narratives

Abstract

Oak Alley Plantation, located in Louisiana, is preserved as a master narrative: a cultural heritage landscape reflecting the values and cultures of the Antebellum era. Reconstructed cabins in the rear of the property stand as the only recognition and acknowledgment of the forged Black landscapes used for refuge, joy, and resistance

The thesis critically engages in the plantation as a landscape system of white supremacy that linked the exploitation of racialized bodies and fertile lands to commodities. 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.

Through the layering of archival narratives, poetry, literature, and drawing, Black ecologies emerge on site, 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.