“Black Ecological Insurgencies” charts the formation of an insurgent ecological tradition in the Tidewater of Virginia from slavery through the emergence of Jim Crow, underscoring the relationship between these formations and the re-grounding of Black subjectivity within the Black body in contrast to the latter’s abstraction and extraction in the service of expropriation and accumulation associated with plantation and post-emancipation transformations of the landscape. Engaging court documents, bills of sale, slave narratives, state records related to the consolidation of fisheries, as well as historical newspapers articles and related images, I excavate the dynamic relation between Black collective self-creation, fugitivity, resistance, land and aquacultural cultivation, and the rejoining of Black subjectivity and embodiment outside the premises of fungibility and disposability.

This introductory chapter unpacks and integrates the study’s key concepts, theories, and fields to situate the analyses laid out in subsequent chapters. It devotes detailed attention to the inextricable and co-constitutive relationships linking societies, environments, and power. It connects Afro-Brazilian cultures with the myths of racial democracy that helped to shape their emergence in the twentieth century. It discusses concepts of cultural landscapes within economies of transatlantic exchange, and links theories of relational power with Afro-Brazilian resistance and environmental change. It frames the colonial plantation and its monocultures as the ongoing socioecological framework of coloniality, in contrast to the complex biodiverse palm oil landscapes of Northeast Brazil. Along the way, the chapter introduces the real and conceptual places involved in the study, and their interrelations, especially Bahia, the Atlantic World, and the African diaspora. It concludes with a discussion of methods and methodology and an outline of the book’s structure.