Abstract

Incorporating interdisciplinary methodologies from anthropology, history, and spatial humanities, this paper examines land use and environmental racism over time. It argues Louisiana's petrochemical corridor is a direct outgrowth of settler colonialism and the plantation complex, forming what the “Plantation-to-Petrochemical Complex.”

During colonization, Native lands along the Lower Mississippi River were forcibly taken – through warfare, enslavement, and acts of genocide – divided and distributed through royal land grants to settlers, and then developed into plantations dependent on enslaved Native and, increasingly, African and African American labor. This extractive exploitation of land and labor consolidated wealth and biopower into the hands of the planter elite, creating the one of the most brutal slave societies in the Antebellum South. During the U.S. Civil War, Louisiana's sugar parishes were exempted from immediate emancipation, and plantations were allowed to remain operational well into the Postbellum period. Profitability, though, became dependent on newly developing coerced labor regimes. Control was maintained through the pervasive use of state-sanctioned racial violence.

However, when Louisiana’s sugar plantations collapsed at the beginning of the 20th century, it coincided with the discovery of the oil frontier along the Gulf Coast. Many former plantations were sold directly to emerging petroleum corporations as pre-consolidated large tracts of land. Now one of the most toxic geographies in the Western Hemisphere, Louisiana’s sugar parishes form what residents solemnly call “Cancer Alley.” This region’s petroleum and petroleum-derived industrial production facilities, pipelines, and shipping industries are an essential part of the U.S. energy sector, crucial to national security. But to facilitate it, Louisiana’s Black and Native communities must continue to be ravaged by poverty, incarceration, disease, and death, exemplifying a necropolitical present in which subjectivity and death are the roots of both the settler state's historical sovereignty and its modern political economy.

The Plantation-to-Petrochemical Complex reveals the hyper-complexity of global capitalist spatialities, linking colonial and neo-colonial strategies to maintain control over land, labor, and natural resources.

BIO

Leila K. Blackbird is the Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellow of History at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, entitled “The Middle Ground is a Shatter Zone: In the Wake of Settler Colonialism and Slavery on America’s Third Coast,” centers enslaved Native and Black-Native people at the core of U.S. History. In additional to the Pozen Center for Human Rights, Leila is affiliated with the Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (NCAIS), the Johns Hopkins Center for Africana Studies, and the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies. She is a contributing author for What is History, Now? and Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity & Community.