Join us for the 2024-2025 webinar series by the DSA-EADi joint study group on land, labour and food convened by Dr. Mihika Chatterjee and Dr. Rama Salla Dieng. For information on the group, see here.

Talk: Vanguards of the Forest

Speaker: Dr. Aby L. Sène, Clemson University

Chair: Dr Mihika Chatterjee, University of Bath

Abstract

Located in the marshlands and forests of coastal South Carolina, Francis Marion National Forest and Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge are surrounded by Black communities who have maintained a deep relationship with these ecologies since the rice plantation economy of the settler colony. For almost a century, descendants of enslaved people owned lands located on the periphery of these federally protected lands, safeguarding them from the environmental degradation that accompanies capitalist development. These federally designated protected wilderness areas stand today on lands that once was a place of refuge and continue to serve as a source of subsistence food production and cultural sustenance for these communities. Thus, this enduring land relation plays a critical role for ecological resilience and embody Black freedom and self-determination. Yet, economic and political disenfranchisement and challenges related to property inheritance, coupled with decades of conservation policies and tourism development in the area have deepened land and resource alienations of the communities on the periphery eroding the important role they play as vanguards of the forests.

This webinar presents part of Dr. Sène project in collaboration with researchers from Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute and American Rivers. Using the practice of bricolage to weave together diverse stories that connect to these Coastal South Carolina forests and marshlands, she draws from existing literature, oral histories, and other historical documents to contextualize these local ecologies within the broader processes of primitive accumulation that are part and parcel to the ongoing settler colonial capitalist formations of South Carolina including, the rice plantation economy, reconstruction era, timber economy and the modern conservation-led tourism development. She ends the talk with the different ways Black communities around the federally designated wilderness areas have mounted resistance against State and private capital driven land grabs.

About the Speaker

Dr. Sène is a professor in conservation and development at Clemson University. Her work lies at the intersections conservation policies, economic development, land rights, resource sovereignty, and rural livelihoods in the US and Senegal. In the US her work interrogates how history, pollical economy and culture mediate African American relationships with conservation lands and cultural landscapes. In Senegal, her work centers on the colonial structures of power in conservation, and integrative conservation approaches such as livelihood-centered projects, ecotourism and community-based conservation. For over a decade, Dr. Sène has worked closely with government agencies in the US and Africa to inform and design integrated management plans for large scale conservation areas of international importance for biodiversity and socio-economic development (i.e., RAMSAR designated Wetlands; World Heritage Sites, National Parks).

Vanguards of the Forests