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Much southern history has positioned African American farmers as the victims of race bias and the sharecropping system. While largely true, recent scholarship has indicated the complex systems that allowed some farmers to become prosperous landowners while constraining others to subordinate status. This collection of essays will explore the ways that black farmers negotiated southern racism and the capitalist system between Reconstruction and the recent past, and the mixed results of their efforts. In general, the essays will represent recent, interdisciplinary scholarship on myriad factors affecting farmers’ approaches to acquiring and retaining land, building communities and negotiating change in the rural South. Essays could explore topics such as the ways monoculture and agribusiness affected black farmers, or the ways black farm families built homes and support networks. Essays may explore tensions among black farm families, between public and private reform efforts, and within rural politics. Essays should be analytical and original, and can incorporate race, gender or class as conceptual frameworks to better understand black farming in historic perspective.
Editors seek ten previously unpublished essays of 6,000 words maximum excluding endnotes. The anthology will be useful in courses on southern history, agricultural history, rural sociology and cultural anthropology.
For additional information, contact Debra A. Reid, Eastern Illinois University and Evan P. Bennett, Florida International University. To begin the submission process, please send both editors a 500 word proposal/abstract which includes the number and subject of potential illustrations, if relevant, and a one page CV that includes professional contact information by 31 August 2007. Authors will be notified immediately thereafter whether or not to submit a complete article. Completed articles are due no later than 31 December 2007.
Proposals should be sent electronically or in hard copy to the editors at:
Debra A. Reid
Associate Professor
Department of History
Eastern Illinois University
600 Linncoln Ave.
Charleston, IL 61920
dareid@eiu.edu
phone: 217-581-7272
fax: 217-581-7233
Evan P. Bennett
Visiting Instructor
Department of History
Florida International University
University Park (DM-397)
Miami, FL 33199
ebenn01@hotmail.com
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