People

From roughly the early 1940s to the early 1970s, the United States, in conjunction with corporate, philanthropic, and state actors around the world, led a set of international capital-intensive agricultural research, technology, and education transfer initiatives. These initiatives were designed to facilitate a more expansive market agrarianism, increase agricultural yields, and combat hunger amidst concerns of a rapidly growing population. Yet, named the “Green Revolution,” this international collaboration, in its push for the development of industrial agriculture oriented to the global market, ultimately reconstituted states as guarantors of agricultural markets in service of U.S. state power and transnational capitalism. Scholars have argued that the processes of state reconfiguration, capitalist accumulation, and agricultural investment, innovation, and outreach for which the Green Revolution became known were developed and in place within the U.S. itself much earlier in the twentieth century. Yet, in light of the fact that the Green Revolution also served to preempt peasant unrest and undermine larger revolutionary action in service of U.S. state power and transnational capitalism, scholars have begun to situate strategies of the “risk management” of racial capitalism within the United States earlier in the twentieth century as among, and intimately tied to, such processes.

Containment in Black and Red: Race, Rural Insurgency, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution, aims to contribute to and expand upon such incipient genealogies of the Green Revolution as an exercise in the risk management of racial capitalism. Specifically, it seeks to outline the significance of the Green Revolution to the period of great social upheaval during which it took place—when overlapping, internationalized anticolonial and civil rights movements named the limits of racial democracy, particularly in ways that risked undercutting Cold War U.S. state power and transnational capitalism. From there, it seeks to situate the Green Revolution in relation to the genealogy of U.S. settler colonial and anti-black forms of subjection, administration, and governance directed toward the cultivation of a Native market agrarianism and black market agrarianism from the early-twentieth century onward. Finally, it seeks to situate this comparative, relational, and transnational analysis of the Green Revolution within localized and embodied contexts, attendant to Native and black peoples’ visions and practices of liberation vis-à-vis agricultural and rural development more broadly during this time period.

Containment in Black and Red argues that the mid-twentieth century technical, scientific, and education cooperation efforts, and paired innovations in governance and administration, channeled the migration of the logics of the plantation and the reservation. Specifically, operating in service of the accumulation of wealth and the exercise of geopolitical power during this time, such efforts remade peoples and places in accordance with their anti-black and settler colonial logics. It was also according to such logics of the plantation and reservation that ambiguous expressions of U.S. state power bearing the agency of transnational capitalism were inured from critique during the mid-twentieth century. Additionally, the transit of the plantation and the reservation toward such ends was based upon domestic innovations in the two sets of operations of U.S. slave and settler capitalism in the early twentieth century. Specifically, while the framework of technical and scientific cooperation and requisite modes of governance and administration during the mid-twentieth seemed to crystallize an emergent trope of “development,” the problematization of the plantation and reservation in ways that seemingly necessitated techno-scientific fixes in the early twentieth century prefigured such developments globally.