Black Commons

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History

In the US, By J. T. Roane:

"While enslavers sought to catalog, name, and divide the earth into sellable property, the enslaved reimagined it through a rich cosmology built around what Sylvia Wynter termed the “plot.” The plot was constituted through a parcel of land given to the enslaved by planters “on which to grow food to feed themselves in order to maximize profits.” The system of the plot also allowed “African peasants transplanted” to American plantations to transpose “all the structure of values that had been created by traditional societies of Africa” by which the “land remained the Earth—and the Earth was a goddess; man used the land to feed himself; and to offer first fruits to the earth; his funeral was the mystical reunion with the earth.” In turn the plot incubated “traditional values—use values. This folk culture became a source of guerrilla resistance to the plantation system.”2 Plots anchored alternative modes of earth stewardship that, taken alongside other practices, forged a fleeting Black commons." (https://www.aaihs.org/towards-usable-histories-of-the-black-commons/)