Over the River: Reproducing the Home House in East Athens

In this talk, Professor Carrie Freshour, follows women’s attempts to create what Katherine McKittrick understands as a “Black sense of place” within neighborhoods and homes from the early days of urban renewal to more recent forces of displacement coming from the neighboring university. Over time, Nicole, an artist and food writer whose mother worked in the poultry plant for nearly 35 years, became a close collaborator of mine. Walks along the Oconee River with Nicole in the sticky heat of summer inspire this talk. Never allowing our conversations to focus on the poultry alone, she physically and emotionally educates me on “the Bottoms,” a former Black neighborhood-turned-park where white people now walk their dogs in East Athens. Our walk materializes the relationship between a Black sense of place and the geographies of racial capitalism, or how Black ways of life threaten and mobilize infrastructures of discipline and control for the continued accumulation of capital. Relying on multigenerational oral histories and archival evidence, Freshour will trace Black geographies connected to the poultry plant, emphasizing the stabilizing role of the home house achieved through once reliable, relatively high-wage poultry work and Black women’s organizing for affordable housing. Yet, today’s younger generation of processing workers find themselves in a drastically different poultry plant with fewer opportunities for economic security through home ownership and access to welfare programs from those of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. In place of decent wages, affordable housing, and other social supports, strategies emerge through Black women’s collective activities to reproduce the home house. This means that women sometimes creatively share and collectivize family care, pool resources for mutual aid, and piece together life from a meager disability check. Beyond the poultry plant walls, Black women relax, recuperate, and remake the home house for their children, grandchildren, and families. Rather than praising home ownership as the ideal achievement of the American Dream, the home house becomes a site to strategize and recuperate against the conditions of work extending from historically and geographically specific plantation geographies.

Carrie Freshour is an un-disciplined human geographer and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University. Her ethnographic work focuses on low-wage food and agricultural labor in the US South, racial capitalism, carceral and abolition geographies, and the Black Radical Tradition. She is currently finalizing her book project, Making Life Work, which centers the experiences of Black women, their families and broader place-based communities in northeast Georgia who remain the basis for the global production of cheap chicken. In collaboration with Black artists and activists in Northeast Georgia, Carrie is co-creating a documentary short film featuring poultry worker families' placemaking activities despite and in spite of their experiences of persistent exploitation at the poultry. She believes in collective, justice-centered research in and for community, and thinks and writes best with others. Her work has been published in Antipode, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, The Southeastern Geographer, Monthly Review, and more.

Beverley Mullings is a professor of political economy. She is interested in the ways that evolving racial capitalist regimes are recasting and transforming work, divisions of labour, patterns of urban governance and ultimately, responses to social and economic injustice in post-plantation economies. Mullings is currently engaged in a number of research projects that include: an examination of the kinds of dispossessions that financialization is enabling in the Caribbean; the transforming nature of work within racial capitalist regimes; the place of diaspora in the re-making of Caribbean radical traditions; and the relationship between middle-classness and social transformation in Jamaica. She also has a long-standing commitment to questions of mental health in the academy, and currently co-chairs the AAG Mental Health and the Academy Affinity Group. Her publications have appeared in a number of journals including the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Gender, Place and Culture, the Journal of Economic Geography, Antipode, Review of International Political Economy, Small Axe, Geoforum and Environment and Planning A.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States and co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto.

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