Chapter 12 - “This Is Especially Our Crop”: Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton

Summary

Katherine Adams’s “‘This Is Especially Our Crop’: Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton” thinks deeply about that historical record’s ties to materiality, labor, and “worth.”Adams focuses on writing that promoted cotton as a site for Black economic self-determination – specifically on how writers negotiated the double bind of racial capitalism, simultaneously countering predictions that freedpeople could not become economic producers without white coercion and resisting the reduction of Black personhood to economic value. Analyzing texts from Martin Delany, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and diverse other authors for the Black periodical press, Adams shows how African American writers and thinkers complicated the putative opposition between capitalist and human value by laying claim to both, appropriating the logic of cotton capitalism in order to inscribe Black personhood within its aporia.