Plotting a Geography of Paradise: Black Ecologies, Productive Nostalgia, and the Possibilities of Life on Sinking Ground

Abstract

This article considers the cultivation of Black life in the face of environmental crisis in the sinking grounds of southeast Louisiana. In dialogue with scholarship in anthropology and geography on Black place‐making and memory, I examine how individual and collective memories of past ecological practices provide counternarratives of ecological demise for the present. Working with the concept of productive nostalgia, I situate my analysis of collective memory via Sylvia Wynter's and Katherine McKittrick's formulations of the plot as a countergeography of the plantation through which Black people cultivate ecologically based self‐reliance, care, and freedom. I use oral history and ethnography to demonstrate how the socioecological ethos of the plot travels across time through collective memory, interrupting present‐day ecological crisis narratives with visions of climate changed futures tied to ecological and racial justice.