A fellow's forum with Gesa Mackenthun, Professor of American Studies, Rostock University, Germany from September 25, 2024.
About the Presentation
This project focuses on Jefferson’s and the Jeffersonian understanding of soil and seeds. It looks at Jefferson’s experimentation with mixed planting – at a time when monoculture became the dominant mode in agriculture. It offers reflections on transcultural aspects of Jefferson’s positions about soil composition and soil depletion; manure (green and animal); and seed selection, exchange, and protection. It particularly asks how knowledge about these matters was exchanged across cultural lines – between European settlers, African enslaved soil workers, and Indigenous gardeners and farmers. In spite of Jefferson’s pervasive awareness of the Indigenous and Black presence, in his state Virginia, on his own plantation, and throughout North America, his Garden Book shows very few signs of acknowledging Indigenous and African American planting practices. This presentation asks about the discursive conditions and long-term effects of this conspicuous silence.
About Gesa Mackenthun
Gesa Mackenthun is professor of American Studies at Rostock University, Germany, since 2003. She was initiator and spokesperson of the graduate school “Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship” (2006-15). Her books include Embattled Excavations. Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past (2021), Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire (1997),Fictions of the Black Atlantic (2004), and many edited volumes, among them Decolonizing ‘Prehistory’. Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (with Christen Mucher, 2021). Her current research deals with representations of the transatlantic history of enclosures, evictions, and ecocide. She is also in constant search of “sustainability stories” offering visions of a non-doomsterist future.