“A little portion of our 40 acres”: A black agrarian imaginary in the city

Abstract

In this article, I draw upon more than three years of research with black urban gardeners and farmers in Cleveland, Ohio to explore the contours of a specifically black agrarianism in the city, or what I am calling a black agrarian imaginary. I argue that this imaginary, enacted through an ongoing production of space that stakes a claim on the right to difference, emerges from and draws upon a diasporic and ancestral agrarianism (most proximally from the American South) to build a more self-determined urban food system while also contesting prevailing notions of what does and does not belong in the city and who gets to make those decisions. Black growers in Cleveland assert the right to difference—to produce the city as oeuvre—as a way to build and establish a more self-determined, just food system.