Haunting as Agency
A Critical Cultural Landscape Approach to Making Black Labor Visible in Sugar Land, Texas
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v19i1.1752Keywords:
Black geographies, urban planning, cultural landscapes, sprawl, suburban landscapes, laborAbstract
This paper contextualizes the most recent discovery of 95 forgotten graves of incarcerated laborers at a public school construction site within ongoing tensions around public history, race, and development in Sugar Land, Texas, a Houston-area bedroom community. Unearthed along with the graves is the state’s long history of Black labor exploitation, from enslavement to convict leasing to employment with Imperial Sugar. In this article, I engage the haunting of Black laboring bodies in the landscape from the perspective of both that of a researcher and former resident of Fort Bend County confronted with the purposeful forgetting of Black geographies, bodies, and lives. I expose through critical analysis of government documents, online digital exhibits, maps, photos, and autoethnographic recollection of the area, the haunting of Black laboring bodies in not only the site of burial discovery but also two sites within the Sugar Land cultural landscape: Mayfield Park and the Imperial Sugar Refinery. I argue developers and government agencies perpetuate a mythic local history that, until the discovery of the 95, allowed them to disassociate itself from Sugar Land’s history of Black labor exploitation before its incorporation as a city. The 95’s haunting allows for an inventive awareness of the Black laboring bodies and thus redefines the cultural landscape rooted in plantation logics as a Black geography. I conclude with a discussion of the ways Black laboring bodies’ haunting creates a space for a critical cultural landscape solution.
References
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Allen, R. Bob, 2012. Realtor, Mayfield Park advocate, member Imperial Redevelopment Committee. 2012. Phone.
“Rebuilding Mayfield Park.” 2013. Government. City of Sugar Land Articles. March 23, 2013. http://www.sugarlandtx.gov/documentcenter/view/917.
“A Planned Development in Sugar Land, Texas Imperial” 2012. Accessed May 4. http://www.imperialsugarland.com/uploads/files/PZ_Presenatation.pdf.
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Blakey, Michael L. 1998. “The New York African Burial Ground Project: An Examination of Enslaved Lives, A Construction of Ancestral Ties.” Transforming Anthropology 7 (1): 53–58. https://doi.org/10.1525/tran.1998.7.1.53.
Blunt, Alison. 2003. “Collective Memory and Productive Nostalgia: Anglo-Indian Homemaking at McCluskieganj.” Environment and Planning D 21 (6): 717–38.
Boyd, Candice, and Michelle Duffy. 2012. “Sonic Geographies of Shifting Bodies.” Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture 1 (2): 1–7.
Castiglia, Christopher, and Christopher Reed. 2012. If Memory Serves : Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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———. 2008a. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1 (1): 59–71.
———. 2008b. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1 (1): 59–71.
Crouch, Barry A. 1993. “‘All the Vile Passions’: The Texas Black Code of 1866.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 97 (1): 12–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30238869.Davis, D. B. 2006. Inhuman bondage: The rise and fall of slavery in the New World. Oxford University Press.
Dase, Amy E., and Douglas K. Boyd. 2004. Hell-Hole on the Brazos: A Historic Resources Study of Central State Farm, Fort Bend County, Texas. Austin, Tex.: Prewitt and Associates.
Flewellen, Ayana Omilade. 2017. “Locating Marginalized Historical Narratives at Kingsley Plantation.” Historical Archaeology 51 (1): 71–87.
Gordon, Avery. 2011. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” Borderlands 10 (2): 1–21.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1999. “Prison Notebooks.” Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Electric Book Company Ltd, London.
Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press on Demand.
Hernández, Marie T. 2008. Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.
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King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2016. “The Labor of (Re) Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible (Ly).” Antipode 48 (4): 1022–39.
Kinossian, Nadir. 2018. “Cities as Haunted Landscapes.” City & Society 30 (1).
Ledbetter, Huddie. 1935. Midnight Special. Sound recording. Vol. John Lomax Southern States Collection. Wilton, Connecticut. Library of Congress (loc.gov). https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196310/.
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McKittrick, K. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12 (8): 947–63.
———. 2013. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17 (3 42): 1–15.
———. 2016. “Rebellion/Invention/Groove.” Small Axe 20 (1 49): 79–91.
Meskell, Lynn. 2002. “Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology.” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (3): 557–74.
National Park Service. 1997. “How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation,’ (PDF), National Register Bulletins.” Accessed April 29, 2012. http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/nrb15/nrb15.pdf.
Painter, Nell Irvin, Alice. Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish. Sklar. 1995. “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting.” In U.S. History as Women’s History : New Feminist Essays. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Perkinson, Robert. 2010. Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. “Memory, History, Forgetting.” 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.04911.
Roberts, Andrea. 2018. “A Texas City Discovered a Mass Grave of Prison Laborers. What Should It Do with the Bodies?” The Conversation. August 14, 2018. http://theconversation.com/a-texas-city-discovered-a-mass-grave-of-prison-laborers-what-should-it-do-with-the-bodies-101015.
———. 2018. “Performance as Place Preservation: The Role of Storytelling in the Formation of Shankleville Community’s Black Counterpublics.” Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage. 5(3).
Rose, Julia. 2016. Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites. Philadelphia: Rowman & Littlefield.
Schein, Richard H. 2003. “Normative Dimensions of Landscape.” Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after JB Jackson, 199–218.
Stottlemyer, Cory. 2011a. “Heritage Hikes Will Offer Scenic Walk through Sugar Land’s Past - Your Houston News: News.”
Sugar Land Sun, September 7, 2011. http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/sugar_land/news/heritage-hikes-will-offer-scenic-walk-through-sugar-land-s/article_58b1d371-7a8e-5690-b10c-b73c27cfd842.html. Last accessed 2012.
———. 2011b. “Mayfield Park Residents Speak up about Imperial Development Worries.” Sugar Land Sun, December 29, 2011. http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/sugar_land/news/mayfield-park-residents-speak-up-about-imperial-development-worries/article_5939a2e8-8ae2-574a-b347-b888642498ce.html. Last accessed 2012.
Till, K. E. 2008. “Artistic and Activist Memory-Work: Approaching Place-Based Practice.” Memory Studies 1 (1): 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007083893.
———. 2012. “Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care.” Political Geography 31 (1): 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.008.
Walker, Clarence. 2004. “The Effects of Brown: Personal and Historical Reflections on American Racial Atavism.” The Journal of Southern History 70 (2): 295–302.
Wilczak, C., Rachel Watkins, C. Null, and Michael L. Blakey. 2004. “Skeletal Indicators of Work: Musculoskeletal, Arthritic and Traumatic Effects.” Skeletal Biology Final Report 1.
Williams, Rhaisa Kameela. 2018. “Choreographies of the Ongoing: Episodes of Black Life, Events of Black Lives.” Biography 41 (4): 760–76.
Winfrey, Dorman H. 1955. “Mirabeau H. Lamar and Texas Nationalism.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 59 (2): 184–205.
Woods, Clyde. 1995. “The Blues Epistemology and Regional Planning History: The Case of Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission.” In Planning Theory.
Yancy, George. 2008. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.
Allen, R. Bob, 2012. Realtor, Mayfield Park advocate, member Imperial Redevelopment Committee. 2012. Phone.
“Rebuilding Mayfield Park.” 2013. Government. City of Sugar Land Articles. March 23, 2013. http://www.sugarlandtx.gov/documentcenter/view/917.
“A Planned Development in Sugar Land, Texas Imperial” 2012. Accessed May 4. http://www.imperialsugarland.com/uploads/files/PZ_Presenatation.pdf.
Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Civitas Books.
Bell, Wayne. 2004. “Ain’t No More Sugar in Sugar Land.” KUHF Houston Public Radio. 24-2/25. http://app1.kuhf.org/articles/12888-Aint-No-More-Sugar-in-Sugar-Land.html.
Blackmon, Douglas A. 2009. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Anchor.
Blakey, Michael L. 1998. “The New York African Burial Ground Project: An Examination of Enslaved Lives, A Construction of Ancestral Ties.” Transforming Anthropology 7 (1): 53–58. https://doi.org/10.1525/tran.1998.7.1.53.
Blunt, Alison. 2003. “Collective Memory and Productive Nostalgia: Anglo-Indian Homemaking at McCluskieganj.” Environment and Planning D 21 (6): 717–38.
Boyd, Candice, and Michelle Duffy. 2012. “Sonic Geographies of Shifting Bodies.” Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture 1 (2): 1–7.
Castiglia, Christopher, and Christopher Reed. 2012. If Memory Serves : Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
City of Sugar Land. 2018. “City of Sugar Land Use Plan.” Land Use Plan. Sugarland, Texas.
Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2008a. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1 (1): 59–71.
———. 2008b. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1 (1): 59–71.
Crouch, Barry A. 1993. “‘All the Vile Passions’: The Texas Black Code of 1866.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 97 (1): 12–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30238869.Davis, D. B. 2006. Inhuman bondage: The rise and fall of slavery in the New World. Oxford University Press.
Dase, Amy E., and Douglas K. Boyd. 2004. Hell-Hole on the Brazos: A Historic Resources Study of Central State Farm, Fort Bend County, Texas. Austin, Tex.: Prewitt and Associates.
Flewellen, Ayana Omilade. 2017. “Locating Marginalized Historical Narratives at Kingsley Plantation.” Historical Archaeology 51 (1): 71–87.
Gordon, Avery. 2011. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” Borderlands 10 (2): 1–21.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1999. “Prison Notebooks.” Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Electric Book Company Ltd, London.
Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press on Demand.
Hernández, Marie T. 2008. Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.
Hunter, Marcus Anthony, and Zandria Robinson. 2018. Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Univ of California Press.
Imperial Crown Newsletter. 1954. “The Old Sugar Land Club House: New Development In Mayfield Park, 1954.” Imperial Crown Newsletter, 1954. http://wateringholdclubhouse.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-development-in-mayfield-park-1954.html.
Inwood, Joshua FJ, and Derek Alderman. 2016. “Taking down the Flag Is Just a Start: Toward the Memory-Work of Racial Reconciliation in White Supremacist America.” Southeastern Geographer 56 (1): 9–15.
Johnson Development Corporation. 2019. “Imperial Market: Imperial in Sugar Land, TX.” Www.Imperialsugarland.Com. 2019. https://www.imperialsugarland.com/imperialmarket.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2016. “The Labor of (Re) Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible (Ly).” Antipode 48 (4): 1022–39.
Kinossian, Nadir. 2018. “Cities as Haunted Landscapes.” City & Society 30 (1).
Ledbetter, Huddie. 1935. Midnight Special. Sound recording. Vol. John Lomax Southern States Collection. Wilton, Connecticut. Library of Congress (loc.gov). https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196310/.
Mack, Kristen. 2005. “Walter Mischer Left Mark on Politics, Real Estate - Houston Chronicle.” Houston Chronicle, December 20, 2005, sec. News- Deaths. http://www.chron.com/news/houston-deaths/article/Walter-Mischer-left-mark-on-politics-real-estate-1637567.php.
McKittrick, K. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12 (8): 947–63.
———. 2013. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17 (3 42): 1–15.
———. 2016. “Rebellion/Invention/Groove.” Small Axe 20 (1 49): 79–91.
Meskell, Lynn. 2002. “Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology.” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (3): 557–74.
National Park Service. 1997. “How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation,’ (PDF), National Register Bulletins.” Accessed April 29, 2012. http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/nrb15/nrb15.pdf.
Painter, Nell Irvin, Alice. Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish. Sklar. 1995. “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting.” In U.S. History as Women’s History : New Feminist Essays. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Perkinson, Robert. 2010. Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. “Memory, History, Forgetting.” 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.04911.
Roberts, Andrea. 2018. “A Texas City Discovered a Mass Grave of Prison Laborers. What Should It Do with the Bodies?” The Conversation. August 14, 2018. http://theconversation.com/a-texas-city-discovered-a-mass-grave-of-prison-laborers-what-should-it-do-with-the-bodies-101015.
———. 2018. “Performance as Place Preservation: The Role of Storytelling in the Formation of Shankleville Community’s Black Counterpublics.” Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage. 5(3).
Rose, Julia. 2016. Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites. Philadelphia: Rowman & Littlefield.
Schein, Richard H. 2003. “Normative Dimensions of Landscape.” Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after JB Jackson, 199–218.
Stottlemyer, Cory. 2011a. “Heritage Hikes Will Offer Scenic Walk through Sugar Land’s Past - Your Houston News: News.”
Sugar Land Sun, September 7, 2011. http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/sugar_land/news/heritage-hikes-will-offer-scenic-walk-through-sugar-land-s/article_58b1d371-7a8e-5690-b10c-b73c27cfd842.html. Last accessed 2012.
———. 2011b. “Mayfield Park Residents Speak up about Imperial Development Worries.” Sugar Land Sun, December 29, 2011. http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/sugar_land/news/mayfield-park-residents-speak-up-about-imperial-development-worries/article_5939a2e8-8ae2-574a-b347-b888642498ce.html. Last accessed 2012.
Till, K. E. 2008. “Artistic and Activist Memory-Work: Approaching Place-Based Practice.” Memory Studies 1 (1): 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007083893.
———. 2012. “Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care.” Political Geography 31 (1): 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.008.
Walker, Clarence. 2004. “The Effects of Brown: Personal and Historical Reflections on American Racial Atavism.” The Journal of Southern History 70 (2): 295–302.
Wilczak, C., Rachel Watkins, C. Null, and Michael L. Blakey. 2004. “Skeletal Indicators of Work: Musculoskeletal, Arthritic and Traumatic Effects.” Skeletal Biology Final Report 1.
Williams, Rhaisa Kameela. 2018. “Choreographies of the Ongoing: Episodes of Black Life, Events of Black Lives.” Biography 41 (4): 760–76.
Winfrey, Dorman H. 1955. “Mirabeau H. Lamar and Texas Nationalism.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 59 (2): 184–205.
Woods, Clyde. 1995. “The Blues Epistemology and Regional Planning History: The Case of Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission.” In Planning Theory.
Yancy, George. 2008. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.
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Published
2020-04-15
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Roberts, A. R. (2020). Haunting as Agency: A Critical Cultural Landscape Approach to Making Black Labor Visible in Sugar Land, Texas. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 19(1), 210–244. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v19i1.1752
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