“Earth work,” Black agrarianism, and urban theory (2025) Plenary Commentary

In this slightly expanded version of the comments delivered in response to Alesia Montgomery’s Urban Geography Plenary Lecture at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Detroit, I bring Montgomery’s concept of “earth work” into conversation with Sylvia Wynter’s plot/plantation dialectic and the intellectual tradition and material practices of Black agrarianism. Attending to earth work’s dialectic emergence from racial capitalism, I argue, reveals the co-constitutive nature of the urban and the agrarian. Drawing on two examples of Black agrarian earth work in the 1970s – the Black Panthers’ gardens in Oakland and the Green Fingers program in Portland – I then demonstrate how a lens of Black agrarianism can bring into focus the inherent pluralism and pragmatism at play as diverse configurations of Black placemakers navigate tensions between conflicting ideologies and material realities.