On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction

Abstract

This article introduces swampification, a social and methodological process whereby governments, corporations, and the press socially (re)invented swamplands as spaces of death, disease, and “uninhabitability” to justify their destruction. Using the case of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project in New Deal South Carolina, this article demonstrates how White institutions sought to eradicate Black autonomous spaces and ecological connections. I build on Black ecologies, a subfield that aims to illuminate conditions and relations Black people have with/in ecological and social worlds that comprise struggles for existence and legacies of world building. I propose coupling Black ecologies with moral geographies to bring attention to the sociospatial imaginaries placed on Black people that forced them to the ecological margins, then later extracted them from those very spaces when the landscapes stood in the way of White progress. Swampification did not merely stagnate Black terraqueous landscapes but further perpetuated racial stereotypes of Blackness as out-of-place and pestilent, and situated the presence of non-White others as antithetical to U.S. progress.