CAPE Honors

Judy Carney, UCLA

Winner of the 2003 James M. Blaut Award

Testimonial by Paul Robbins, Ohio State University, March 2003

Carney, J. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press*.

Black Rice is most remarkable because it does the radical work of a postcolonial political ecology using the very traditional and rigorous tools of cultural ecology. Situated directly in the Sauerian tradition of diffusion studies, Carney offers a rigorous historical mapping of the diffusion of rice (Oryza glabberima) from the flooded fields of pre-colonial West Africa to the antebellum plantations of North America, where it became the largest cash crop of the prewar period.

In the process, the study turns Eurocentric diffusionist notions on their heads and in the spirit of Jim Blaut, shows the contributions of non-Euro-Americans to the environmental history of global knowledge and genetic exchange. Far from lacking food surpluses as has been suggested of the region, the levels of surplus from West African rice production likely supported vast populations in the region into the 1500s, a hugely successful agroecology that ironically made the region a target for slavers. So too, the success of American plantations, populated by Europeans with little or no reliable knowledge of subtropical production, depended entirely on seizing and capitalizing on African rice production knowledge - the knowledge of the enslaved. It also depended upon the transplantation of an African domesticate, which was parlayed into the major cash-earning crop of the antebellum South. The power of this story in both contributing to, and inverting, diffusionist history is profound.

It is also a research contribution that reflects a lifetime of work. To ask the question - "from where does American rice come?" in and of itself required familiarity with the landscapes, languages, and landscape practices of Brazil, Gambia, and the southeastern United States. To actually answer the question further demanded exacting historical work in multiple languages, fieldwork in agrarian societies, and careful deduction to connect the dots. This is a model of geographic research in every sense.

Reviews for the book have been effusive, and it is notable that this book, almost unique among many excellent works in Geography, has received national attention and exposure. Drew Gilpin Faust recently wrote in the New York Times Book Review:

“Exploring crops, landscapes and agricultural practices in Africa and America, [Carney] demonstrates the critical role Africans played in the creation of the system of rice production that provided the foundation of Carolina's wealth...This detailed study of historical botany, technological adaptation and agricultural diffusion adds depth to our understanding of slavery and makes a compelling case for "the agency of slaves" in the creation of the South's economy and culture.”

In sum, Black Rice is an exceptional achievement and a really good book. In the spirit of Blaut it challenges Eurocentrism and colonial thinking. In the spirit of Sauer it requires landscape thinking and cultural historical research. For Cultural and Political Ecology, it is one of the most publicly prominent books in recent memory. It fully fills the spirit and letter of the Blaut Award and makes Judith Carney the most appropriate recipient of this, the first Blaut Award.

Thanks from Judith Carney

I am greatly honored to receive this award.

Over a broad region of northeastern South America, there is a legend told by the maroon descendants of enslaved Africans who were brought there five centuries earlier. In remote communities of Suriname, Cayenne, and Maranhão [Mar-an-yow], Brazil the legend describes how they came to grow rice, a crop that remains to this day central to life and community identity. In the legend, an enslaved female ancestor hides grains of rice in her hair as she endures the long, harrowing journey by slave ship. The precious seeds detection. When she flees plantation slavery, she takes the smuggled rice grains and plants them. This, say the maroons, is how we came to grow rice.

One hundred years ago, or perhaps even a single generation ago, this story would have been dismissed as a colorful myth, more suited to studies of folklore than to the fields of cultural ecology and environmental history. But as botanical, archaeological, and historical research has come to show, the maroon legend, like its Promethean heroine, also conceals a seed, a seed of truth which through clever allegory sprouts a remarkably accurate history of African rice in the Americas.

Africans actively shaped the early modern Atlantic world. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean in greater numbers than Europeans (at least through 1820), they were central to the economic, cultural, and ecological shifts occurring over three centuries in the Americas. The African diaspora was one of plants as well as people, but perhaps just as significantly, it was one of knowledge. And as the maroon legend signifies, this knowledge at times was borne by women. Rice promoted cultural identity in bondage and resistance and served as a potent recipe of memory that endures in diaspora communities to this day.

Thirty years ago Berkeley geographer James Parsons published his pioneering article on the botanical 'Africanization' of the New World tropics. His work asked us to consider African landscape legacies in the Americas. For me, this became the starting point for thinking about the African diaspora in new ways. During my graduate education at Berkeley, I learned the significance of mastering the minutiae of agronomic systems and environments as a key to understanding broader level processes. I therefore offer my thanks to my mentors there: Michael Watts, Hilgard O'Reilly Sternberg and the late Clarence Glacken, Jim Parsons, and Barney Nietschmann. Finally, I would like to offer my appreciation to the late Jim Blaut for his enlightened efforts in grounding agrarian change in power, agency, and history.

I also wish to acknowledge my debt to all of you. Your own research has stimulated me over the years, and in many respects, this honor is a shared one. I knew Jim Blaut and deeply respected his scholarship. It pleases me greatly to receive this award in his name. Thank you deeply for your support in presenting me this award.

Judy Carney, UCLA, March 2, 2003

* Also Co-Winner of the 2002 Melville Herskovits Award sponsored by the African Studies Association

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Page last updated October 6, 2005