JOURNEY OF A SEED: AGRARIAN LIFEWAYS OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA AND ADDRESSING THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FARMING CRISIS THROUGH CULTURE AND COMMUNITY

African American agrarian lifeways are rooted in the nexus of the African/Black Diasporic experience in the American landscape and the legacy of their Sahelian, South Saharan, and East African indigenous heritages adapted into an American context. Addressing the erasure of the African American farming tradition, land loss/displacement, and structural violence this thesis study engages with space, place, Black placemaking, and African Diasporian indigenous knowledge as sites for transformative, transcendent, and restorative paradigms. At the turn of the twentieth century African Americans amassed over 12 million acres of land which represented the hopes of healing, sustainability, and a co-liberatory connection with land, earth, and spirit, where they were. The legacy of institutional and structural racism in the American landscape through social, cultural, and political mechanisms shaped the decline of this co-liberatory eco-connection.