LIVING WITH NATURE IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

Dr. Fields-Black is an Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, where she specializes in early and pre-colonial African history whose research interests extend into the African Diaspora. Fields-Black’s book Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008) uses a unique blend of interdisciplinary sources and methods to chronicle the development of tidal rice-growing technology by the inhabitants of the West African Rice Coast region, the region where the majority of captives disembarking in South Carolina and Georgia originated. By integrating linguistic evidence, biological and botanical studies of mangrove ecosystems, oral traditions, and travelers’ accounts from the first European traders to visit the coastal region, Deep Roots reconstructs a historical period pre-dating the first written sources for the region and beginning more than a millennium before the trans-Atlantic slave trade when both West African rice and rice farmers became important commodities. Fields-Black is also collaborating with internationally acclaimed artists, painter Jonathan Green and filmmaker Julie Dash, to produce The Requiem for Rice which begins as a lamentation for the souls of the dead who were enslaved, exploited, and brutalized on Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia’s rice plantations; many remain unburied, their graves unmarked, and their tragedies unmourned. It ends in celebration of the critical role enslaved Africans’ ingenuity, technology, and industry played in the economy of the US South. Fields-Black is writing the libretto on which The Requiem is based. Dr. Fields-Black is a consultant for “The Power of Place: The Rice Fields of the Lowcountry” permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, SC, the “From Slavery to Freedom” permanent exhibition for the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, PA.”