Paulla Ebran

My book, tentatively entitled Making Tropical Africa in the Georgia Sea Islands, describes how the Gullah-Geechee region of the southeastern United States came into being—and continues to shape Black culture. I consider three kinds of region making: cultural representations, which contribute to a sense of collective “memory”; landscape reformations through the plantation economy; and political mobilizations for literacy and civil rights. The book project moves across varied forms of evidence, including ethnography, texts, and images, to show both semiotic and material emergence of this region, known for its imagined tropicality and African culture.