Paulla Ebron

The United States is famed for its distinctive regional cultures. Few regions are considered more distinct than the Georgia Sea Islands, now commemorated as the Gullah Geechee National Heritage Corridor. This site enchants scholars, artists and inspires organic intellectuals, primarily because of its historical connections to West and Central Africa and the Caribbean. For more than a century, the Georgia Sea Islands gained critical attention as the most authentic site of “Africa” in American. It was also the closest North America had to a “tropical colony,” that is, a site for growing the valuable crops that siphoned profits from satellites to metropoles. My book project offers a critical examination of this distinctive regionality. How do regions come into being, and what does it take to sustain them? How do certain areas gain a force as cultural, political, and biological landscapes? These questions do more than show us a parochial location; instead, we can see how places produce an expansive set of connections. My book shows the connections between disease-bearing mosquitoes, freedom projects, nostalgic films, crop breeding, and much more. Together, they create a region both materially and semiotically.