Sarah Franzen

Grant Type

Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship

Institutional Affiliation

Louisiana State U., Baton Rouge

Grant number

Gr. 10169

Approve Date

September 15, 2021

Project Title

Franzen, Sarah  (Louisiana State U., Baton Rouge) A Quiet Revolution: Building a Black Farmer Movement

SARAH FRANZEN, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, received a Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship for Ethnographic Film to aid editing and completion of “A Quiet Revolution: Building a Black Farmer Movement.” How do you build a movement? More importantly, how do you sustain a movement? This film project explores the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, a network of Black farmers and farm cooperatives spanning the southeastern US. The Federation calls itself a quiet movement; it aims to build and sustain a Black agrarian world that emerged in the hollows of the plantation system. A movement is a dynamic process, built through ongoing and sometimes mundane actions. This film project explores the actions of people associated with the Federation that are working in the rural areas of Alabama and Mississippi, actions which cumulatively create their agrarian vision. Through a collaborative process, people of the Federation identified and performed for the camera activities they considered an important part of their efforts. These films have been edited to feature the sensory and experiential aspects of these moments and is organized to showcase the way these moments, when quilted together, reveal the Federation as a movement. Focusing on on-the-ground interactions among farmers, organizers, and rural residents, this multi-part digital gallery of films invites viewers to affectively and aesthetical experience these moments within which the Federation’s quiet movement is manifested.