ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on the parallel literatures of Black geographies, critical geography, and environmental justice to clarify how the continuation of plantation regimes creates modes of over- and underdevelopment and differentiated place ontologies in modern US towns. Such uneven development is generated by the abusive extraction and repurposing of land and water as resources for white wealth accumulation, enabled by white-dominated racial, social, and economic structures. Through a case study in the US South, I demonstrate the transition from the traditional plantation to the plantation town through the mobilization of land and water resources to create legal and physical infrastructures that reify white space and conceive of Black spaces and Black people as extractable resources. Black communities both resist extraction and attend to alternative ways of living. Attention to the plantation as a prototype for resource assignation and extraction offers race as an essential axis of analysis for critical resource geographies.
