BY MEG SULLIVAN
UCLA Today
Growing up during the 1950s as part of a “meat and potatoes”
family in Detroit, Judith Carney didn’t eat rice. In fact,
she suspects a kernel never passed her lips until she moved
to California at 22.
“The Midwest didn’t eat rice back then,” the
geography professor recalled with a laugh. “To us, noodles
were exotic.”
Has Carney ever made up for lost time. And her mostly vegetarian
diet, which relies heavily on rice, isn’t the only way
the grain has changed her life.
With more than 64 journal articles and other publications on
rice, she is fast emerging as one of the world’s foremost
authorities on the simple grain’s surprisingly complex
history. Her 2001 book “Black Rice: The African Origins
of Rice Cultivation in the Americas” cemented this reputation.
Initially hailed by The New York Times for its “richly
detailed analysis” of the crucial role played by enslaved
African Americans in establishing and developing South Carolina’s
booming antebellum rice industry, the book continues to attract
attention.
In December, Carney received the 2002 Herskovits Award, which
recognizes outstanding original scholarly work in African studies
and is the field’s most prestigious honor. (Carney split
the award with a Boston University historian who looks at racism
in modern South Africa.)
In March, “Black Rice” became the first recipient
of the James M. Blaut Innovative Publication Award, given by
the Association of American Geographers for the year’s
most outstanding example of scholarship in cultural and political
ecology.
No one has ever denied that slave labor was responsible for
harvesting the South’s most lucrative cash crop prior
to the rise of cotton. And as early as the mid-1970s, historians
had begun to recognize a link between African rice-cultivation
practices and South Carolina’s economic success. But Carney,
who happened to spend 15 months studying rice production in
Gambia as a graduate student in the mid-1980s, is credited with
giving this connection real specificity.
She argues that slaves brought with them to the South a complete
“knowledge system” — not just a plant or a
seed but an entire body of techniques, technology and processing
skills. Plantation owners then used this information to plant
malaria-infested swamplands with what became colonial America’s
largest cash crop.
“So many plantation histories said, ‘How ingenious
our European forebears were to figure out how to grow this crop
in a swamp with unskilled labor!” Carney said. “It
was such an incredible appropriation of knowledge.”
Carney plans next to write a book tracing the lineage of okra,
coffee, black-eyed peas and other crops introduced to the Americas
by slaves.
“Part of U.S. history is to acknowledge the contributions
of all people who came to the Americas, including the indigenous
peoples,” she said. “And until the 1800s, the majority
of ‘immigrants’ to the Americas were people of African
descent. But we don’t think of that, and we haven’t
begun to give full credit to their legacy.”
