"The Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, was built on a former plantation and focused on practical, hands-on ways to develop mechanical and especially agrarian skill sets as a strategy for Black self-determination. What had once been a site of enslavement became one in which new global futures could be imagined for Blacks. While much has been written about Washington, casting him as an accommodationist, Jarvis McInnis's Afterlives of the Plantation argues that he inspired and empowered a range of men and women in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Central America, and the US South--from Haitian scholar Jean Price-Mars to Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marcus Garvey--to forge their own political and economic destinies, that helped to set the stage for the cultural innovations of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. McInnis shows how the agricultural and industrial education at Tuskegee and migrant labor in the hemisphere's agro-industrial enterprises such as the Panama Canal Zone and United Fruit Company plantations produced alternative networks of cosmopolitan mobility and political and intellectual exchange. The book remaps the field of Black Transnational and Diaspora Studies by elucidating how Washington's vision of agrarian futures--conceived through the establishment of a historically Black institution in the rural Jim Crow South helped to facilitate hemispheric networks between the US South, the Caribbean, and Central America that were critical to the production of Black intellectual, cultural, and political futures"-- Provided by publisher.