Kendra Hamilton of the University of Virginia will present “A Geography of Addiction: Tobacco, Jefferson, and the ‘Founding Farmers’ ” on Friday, April 20, at 4:30 p.m. in 208 Belk Pavilion. The presentation and light refreshments are sponsored by the Center for Law and Humanities.
The image of Thomas Jefferson as passionate gardener and man of the soil is firmly entrenched as an aspect of the myth of the great sage of Monticello. But a deeper look at the generation of the “founding farmers” reveals a more complex portrait, as Jefferson’s “chosen people,” his celebrated yeoman farmers, were, in fact, abandoning the state in droves, unable to cope with the combination of ruined soils and adverse market forces. Placing the multiple dependencies produced by tobacco cultivation at the center of her inquiry—dependencies on the drug itself, on plantation slavery and a ruinous method of cultivation, on fickle global market forces—Hamilton explores these “hidden wounds” and evaluates anew the powerful counterexamples provided by Jefferson peers such as George Washington and John Hartwell Cocke: men who were able to “kick the tobacco habit,” restoring and nourishing their soils with diversified, sustainable cultivation methods, while creating new relationships within the plantation “family” with their rejection of slavery.
Kendra Hamilton is a poet, essayist, and a scholar of the literature and culture of the South. Hamilton has degrees from Duke University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Virginia and is published in journals such as Callaloo, the Southern Review, Southern Cultures, and Shenandoah. Hamilton’s research, writing, and advocacy related to fragile (coastal) environments and endangered indigenous communities have attracted the interest and support of foundations such as the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (2012-2013), the International Center for Jefferson Studies (2011), the Skinner Foundation (2008-2009), and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio program 2006. Recent work on the Gullah/Geechee from her scholarly book in progress, Code-Switching: Vernacular Visions in the Age of Porgy and Bess, is forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly. In addition, she has a poetry collection, The Goddess of Gumbo (2006) and is featured in such recent anthologies as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2012), Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), and Shaping Memories: Reflections of 25 African American Women Writers (2009).