Melissa Hargrove

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
(Ph.D., University of Tennessee)
Gullah Culture of the Southeastern U.S.; African Diaspora; Race, Racism and Social Inequality; Development, Tourism and Cultural Commodification; Collaborative Anthropology.

Primarily, my scholarship and research interests converge around five distinct areas of anthropological inquiry and praxis: a) the political economy of racism as a “postcolonial predicament,” as well as an offshoot of capitalist globalization; b) the ‘New World’ African Diaspora, particularly within the context of “race” and race theory, and the ways in which race, class, and gender intersect to produce shared experiences of local and global inequality; c) the web of relationships connecting culture, power, and history to space and place (both real and imagined); d) the politics and ethics of ethnographic research; and e) collaborative anthropology.

My ethnographic specialization lies in and around the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Northeast Florida, where I have cultivated an ongoing relationship with Gullah/Geechee communities combating the forces of heritage tourism, resort and gated community development. In adjacent urban areas, displacement and redevelopment agendas bring similar results, while tourism operators continue to thrive by exploiting an invented, romanticized version of Southern history (further developed within my writing as an integral component of the “New South”). In this version, there is no credit given to the enslaved Africans and Gullah/Geechee who built the glorious antebellum homes, or the unpaid labor on surrounding plantations that produced one of the wealthiest planter classes in North America.

In response, Gullah/Geechees have taken their concerns to the international arena via the United Nations, seeking rights to self-determination as an American linguistic minority. With assistance from IHRAAM (International Human Rights Association for American Minorities) grassroots organizations are invoking “Africa” to redefine their predicament within a broader context as descendants of an historical event of genocidal proportions. In 2006, the US Congress passed The Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Act, thus establishing the “Gullah/Geechee Heritage Corridor” and allocating $15 million dollars to the region over the next ten years “to enhance the preservation and interpretation of the Gullah/Geechee cultural heritage.” Chronicling this ongoing struggle (which is where I come in) is of extreme significance to various Diasporic communities seeking justice based upon human rights, while their expressions of postcolonial agency and redefined nationalism have much to contribute to current theoretical (re)imaginings of the anthropology of the African Diaspora.
               
My dissertation, Reinventing the Plantation: Gated Communities as Spatial Segregation in the Gullah Sea Isnds (2005), is currently under revision for possible publication in University Press of Florida’s “New World Diasporas Series.”
               
At present, I am also engaged in a pioneering anthropological project, (The Anthropology of Contemporary White Supremacy, initiated by Enoch H. Page (UMass-Amherst) and Pem Davidson Buck (Elizabethtown Community and Technical College) which “theorizes racism as an increasingly global system producing the material and symbolic benefits of white privilege, along with ideological whiteness, in ways that routinely sustain the supremacy of whitened people in the 21st century.” This intellectual collective is currently compiling a volume of collected papers for publication exploring whiteness and white supremacy in the 21st century.

Contact Information:
Office: Building 51/2203
Phone: 904.620.1625
Email: m.hargrove@unf.edu

Links:
Curriculum Vitae