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The Toll of Land Dispossession on the World's Minorities

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A conference looks at the effect of land dispossession around the world.

Across the globe, food insecurity and rural poverty take a severe toll on people of color. Meanwhile, more of the world’s minority populations are landless. That’s no coincidence, say organizers of a conference at Duke this upcoming Thursday through Saturday.

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The conference, Race and Rurality in the Global Economy, will examine land displacement and other development trends affecting people of color in Asia, Africa and the Americas including the United States.

“Minorities and people of color have tended to be more vulnerable to processes of displacement and dispossession,” said conference co-organizer Anne-Maria Makhulu, a Duke assistant professor of cultural anthropology and African and African-American studies. “The history of land dispossession in South Africa, as one example, is a very long one.”

Makhulu studies South African cities, where the legacy of landlessness is particularly stark. Under the old apartheid system, black South Africans were prohibited from setting up permanent residence in cities where they worked, and were legally prohibited from owning land in the city or country.

Makhulu organized the conference with Michaeline Crichlow, a professor of African and African American Studies at Duke.

Crichlow specializes in global and Caribbean studies, working primarily in Fiji, South Africa and the Dominican Republic. In those countries and others, companies from China, North America, India, Turkey and Europe are leasing or buying large tracts of land for industrial-scale agriculture, unsettling local groups’ traditional access, she said. Mining interests are also acquiring large tracts of land there for biofuel, she added.

“It seems to hark back to 19th century colonial projects of dispossession,” Crichlow said. “But these land grabs are of a different character, involving postcolonial governments.”

Scholars from around the world will address such topics as the history of rural resettlement in Tanzania, land politics in the southern U.S. and contemporary land grabs in Africa. 

The free, public conference takes place Thursday, March 26, through Saturday, March 28, in 101 West Duke Building on Duke’ s East Campus.

 For more information on abstracts, presenters and the schedule see: http://aaas.duke.edu/events/race-and-rurality-in-the-global-economy.