The Black Scholar (TBS), a leading journal in the interdisciplinary world of Black Studies, invites submissions for a themed issue on agriculture and food in Black life.
As the first of its kind in TBS's history, this themed issue addresses a distinct subfield—Black Agricultural and Food Studies—of Black Studies that has long operated on the sidelines of the discipline. From sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s early work on Black farmers to anthropologist Jessica B. Harris’s work on Black culinary traditions, this subfield has been obscured by a paradox: the significant role of agriculture and food in the story of Black life and the severe lack of sustained interest in these topics as sites of analysis in Black Studies. This paradox has produced intellectual blind spots, contributing to a robust ecosystem of scholarship and research on Black discourses about farmers, food justice/sovereignty, foodways, culinary innovation, agricultural history, food systems, land justice, and related topics outside of Black Studies journals and publications.
To be very clear, acknowledging Black Studies’ limited engagement with agriculture and food is not an indictment of the discipline. Instead, it is an invitation to raise fundamental questions:
- How have Black people defined their relationships—past and present—with agriculture and/or food?
- What theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives are needed to advance the study of agriculture and/or food within Black Studies?
- What steps are necessary for Black Studies to formally recognize Black Agricultural and Food Studies as an integral subfield of the discipline?
While the guest editor invites scholarly articles and essays that address one of these questions, submissions may explore any aspect of Black people’s historical and contemporary relationships to agriculture and food. These three questions provide a frame for this themed issue, offering an intentional starting point for carving out a space for an established area of focus in Black Studies on agriculture and food. This space is intended to build a collective, intergenerational understanding of agriculture and food in Black life, to sustain interest in these topics in Black Studies, and to open new lines of research. The guest editor hopes that this themed issue showcases a cross-pollination of scholarship that demonstrates agriculture and food as fertile sites for Black thinking—not only reshaping how we think, study, and write about Black life but also reframing how we understand agriculture and food more broadly.
Guest Editor
Bobby J. Smith II
bobbyjs2@illinois.edu
Complete submissions must be submitted to TBS’s landing page on Taylor & Francis’s website by September 1, 2026. Manuscripts should not exceed 4,500-6,000 words (inclusive of endnotes). Black Agricultural and Food Studies will be published as our Fall 2027 issue.
To avoid your article being sent back or rejected, please review all guidelines carefully before submitting.
