Fungible Dispossessions: Heirs Property Ownership and Land Dispossession in South Carolina
In the twentieth century, Black families in the American South lost an estimated $326 billion dollars in land. Complicated by an obscure legal category known as heirs property, for many Black landowners, resisting land loss is a generational challenge juxtaposed against a legal system that misinterprets and disavows their ownership. This dissertation examines the risk of land dispossession in Black communities in South Carolina with attention to heirs property as a legal category impacting ownership retention outcomes. Broadly defined as property with no clear title, but owned equally by the legal heirs of a deceased property owner, heirs property accounts for an estimated one-third of all Black-owned land in the American South. South Carolina, historically one of the first places in the United States where Black Americans were granted property after the Civil War, has been characterized as "ground zero" for heirs property disputes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation crystallizes how the risk of land dispossession for Black landowners in South Carolina is mediated by shifting bureaucratic processes, with heirs property landowners caught in a cycle of bureaucratic and legal instability, yet maintaining attempts at retention.
This research reframes land dispossession in the American South as a fungible constellation of processes facilitated by a bureaucratic system that renders heirs property owners unknowable and threatens symbolic and structural implications for Black families across generations. Attuned to the risk of Black land dispossession in the American South as a condition within the afterlife of slavery, this research considers how a race-property matrix in the United States is reified through heirs property as a legal classification that troubles normative American understandings of property ownership.
Meeting ID: 924-0140-3126
Password: 148312
