Professor Etienne Toussaint, Fellow, has had two papers’ recently included in Columbia Law Review – in the 5th issue of the 125th volume, an issue on protests, he had Afrofuturism in Protest: Dissent & Revolution published. In the 2nd issue of the 126th volume, he had his essay The Spirit of Oligarchy in American Agriculture published. Professor Toussaint is currently an associate professor at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law, where he teaches Contracts, Business Associations, Law and Political Economy, Critical Legal History, and the Reconstruction Constitution.
Afrofuturism in Protest explores Black protest and Afrofuturist imagination as a radical legal tradition rooted in historical defiance and visionary possibility. Drawing on the writings of nineteenth-century Black activists such as David Walker, Martin R. Delany, and Frederick Douglass, the Piece connects historical visions of liberation to contemporary movements, revealing a distinctly Black radical vision of protest law.
The Spirit of Oligarchy in American Agriculture highlights the stakes of agricultural equity for constitutional theory, democratic governance, and racial justice. It specifically that Black farm ownership has fallen by more than 90% since the 1920s and argues that this decline was not caused by a few isolated cases of discrimination. Instead, it resulted from a long-standing system in which economic, political, and cultural power has been concentrated in the hands of a few groups, shaping American agriculture since before the Civil War.
Read Afrofuturism in Protest: Dissent & Revolution here and The Spirit of Oligarchy in American Agriculture here.