The Land beneath Our Feet: "The Enduring Legacy of the Past in the Present" An Interview with Gregg Mitman and Emmanuel Urey

As the starting point of this conversation with documentary filmmaker and research scholar Gregg Mitman and Emmanuel Urey, consider the archival record, written and visual, of Harvard University's 1926 expedition to Liberia. From such evidentiary materials, the history of the country's development is foregrounded and mapped—from a colony under British rule, through the period of settlement in the 1820s and the later formation of the nation-state by former African American slaves and their descendants, to its development in the mid-to late 1920s by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company's appropriation of vast holdings of fertile land during the ascendancy of the United States as an imperial power and protagonist in world affairs. Consequential and enduring, these interventions reverberate to this day in land-development policy and are manifested, under conditions of neocolonial land practices, by monocrop plantations and foreign concessions. Liberia thus illustrates a distinct model of land development increasingly prevalent in the global South, affecting inhabitants—former settler and indigenous—in the contemporary period.