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Whitney A Snow, John H. Cable. Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 495–496, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae531
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In Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi, John H. Cable broadens the historiographical scope of enclosure by challenging the traditional Black-white binary approach. In this groundbreaking work, Cable argues that incorporating Native Americans, specifically Choctaws, not only strengthens our understanding of racial injustice but views the South through the transnational lens of settler colonialism. While convincingly comparing the South to other settler societies like South Africa and Rhodesia, he nevertheless maintains that a narrower focus—east-central Mississippi—allows him to analyze the land dispossession endured by Blacks, Choctaws, and poor whites. Concentrating primarily on the mid-twentieth century, he shows that despite the passage of civil rights legislation, sharecroppers and tenants continued to face eviction. Much like displaced people in other settler states, these two groups faced decades of ravenous exploitation followed by abrupt dismissal. In Cable’s words, the enclosure movement “was, in that sense, simply a new chapter in a very old story, of which Mississippi was as much a part as settler states elsewhere” (126).
