UC Berkeley

'Reservoir Noir' illuminates the making of the New Deal Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project in rural South Carolina, the subsequent inundation of the floodplain between the Santee and Cooper rivers, and the unmaking of 901 Black and poor white families therein. Through the case study of the Santee-Cooper Project, this dissertation illuminates how race and the environment are coeval, simultaneously produced by governments and white elites, often to destroy or displace both. South Carolina’s ecological and racial history are not historical anomalies but are instead representative of the larger American project of Black suppression for the benefit of white progress. 'Reservoir Noir' demonstrates a commitment to a structural analysis of the processes that constitute America’s social, moral, and geographical self-identification. It illuminates the “wasted” environments and inhabitants that have always been regarded as incompatible with progressive futures. Exclusion, destruction, and dispossession are not new or even wholly “modern” projects, but, rather, are constitutive of American history. 'Reservoir Noir' therefore illuminates the inequities of the New Deal project, and its manifestations in rural South Carolina, to offer guidance for addressing racial, environmental, social, and political-economic crises of our own times — as well as the infrastructures being introduced to “solve” them.