Tong is a distinguished scholar and professor of Global South Studies.

Global Souths Conference & Academic Recognition

Best Paper Award: She is a recipient of a Best Paper Award associated with the Global Souths Conference, which is hosted by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Research Focus: Her work is often centered on the "Global South," a term used in postcolonial and transnational studies to describe regions outside of Europe and North America that face common socio-economic and political challenges.

This conference paper reads Natalie Baszile’s Queen Sugar as a modernist, feminist, and intersectional reworking of Southern rural life, focusing on an 800‑acre sugarcane farm in rural Louisiana as a site where power over bodies—biopower—is organized and contested.

Core argument

• The sugarcane farm in St. Joseph Parish functions as a political institution and a biopolitical apparatus. It regulates:

1. Public health

2. Heredity and genetic transmission

3. Risk and social control (beyond literal physical health)

• Baszile uses this setting to deconstruct southern Louisiana regionalism as an “alien body” threatening the American national family, exposing how race, gender, class, and bodily regulation intersect.

Body politics and biopower

• “Body politics” includes social and state power over abortion, anatomy, disease, discipline, sexuality, race, and identity.

• The inherited farm represents biopower: techniques for subjugating bodies and controlling populations, linking Jim Crow–era white supremacy to contemporary global capitalism and “new” body politics.

• The farm is a metaphorical prison: an “exile-enclosure” that confines and disciplines workers like Charley and Remy, echoing Foucault’s analysis of the modern penal system and the California “prison boom.”

Charley Bordelon and intersectionality

• Charley, a young African American single mother from Los Angeles, inherits her father’s sugarcane farm via a trust.

• She faces:

• The physical and economic demands of farming

• Her brother Angel’s addiction and instability

• Miss Honey’s matriarchal control

• The vulnerabilities of an interracial relationship with white farmer Remy Newell

• Charley initially appears as a middle-class striver seeking class ascension through marriage and farm ownership, but the paper argues this is a misreading if seen as merely bourgeois aspiration.

• Instead, Baszile critiques how black women must navigate overlapping systems of oppression—race, gender, class, sexuality, and regional identity—within both white and Black communities.

Modernism, the New Negro woman, and literary form

• The paper positions Queen Sugar within a modernist tradition, linking it to Harlem modernity and transnational feminist projects.

• The farm unites folk and bourgeois aesthetics, spirituality, morality, and modernity; it does not provide closure but opens a space where a “new Negro woman’s” voice emerges.

• Baszile’s style resists stereotypes of Black women’s writing as melodramatic. Instead, she constructs a complex, politically engaged modernist/feminist narrative.

Political economy, prisons, and globalization

• The farm’s political economy mirrors:

• Capitalist exploitation and differential production

• The building of “mega-prisons” by prisoners themselves

• The commodification of both imprisoned and non‑imprisoned Black bodies

• The farm stands in for state strategies to solve social problems through spatial segregation and incarceration, intensifying surveillance and control.

• Drawing on Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s Multipolar Globalization, the paper situates Louisiana within shifting global economic axes (from North–South to East–South). The sugarcane industry becomes a node in neoliberal globalization and “multipolarity,” tied to emerging economies and new middle classes.

Charley, her father, and class politics

• Charley and her father symbolize contrasting Black masculinities and femininities:

• Father: physical, practical, emotional, grounded in hard farm life

• Charley: literary, middle‑class, family‑oriented, reserved

• Her search for validation—especially through Remy—shows the psychological burden of middle‑class respectability under white supremacy.

• Baszile uses middle‑class politics not to celebrate bourgeois comfort, but to critique how race and class co‑produce power over Black women’s bodies.

Contribution of the paper

• Re-conceptualizes Queen Sugar as a modernist Southern text rather than simply contemporary realism.

• Shows how the sugarcane farm operates as a carceral, biopolitical institution with its own disciplinary logic.

• Demonstrates how Baszile’s narrative foregrounds a distinctly modernist/feminist, Black middle-class female subjectivity that challenges:

• Colonial and neo-colonial forms of biopower

• Stereotypes of Black women’s literature as sentimental or melodramatic

• Traditional Southern narratives that obscure intersectional power relations.

In sum, the paper argues that Queen Sugar uses the rural Louisiana sugarcane farm—under conditions of global capitalism and mass incarceration—to dramatize how race, gender, class, and region converge on Black women’s bodies, producing a new, politically charged modernist vision of the “New Negro woman.”

University of Louisiana Lafayette