| Sumario: | This article examines infant abandonment, death, and burial in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American South, predominantly in South Carolina. It investigates the physical and imaginary geographies associated with infant death, exploring how southerners navigated local landscapes to conceal infant deaths. It links physical spaces to geographies of power and control in a postbellum southern world still defined by racism and violence, arguing that places of infant abandonment or burial were deeply meaningful to both Black and white communities. This research also demonstrates how the spaces of infant disposal or burial could serve as sites of Black resistance even as they remained spaces of marginalization and death. Through an interrogation of infant death, this article uncovers the ways in which Black people in South Carolina and beyond negotiated, disrupted, and resisted the white domination of the landscape that persisted well after emancipation.
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