Refiguring the Plantationocene (original) (raw)
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The Plantationocene as analytical concept: a forum for dialogue and reflection
The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2023
This forum for dialogue and reflection invites empirical and theoretical inquiries that critically interrogate plantations in their myriad forms through the conceptual analytic of the Plantationocene. In doing so, we understand, and invite attention to, the Plantationocene, both as a key for interpreting histories of local to global development and for understanding the role of plantationlogics today. Not all contributors need agree that the Plantationocene is a useful concept. Rather, we envision the forum as providing opportunity for constructive debate and for highlighting the role of plantations across historical and contemporary sites, scales, and subjects.
New Literaria: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities ISSN- 2582-7375, 2020
Postcolonial interpretation of violence inflicted on colonial subjects for crop production has shifted to a neocolonial interpretation because colonization now takes place in a disguised form of neo-ism. Such transfer of subject domination and power relation between subject and the master should be interpreted according to modern day disguised labor coercion. Here the transfer of inspection is thus from colonial exploitation for cultivation of crops to plantation culture. Plantationocene is then an epoch similar to anthropocene where the Global South is locked in a circle of environmental havoc following the notion of development as an idea as established by the Global North. Plantation technique requires harsh policies which has a historical tendency of labour coercion. Such coercions were categorical during colonial era however modern day labour coercion uses techniques of soft power and maneuver. The phenomenon of detrimental extractive processes is prevalent in the Global South countries where these economically weaker countries serve for the Global North countries. To discuss labour coercion and environmental degradation requires parallel discussion of the politics behind creating vulnerable environment for existence of indigenous people leading to quiet erasure of such minority communities, indigenous people being part of the minority communities.
Un)Worlding the Plantationocene: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2022
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from arts, humanities, social sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the tropics. Published by James Cook University, a leading research institution on critical issues facing the world's Tropics. Free open access, Scopus Listed, Scimago Q1.
The Neo Slave Narrative and the Plantationocene
African American Review, 2022
From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2009), which represents the landscape of environmental extinction and consumer cannibalism through plantation slavery, to Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017), which figures America’s climate future as a second Civil War over the abolition of fossil fuels, contemporary climate fiction frames the current climate crisis as a legacy of slavery. African American literature—little of which is read as climate fiction—has long articulated the intersections between plantation slavery’s environmental and racial regimes and, more recently, traced the plantation’s ecological and social histories directly to the climate crisis. This essay utilizes the concept of the Plantationocene—the idea that plantation slavery’s global expropriation of people, plants, and land was a watershed transformation in human, natural, and climate history—to show how racial capitalism created and continues to shape the climate crisis. It looks to the slave narrative (Charles Ball’s narrative among others) and the contemporary neo-slave narrative (Coates’ The Water Dancer and Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad) to show how the plantation serves as the “ugly blueprint” (McKittrick) of the climate crisis. It also traces the alternative ecologies of resistance and repair that this literature encodes. By reading African American literature as climate literature, I seek to expand climate fiction’s canon—transforming how the genre is most often configured around white writers—and re-center it on race. White supremacy, African American literature argues, has fueled and continues to drive the climate crisis.
Into a New Epoch: Capitalist Nature in the Plantationocene
Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research, 2019
This chapter delineates the characteristics of impacts and changes brought by the expansion of oil palm plantations to the biomass-rich interior region of Sarawak, Malaysia. It argues that many of the changes, both social and ecological, and the combination of the two, are derived from interfaces being formed when different and often distant landscapes, peoples, institutions and networks come into contact and are abruptly juxtaposed. Such new encounters have led to the temporal compression of succession-the transplanting, mobilisation, proliferation, reduction and extirpation of fauna, flora and human communities in a relatively short time. What emerges is a mixed landscape consisting of first nature and capitalist nature, where habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss and multifaceted displacements proceed. Spatial compression brought by infrastructure development also connects the local community, both human and non-human, with distant people and markets, leading to a new kind of rural-urban continuum as well as the commodification of nature and labour. Along newly created commodity chains, there emerge numerous cultural encounters of individuals and social groups, adding a new social amalgam to the local community.
Global Plantations in the Modern World Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives, 2023
In this chapter, we outline our contribution to the study of plantations, building upon a wide and important body of critical literature that has developed on the subject over more than a century of reflections and struggles. Plantations are analyzed according to three main axes: an eco-material dimension that articulates to racial injustices; the long-term material, affective and symbolic imprints of plantations; and their sovereign dimensions. We explore these topics through a variety of examples and transdisciplinary approaches that cut across chronologies, geographies and political contexts and provide a navigation tool through the edited volume’s contributions. By stressing plantations’ more-than-human relations and their all-too-human (modern, colonial, imperial) dynamics, we want to both call into question any monolithic notion of “the” plantation and pinpoint the common features that accrue to the different plantation experiences and experiments addressed by authors. Contributing to the current discussion on the predicaments of the Plantationocene, we argue that this book’s breadth and vision might help imagine more nuanced ways of narrating plantation regimes and forms of resistance against them—past, present and future.
The green economy as plantation ecology: When dehumanization and ecological simplification go 'green
Journal of Political Ecology
The green economy is proposed as a solution to address growing and potentially irreversible ecological crises. But what happens when environmental solutions are premised on the same logics of brutal simplification and dehumanization that sustain and reinforce systems of oppression and ecological breakdown? In this article, we describe the transformation of the biophysical landscape of the planet into replicable blueprints of the plantation plot. The plantation as a colonial-era organizational template is an ongoing ecological process premised on disciplining bodies and landscapes into efficient, predictable, calculable, and controllable plots to optimize commodity production and is dependent on racialized and gendered processes of dehumanization. The visible cultural, physical, aesthetic, and political singularity of the plot, under the guise of objectivity and neutrality, permits a tangible depiction of the way ecological breakdown takes place. We interrogate the notion of "gr...
Social Studies, 2022
In light of the Plantationocene, a term recently elaborated to capture the magnitude of power of plantation systems from European Colonialism and plantation slavery to industrial animal farming and plant monocultures in the present climate crisis, political anthropology faces new challenges in noticing resistance. While plantation struggles have been crucial for conceptual innovations since the late 1960s as well as new arts of noticing, the related crises of climate change, extractivism and exterminism garner a new urgency to rethink resistance in the light of the multispecies turn. Examining recent anthropological examples of resistance in, around, and against plantations, this article opens the concept of resistance to include the agency of nonhumans and their capacity to make social and political changes, fight back, form alliances and co-produce rebelliously charged effects, meanings and interpretations. The article discusses the emerging field of anthropology of more-than-human resistance and helps in re-calibrating the anthropologist's art of noticing it. In doing so, the text elaborates three challenges-the risk of romanticizing resistance, of reifying it, and of conceptual stretching. To cope with the challenges in forging anthropology of more-than-human resistance, two particular strategies are further outlined-of focusing on the articulations of resistance, and fostering a closer affiliation to activism and organized protest.
Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
In his essay 'The Souls of White Folk', written generations before the International Stratigraphy Committee would begin debating the Anthropocene concept, W.E.B. Du Bois (1920: 29) made an observation which remains as pertinent today as it was when he wrote it 1920. 'I am given to understand', he wrote, 'that whiteness is the ownership of the Earth forever and ever, Amen'. Although Du Bois' famous line is in reference to the imperial origins of the First World War, it nevertheless anticipates one of the core themes of this special issue on 'race' and the Anthropocene, that lurking just beneath the surface of the Anthropocene concept is a racialised narrative about white Earthly possession. The 'Anthropocene' is a term used in both popular and scientific discourse to designate a unit of geological time in which humanity, anthropos, is said to be leaving its own stratigraphic signature on Earth's geology. The recent popularisation of the term is credited to Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and their article in 2000 in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter which Crutzen followed up with a piece in Nature in 2002. As Michael Simpson illustrates (p. 53), there is a longer discursive history of an 'age of man' within European scientific circles (see also Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016), but it was only after the publication of this article that the term would gain popular notoriety and come to be considered a credible epochal label. In 2008, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was the first to recommend official consideration of the inclusion of the Anthropocene into the Geological Time Scale. The International Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was formed shortly thereafter to report to the International Union of Geological Sciences on this possibility. Throughout the 2000s the term entered popular discourse as a signifier of environmental crisis (see Kolbert, 2006),