Imperial Plantations: Past, Present, and Future Directions

Chatterjee, Piya; Gupta, Monisha Das; Rath, Richard Cullen

doi:10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01363.x

Cited by 2 publications

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“…As the physical presence of sugar plantations recedes, many scholars continue to insist on the “haunting continuities” that fix contemporary social life on the now-immaterial foundation of the plantation (Chatterjee, Das Gupta, and Rath. 2010: 11). In today's Caribbean factories and data centers some anthropologists hear echoes of slavery, and they presume that the plight of the present is best understood by first overlaying it with the social forms of the plantation (e.g., Yelvington 1995; Freeman 2000).…”

Section: Oil Refineries and The (Re)making Of The Modern Caribbeanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oil in the Caribbean: Refineries, Mangroves, and the Negative Ecologies of Crude Oil

Bond

2017

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This article links up the disastrous history of fossil fuels with the celebrated ecology of mangroves. Building on ethnographic and historical research in Puerto Rico and St. Croix, it outlines the often neglected but quite consequential place of crude oil in the Caribbean. Following the construction of what became the second largest refinery in the world, I describe how the imperial energy networks of the United States first came to the Caribbean. Troubling a popular origin story of the Caribbean, colonial and industry leaders voiced a robust critique of the plantation in order to justify the introduction of these enclave refineries. Imperial energy networks welcomed an unprecedented problem to the region: coastal oil spills. The scientific and legal response to these spills brought new attention to the vital relationality of mangroves. Rather perversely, the destruction of the mangroves in the Caribbean—in which crude oil played the leading role—opened mangroves up to new forms of knowledge and care. While many claim that fossil fuels helped cultivate a modern disregard for the natural world, I show how the negative ecologies of fossil fuels also instigated new scientific and political appreciations for the liveliness of the natural world. This story of oil in the Caribbean has implications for scholarly debates around the so-called Anthropocene. Against scholarship that looks at the coming disaster of crude oil as an epochal break in thought and politics, this paper instead describes the long history of acknowledging and managing the disastrous qualities of fossil fuels.

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Section: Oil Refineries and The (Re)making Of The Modern Caribbeanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oil in the Caribbean: Refineries, Mangroves, and the Negative Ecologies of Crude Oil

Bond

2017

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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“…Engaging Black feminist scholars and anthropologists alongside South Asian, Dalit feminist, and queer framings of politics, time, and kin making, this exercise reroutes the citational paths of Black feminists outside the Americas and the Caribbean to disturb the white habitus (Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006) of the plantation's frames in anthropology and South Asian studies. To conclude, I advocate for situating future plantation research that builds feminist solidarities to (1) work transregionally beyond the Americas and Afro-Caribbean (Alexander 2005;Chatterjee, Das Gupta, and Rath 2010;Mohanty and Alexander 1996;Sandoval 1991); (2) foreground ethical "(re)historicizations" of race, labor, and migration in imperialist capital production (Lowe 2015;Noh 2003;Pulido 2018); and (3) hold the confrontation of anti-Blackness and casteism in feminist anthropology as an active "choice" for co-survival and liberation (Anzaldúa 2015;Grewal and Kaplan 1994;Mohanty 2003;Perry 2013;Rege 1998;Vemuri 2020). 4 The Plots that Came before the Plantationocene In 2013, Katherine McKittrick published "Plantation Futures" in the Caribbean studies journal Small Axe, seven years after publishing Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006), which outlines a Black feminist framework within geography to understand the mapping of space and time in the context of Black life, gendered embodiment, and imperial capital.…”

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“…It also takes up Piya Chatterjee, Monisha Das Gupta, and Richard Cullen Rath's earlier transregional and interdisciplinary call to interrogate “the usual hemispheric and temporal divisions” (2010, 4) of the “plantation complex” (Curtin 1990), but with special focus on citational praxis and Black feminists’ scholarly contributions to building the “substrata of logics which link these plantation projects together” (Chatterjee et al. 2010, 3) 2…”

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confidence: 99%

“…1515It is important to note that cultural anthropologists studying in and of South and Southeast Asia and its diasporas do cite Black women but mainly within feminist and queer studies and in nonplantation contexts, methodologically speaking. In plantation studies, with the exception of Piya Chatterjee (2001), Chatterjee's collaborative introduction to the special issue on imperial plantation with Monisha Das Gupta and Richard Cullen Rath (2010), and Debarati Sen (2017), cultural anthropologists in South and Southeast Asia have not, for the most part, cited or engaged the work of Black feminist plantation scholars working in the American South and Afro‐ and Indo‐Caribbean contexts.…”

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Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology's “Regional Closets”

Jegathesan

2021

Feminist Anthropology

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In 2015, Donna Haraway introduced the Plantationocene concept as an alternative to the Anthropocene in Environmental Humanities. Engaging Black feminist scholars who were thinking about the plantation before Haraway's Plantationocene, this article argues that a transregional centering of Black feminist scholarship within plantation studies is a mutually productive and ethical endeavor that affirms the rightful place of Black feminist scholars in the field of anthropology and builds more robust transnational feminist forms of restorative justice. Analyzing Black, Indigenous and feminist critiques of the Plantationocene, this article is a "reparative reading" (Sedgewick 2003) response to Lynn Bolles' call to identify the "ways of 'miseducation' in anthropology" (Bolles 2013, 58) and seeks to repair the erasure of Black feminists' contributions to plantation studies outside the Americas and Afro-Caribbean contexts, specifically in South Asian studies. Situating new research among landless, minority Tamil plantation residents through a re-reading of plots on Sri Lanka's tea plantations, I suggest that thinking alongside Black feminist scholarship outside plantation studies' "regional closets" (Alexander 2005) is not only an ethical choice but also one of co-survival and liberation within the white habitus (Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006) of anthropology.

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Imperial Plantations: Past, Present, and Future Directions

Cited by 2 publications

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Oil in the Caribbean: Refineries, Mangroves, and the Negative Ecologies of Crude Oil

Oil in the Caribbean: Refineries, Mangroves, and the Negative Ecologies of Crude Oil

Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology's “Regional Closets”

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