Refiguring the Plantationocene

Abstract

While sympathetic to debates about the utility, accuracy, and significance of the “Anthropocene,” in this brief essay, we are most interested in implicating racialization, colonization, and their ongoing place in the capitalist world-economy and global ecological change. To this end, we point to the potential of thinking with the “Plantationocene,” considering that to invoke the plantation is to simultaneously contend with the intermeshing organization of the colonialist/imperialist, racialist, and capitalist dimensions of the world-system as directly related to global environmental transformation since the 15th century.

The Earth Is Sweet. On Cottica Ndyuka (De)compositions

“…In both epochs, sociotechnical gears have been applied toward the same goal: to draw from the earth, the human bodies, the crops, the waters, and the winds the resources needed to produce energy and generate wealth. Donna Haraway (2015), Anna Tsing, and others (Haraway and Tsing 2019; Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019; Murphy and Schroering 2019) have rightly articulated the plantation and the Plantationocene, identifying the logic that maintains the extraction of the vital work of humans and other species through acts of reduction, discipline, alienation, and slavery—the multi-species biopolitics expanded by forms of racial capitalism. Among its diverse ways of operating, it is based on regimes of racialized labor and production-oriented spaces, modalities of coercive and indentured work, both human and animal, and the occupation of territories following the extermination of indigenous peoples.…”

Climate Scholarship Needs Du Bois: Climate Crisis through the Lens of Racial and Colonial Capitalism*

“…The world‐ecology approach, drawing on world‐systems theory, does address Global North–South or colonial relations and does periodize capitalism to extend back to include slavery and the formal colonial period. However, world‐ecology scholars mention the role of race and racialization in capitalism but do not truly analyze it (Murphy and Schroering 2020).…”

Extractivisms, existences, and extinctions

“…Of the four key questions presented in this book, the question about the qualityof-life when taken to a global level of analysis, shows how the complete devaluation of animal lives is linked with a twisted logic that also devalues the people needed in the slaughterhouses and other types of labor as "a cheap and constant gendered and racialized workforce is as integral to global meat production as the acres of GMO feed or the selectively bred broilers" (Freshour 2019, 137). This is not new, but rather it is a basic feature of the Plantationocene expansion, which has been underway since the fifteenth century, and which Murphy and Schroering (2020) argue to be fundamentally based on the expansion of racial capitalism. The Plantationocene concept has been embraced recently in critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and agrarian studies, as it can offer more emphasis on the as-of-yet undernoted role of race and ethnicity, and the centrality of the plantation logic in many areas of the so-called modern world (Wolford 2021).…”

“…Mezzadra and Neilson (2019) emphasize that these practices make use of the differentiation of some people as belonging to other "races" or minorities, to make profits based on such overall socio-ethnic cleavages. This is especially clear when observing the colonial and capitalist trajectory of expanding slavery-based plantations, which continues to this day in different forms within the plantation-logic (Murphy and Schroering 2020). Slavery is a form of stripping and stealing others of their time, by ordering what they must do, and in what rhythm.…”

“…The creation of ethnic and racial cleavages and inferiorities and superiorities, imposed especially by Europeans/whites, is a key logic that is extended, and underlies the capital accumulation according to Murphy and Schroering (2020). Large parts of the Amazon, Cerrado, and Atlantic forests of Brazil have been colonized by Europeandescendant Brazilians, via the genocides of Indigenous populations and violences against Afro-Brazilian communities and other traditional populations.…”