Schooling as Plantation: Racial Capitalism and Plantation Legacies in Corporatized Education Reform in Liberia

Racial Capitalism and Global Labour Studies – a Missed Encounter ?

“…Apart from these more immediate elaborations on the concept of racial capitalism and the work of Robinson, there have been some other elaborations of the concept, one of which is the work on the concept Plantationocene that feminist and biologist Donna Haraway coined in a debate on the concept of the Anthropocene in 2014 (Haraway, 2015). While the Working Group on the Anthropocene recommends "1950 as the birth of the Anthropocene" (Moore et al, 2019), climatologists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) propose starting with 1610 as a birth date: they identify a stark reduction in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere for this time, caused by the death of around 50 million indigenous inhabitants of the Americas who died from war, enslavement, famine and illnesses. The allegation that massive interference with the climate began with the plantation economies continues earlier theses such as that of Sidney Mintz (1985), who calls the plantation a synthesis of field and factory.…”

“…The allegation that massive interference with the climate began with the plantation economies continues earlier theses such as that of Sidney Mintz (1985), who calls the plantation a synthesis of field and factory. Central for our discussion is how plantations bring together "land alienation, labour extraction and racialised violence" (Moore et al, 2019; see also Davis et al 2019;Haraway and Tsing, 2019). In other words, the debate around the Plantationocene opens boundaries between various disciplines -namely labour studies, political ecology, environmental history and studies on racism -and is therefore a fruitful starting point to reconnect labour studies with neighbouring discplines.…”