Plantationocene: A Vegetal Geography

Abstract

A Plantationocene is a threshold for understanding planetary change. Rather than attributing environmental transformations to the universal agency of humankind, a Plantationocene grounds the alteration of landscape in histories of colonialism and race, and takes the plantation to be a pivotal engine for producing novel but fraught natures. This article develops a vegetal geography of a Plantationocene, engaging relations between plants and people as well as the role plants play as mediators of habitability in a landscape. It argues that such geographies influence and are underscored by the exploitation of labor, violent enclosures of land, and the quest to profit from both human and other-than-human life. Vegetal geographies are tracked in three conceptual registers: the vegetal agency of plants put into circulation by plantations, vegetal economies centered on labor power and the work plants do, as well as the vegetal politics of landscape change proceeding though an ecology of relations and the asymmetric exercise of power. This reading of a Plantationocene and its vegetal geographies brings scholarship on planetary transformations into closer dialogue with colonial history and postcolonial political economy. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of the Adivasi community, elephants, and tea plantations in Assam, northeast India.