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.