Plantation Worlds

Abstract

There is no such thing as 'the plantation.' Although a recent surge in scholarship purports to address that very category, the term belies its own claim to universality. 'The plantation,' rather, indexes a proliferation of forms of racialized extractive agricultural production that stretch across the globe from the sugarcane fields of the Canary Islands in the 1400s to contemporary oil palm estates in Indonesia. The recent emergence of the Plantationocene concept makes a similarly universalizing claim. The concept was first extended by Donna Haraway and her interlocutors (2015) as a more historically situated alternative to that of the Anthropocene, which names our epoch of human-induced climate crisis. The Plantationocene identifies past and present practices of extraction and racialized violence as the logics underpinning the operation of colonial monocrop plantations. However, without critical interrogation, concepts like the Plantationocene risk flattening our understanding of the myriad ways in which extractive capitalism and its toxic legacies have shaped human and nonhuman life since the fifteenth century. At the same time, positing plantation worlds as the main mode of organizing time, space, and knowledge under extractive capitalism foregrounds the foundational and sustained role that racialized formations of land, labor, and capital have played in colonial and imperial projects. Our aim is to explore the potential of critical anthropological perspectives to confront the material and epistemological legacies of extractive racial capitalism. We route this exploration through plantation worlds, asking what their making and unmaking shows us about contemporary anthropological theory and practice. As numerous calls to 'decolonize anthropology' indicate, the discipline is itself intimately bound up with the making of plantation worlds. Anthropology has long been complicit in the formations of knowledge and power that sustain extractive racial capitalism. We turn to thinking from and against plantation worlds as a way into imagining their unmaking. As such, we bring anthropological theory and practice into juxtaposition with liberatory genealogies in Black and Indigenous studies. From this conjuncture, we examine whether, and how, anthropology would look different if it reckoned with its own history of entanglements with