Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology's “Regional Closets”

Abstract

In 2015, Donna Haraway introduced the Plantationocene concept as an alternative to the Anthropocene in Environmental Humanities. Engaging Black feminist scholars who were thinking about the plantation before Haraway's Plantationocene, this article argues that a transregional centering of Black feminist scholarship within plantation studies is a mutually productive and ethical endeavor that affirms the rightful place of Black feminist scholars in the field of anthropology and builds more robust transnational feminist forms of restorative justice. Analyzing Black, Indigenous and feminist critiques of the Plantationocene, this article is a "reparative reading" (Sedgewick 2003) response to Lynn Bolles' call to identify the "ways of 'miseducation' in anthropology" (Bolles 2013, 58) and seeks to repair the erasure of Black feminists' contributions to plantation studies outside the Americas and Afro-Caribbean contexts, specifically in South Asian studies. Situating new research among landless, minority Tamil plantation residents through a re-reading of plots on Sri Lanka's tea plantations, I suggest that thinking alongside Black feminist scholarship outside plantation studies' "regional closets" (Alexander 2005) is not only an ethical choice but also one of co-survival and liberation within the white habitus (Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006) of anthropology.

Moving materialities: Oceanic epistemologies and embodied knowledge production in Pentecostal women's health mentorship in Samoa

“…Just as fieldwork positions of “outsider” and “stranger” have been problematized, theory‐work might also be challenged to reconsider what is “generalizable” and what is “culturally specific” (Carter, 2019; Chin, 2021; Narayan, 1993; Visweswaran, 1994; Williams, 1995). The article raises the question about what can we know as anthropologists when we think with Oceanic epistemologies not because there is a match between theory and place (i.e., using Pacific‐based scholarship to understand Pacific‐based people) but because the theory itself can encourage us as anthropologists to know differently, in this case about moving materialities (see also Jegathesan, 2021).…”

From Necrocene to Naíocene—promising pathways toward sustainable agri-food systems

“…Many colonial-capitalist agricultures have proven to be disastrously unstable as a result of their intrinsic political and ecological violence: newly vulnerable wildfire landscapes from California to Australia stem not only from emissions-related global climate change but also from the genocide of Indigenous caretakers; agrarian crises in the United States, Brazil, and India stem not only from water extraction but land dispossession in the interest of monocrop expansion. As Black feminist and other scholars of the capitalist plantation have shown across centuries (Davis et al 2019;Jegathesan 2021;Li and Semedi 2021;McKittrick 2013;Wolford 2021), these systems tried to replicate hierarchies of race, gender, and class in extractive farm fields through violence and surveillance. And yet, those scholars also describe how plantations failed to completely sever links of community and care.…”

“…The Necrocene welcomes plantations and industrial monocrop ecologies as efficient tools to increase production for international trade and speculation, with the health and wellbeing of humans, our organization, and our ecologies rendered externalities or necessary sacrifices. Yet as neither the Necrocene nor capitalism were ever totalizing, scholars have shown how communities of care and multispecies thriving coexist with plantations against violent odds (Carney 2020;Heynen 2021;Jegathesan 2021).…”

Beyond “Enclaves”: Postcolonial Labor Mobility to and from Assam Tea Plantations

“…The central question posed by the evolving literature on the Plantationocene is how plantation economies have shaped the present, while different key features (i.e., extraction, extermination, homogenization, inequality, insularity) of plantations are foregrounded. The Plantationocene literature has been criticized for not using its potential to analyze racial politics in a meaningful way, but rather “obscuring the centrality of racial politics” (Davis et al 2019, 1) by erasing Black and Indigenous voices from the Plantationocene discourse (Jegathesan 2021, 80) and due to its potential to create a “new, race‐based world order” (Wolford 2021, 1624).…”