Plantation Memories, Labor Identities, and the Celebration of Heritage

Abstract

Plantation museums and memorials play different roles in coming to terms with a past of racialized violence. In this article, I briefly review the academic literature on plantations, refer to the plantation–race nexus, address the critical and acritical uses of plantation memories, discuss modes of musealizing plantations and memorializing labor, and present a community-based museum structure: Hawaii’s Plantation Village. This museum project is consistent with a multiethnic narrative of Hawai‘i, in that it provides both an overview of the plantation experience and a detailed account of the cultural heritage of each national group recruited for the sugar plantations. By providing a sense of historical belonging, a chronology of arrival, and a materialized representation of a lived experience, this museum plays an active and interactive role in the shaping of a collective memory of the plantation era, selecting the more egalitarian aspects of a parallel coexistence rather than the hierarchies, violence, tensions and land appropriation upon which the plantations rested.

Plant-people Intimacies: Sugar Canes, Pineapples and the Memory of Migration in Hawai‘i

“…Their descendants – who eventually intermarried and now claim multiple identifications – celebrate ancestrality and often engage in genealogical and genomic research to assess who they are. This is well illustrated in the case of the Portuguese of Hawai‘i, whose ancestors came to the archipelago as contract labourers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly from the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Azores (Bastos 2018, 2020; Correa and Knowlton 1982; Curammeng 2018; de Mattos 2022; Felix and Senecal 1978; Ponta-Garca 2018). I will describe how they became one of the distinctive local groups of Hawai‘i – along with the Japanese, the Chinese, the Filipinos, and others – and reflect on their expressions of intimacy with sugar canes and pineapples.…”

“…Plantations, mills and canneries were mostly owned by the ‘haole’ class of White, protestant missionaries who settled in Hawai‘i in the first half of the 19th century for evangelizing purposes and soon expanded their mission into the economic and political spheres. As for the labour hands and bodies, they belonged to people who came from a variety of places – China, Japan, Portugal, and, later, Korea, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico (Bastos 2018, 2020; Beechert 1985; Dusinberre 2019; Jung 2010; Labrador 2015; Takaki 1983). The plantation produced them as ethnicities, divided and hierarchized.…”

Mobile labour: an introduction

“…The extent to which displacement is embodied as race in more recent contexts of mobile labour is a question that unfolds in multiple research lines, as we explore in the project The Colour of Labourthe racialized lives of migrants (Bastos 2018a(Bastos , 2018bLe Petitcorps 2020;Macedo 2021;Miller 2019;Nóvoa 2021;Peano 2019). Racialization takes different appearances, including in the form of coexiting ethnic, national or cultural differences that obfuscate the enactment of the hierarchized inequalities associated with labour (Bastos 2020). While our research provides some keys to approach contemporary labour displacements -be it on agriculture, industry, or services -that are often depicted as analogous to slavery, more research is needed.…”

Domesticação contra a plantation

“…Porém, é a partir do emprego sistemático de mão de obra africana que a plantation começou a ganhar uma dimensão infraestrutural e, daí em diante, a racialização passou a definir novas formas de hierarquização e violência. Sobre isso, ver o pioneiro trabalho de E. T. Thompson (2013) e as discussões recentes propostas por Cristiana Bastos (2020).…”