Racial Fictions at Work in a Regional Plantation Complex

Abstract

In this article, I argue for a local and regional focus on landscape racializations rather than a national lens for engaging with the Plantationocene. Racial formations on and around Indonesia’s plantations have emerged differently across regions and through varied colonial-era and contemporary land and labor politics. Inspired by diverse scholars’ historical and contemporary treatments of embodied and emplaced racialisms, I use a region in West Kalimantan Province (Indonesian Borneo) to argue that it is misleading to claim a national-level Plantationocene history relevant to all subnational regions. I then unpack racialized and gendered fictions deployed by state actors to justify the protracted political violence (1967–74) that led to the national state’s expropriation of land held by smallholders of Chinese and Chinese-Dayak descent in half the province. All seized land was reclassified as state land to mask its origins and redistributed to non-Chinese local people and transmigrants who worked the regional rubber plantation. This violent reracializing of the West Kalimantan landscape is the antithesis of the racialisms associated with plantation production in Java and Sumatra. Knowing this region-specific history can help in supporting contemporary struggles against entrenched patterns of racialized injustice.

Key Words:

• Indonesia
• landscape racialization
• Plantationocene
• regional plantation complexes

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term derives from a combination of the classic notion of a “plantation complex” (Curtin 1990) and what my research collaborators and I called “village-concession landscapes.”

2 Until 1966 these parties and organizations on the left were legal entities.

3 In addition to academic analyses focused on the political violence and the military (e.g., Davidson and Kammen 2002), the on-the-ground story of the pogroms against the Chinese have been documented from a range of local perspectives (e.g., Hui 2011; Takdir 2017; Lin 2022). In my own work, I have found significant differences in people’s experiences from village to village (Peluso 2009, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy Lee Peluso

NANCY LEE PELUSO is Professor of the Graduate School in the Division of Society & Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, Berekley, CA 94720. E-mail: [email protected]. Her current research interests include the political ecologies of migration and forest plantations and the politics of resource territories in Indonesian Borneo.