Power for the Plantationocene: solar parks as the colonial form of an energy plantation

ABSTRACT

Solar park development in India constitutes racial regimes of land ownership, as solar-related dispossessions produce a highly racialized (through caste) and gendered surplus population of landless peasants. Conceptualizing the power relations of solar power through the Plantationocene, I argue the highly ordered form of the solar park is a set of neocolonial social relations akin to an energy plantation; an archetype of an imperative, idealized and racialized reordering of nature, economy and society to power a more sustainable world-system. Agrarian climate justice requires intersectional peasant coalitions struggling to transform neocolonial land politics and implementing redistributive and emancipatory solar interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Solar
• plantation
• Plantationocene
• green grabbing
• racial regimes of ownership
• agrarian climate justice

Acknowledgements

Immense gratitude goes to Jun Borras, the JPS Editors and Editorial Collective for their interest in this research and for convening the Special Forum and conference on climate change and critical agrarian studies. I am honored for the opportunity to share this manuscript alongside the works of such brilliant scholars and activists. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for generative comments and suggested edits. And to Wendy Wolford who inspired these ideas. I am eternally indebted to the intrepid Mridul Ganguly for fieldwork support. Much empowerment and solidarity to the folks in the Illume Lab, especially Isabelle Honkomp, Eli Williams and Joslin Brown. This article is dedicated to Shilpa, Shyan, Lakshay and Raysha.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Ranajit Gupta (1992, 173) defines the colonial plantation system in India as capitalist enterprises with the following characteristics: ‘an agro-industrial enterprise raising one or several crops on a large scale under tropical or semi-tropical climatic conditions; an international- market orientation; the launching and subsequent maintenance of plantations under the ownership and control of foreign capital with the backing of the colonial state; the employment of a large number of producers and labourers (not necessarily wage workers) doing hard manual work under conditions of a primitive labour process; the use of a migrant and/or immigrant labour system; and the mobilisation and control of direct producers through economic and extra-economic coercive methods with the direct and indirect support of the colonial state.’

2 Haraway (2015, 162) defines Plantationocene as ‘the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor.’

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Ryan Stock

Ryan Stock is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Northern Michigan University. He is a political ecologist whose work examines the political economy of environmental change and agrarian transformation for sustainable development.