The Plantationocene as analytical concept: a forum for dialogue and reflection

ABSTRACT

This forum for dialogue and reflection invites empirical and theoretical inquiries that critically interrogate plantations in their myriad forms through the conceptual analytic of the Plantationocene. In doing so, we understand, and invite attention to, the Plantationocene, both as a key for interpreting histories of local to global development and for understanding the role of plantationlogics today. Not all contributors need agree that the Plantationocene is a useful concept. Rather, we envision the forum as providing opportunity for constructive debate and for highlighting the role of plantations across historical and contemporary sites, scales, and subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Plantationocene
• plantations
• extraction
• racial capitalism
• resistance

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the communities, activists, and scholars who have inspired their thinking about, with, and against plantations. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments, and the journal editors for their patience and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plantation.

Additional information

Funding

Wolford acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation [grant number 1331265] for research on agricultural science in Mozambique. Chao acknowledges the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research [grant numbers 9942, EAG-136, and 9196] and the Australian Research Council [grant number DP200102763].

Notes on contributors

Sophie Chao

Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of ecology, Indigeneity, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022). She is of Eurasian (French and Chinese) heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Australia.

Wendy Wolford

Wendy Wolford is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development at Cornell University. Her research focuses on contestation over access to land, with a focus on Brazil and Mozambique. Wolford is the author of This Land is Ours Now (2010) and a forthcoming volume co-edited with Michael Goldman and Nancy Peluso on The Social Lives of Land (Cornell University Press).

Andrew Ofstehage

Andrew Ofstehage is an anthropologist working at NC State University. With a background in agronomy and ethnography, he researches the on-the-ground realities of commodity cycles from the quinoa boom in Bolivia to the creation of Soylandia in Brazil. He is of European ancestry (Norwegian) and lives on unceded territory of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation.

Shalmali Guttal

Shalmali Guttal is the Executive Director of Focus on the Global South. For over twenty-five years, her research and writing has concerned economic and social development in Asia, especially the Mekong region and India. The central themes of her work are community resources rights, women’s rights, food sovereignty, agrarian reform, and democratization of governance. She works in solidarity with progressive grassroots movements, unions and activists on the creation and governance of natural, social, and knowledge commons.

Euclides Gonçalves

Euclides Gonçalves is a co-founder and director of Kaleidoscopio. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Witwatersrand (2012). Before founding Kaleidoscopio, Gonçalves worked at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (2007-2011) and as a Program Assistant at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Senegal. His research focuses on studies on governance, bureaucratic processes and political rituals.

Fernanda Ayala

Fernanda Ayala works in the Department of Human Rights in Brazil and is a PhD candidate in the Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences in Development, Agriculture and Society, Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (CPDA/UFRRJ) – Brazil. Her work focuses on processes of dispossession and the organization of the dominant rural classes and the state in Brazil.