The Plantationocene Series: Plantation Worlds, Past and Present

What is the Plantationocene?

The Plantationocene is a proposed alternate name for the epoch often called the Anthropocene. Inspired by the scholars, artists, and activists visiting University of Wisconsin–Madison as part of the 2019-2020 Sawyer Seminar “Interrogating the Plantationocene,” this Edge Effects series aims to foster conversations that address multiple forms of plantations, past and present, as well as the ways that plantation logics organize modern economies, environments, bodies, and social relations. For an introduction to the term and the questions surrounding it, read the essay that begins the series: “Plantation Legacies” by Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gómez, and Gregg Mitman.

Series editors: Laura Perry and Addie Hopes

Photo collage of rice, fields, and cotton plants
Essays

Plantation Legacies

The Anthropocene gives a name to human-caused environmental change. The Plantationocene puts colonialism, capitalism, and enduring racial hierarchies at the …
Ceramic and glass mosaics of two faces on a blue concrete wall
Exhibits

A Search for Repair in the Wake of the Plantation

An audio-visual essay by Deborah A. Thomas responds to the 2010 state of emergency in West Kingston, Jamaica, known as …
Small conical red clay sculptures in a wooded lot.
Exhibits

How the Soil Remembers Plantation Slavery

What haunts the land? Artists R.L. Martens and Bii Robertson dig up the tangled history of “the vampire crop,” slavery, …
A street lined with tents and palm trees
Podcasts

Plantation Housing Isn’t the Answer to Homelessness in Hawaiʻi

A “plantation-style community” might ease houselessness in Hawaiʻi. But it also erases violent histories of labor exploitation and Native dispossession …
At the top a helicopter flies over a tank tunneling through the earth. Various armed persons and roosters are spaced above and below the tank.
Exhibits

Excavating Haitian Histories

Haitian political history, Taíno artifacts, colonial plantations, and even cholera bacteria leave their marks on the land in Kwynn Johnson’s …
A red dirt road through the planted rows of the Sime Darby plantation
Podcasts

Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing

Plantations discipline both plants and people. Two scholars reckon with the Plantationocene to develop a shared vision of multispecies justice …
A blue bucket attached to a rubber tree
Podcasts

How Rubber Plantations Reshaped Vietnam: A Conversation with Michitake Aso

An environmental historian explains why, for Vietnam’s rubber plantations and plantation workers, the specifics of colonialism, geography, and ecology matter …
Phosphate Mining and the Paradox of Abundance
Essays

Phosphate Mining and the Paradox of Abundance

Phosphorus fertilizes the land. Phosphate mining poisons it. Artist Christian Danielewitz visits sites of extraction in western Senegal and considers …
Drawing of people kneeling in pineapple plantation
Essays

In Hawaiʻi, Plantation Tourism Tastes Like Pineapple

The Dole pineapple plantation has a destructive history of transforming the Hawaiian Islands. Mallory Huard describes how that continues today …
What Is Land? A Conversation with Tania Murray Li, Rafael Marquese, and Monica White
Podcasts

What Is Land? A Conversation with Tania Murray Li, Rafael Marquese, and Monica White

Land is the scene of a crime and a site of liberation. Tania Murray Li, Rafael Marquese, and Monica White …
A laborer reaches up into a palm tree
EssaysFieldnotes

Can Small-Scale Farming Save Oil Palm?

Drawing from her fieldwork with small-scale oil palm growers and plantation workers in Colombia, Angela Serrano describes a smaller way …
Scattering of mustard seeds. Black and white photograph
Essays

Fugitive Seeds

Christian Brooks Keeve traces how fugitive seeds and seed stories are deeply entangled with the stories and legacies of the …
Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars
Essays

Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars

Timothy Lorek compares two calendars from Colombia that offer competing visions of plantation presents and agricultural futures …
An oil palm plantation in Malaysia
ExhibitsFieldnotes

Picturing the Plantation as a Site of Displacement

A photo essay by Christine Horn from her fieldwork in Sarawak, Borneo, shows how oil palm plantations rearrange and displace …
Truck on dirt road through green fields
Exhibits

A Syllabus for Plantation Worlds

Drawing from postcolonial, Caribbean, Black, and Indigenous Studies, Sophie Sapp Moore and Aida Arosoaie curate a reading list that highlights …
Photo collage of rice, fields, and cotton plants
Essays

Legados de las plantaciones

El Antropoceno da nombre al cambio ambiental provocado por la acción humana. El Plantacionoceno sitúa el colonialismo, el capitalismo y …

Featured Image: Strawberry pickers in California.