POLLEN20: Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, U.K.
June 24-26, 2020
Session organizers
Session organizers: Vijay Kolinjivadi (University of Antwerp), Jean-François Bissonnette (Université Laval), Catherine Windey (University of Antwerp), Rut Elliot Blomqvist (University of Gothenburg), Gert Van Hecken (University of Antwerp)
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Vijay Kolinjivadi vijay.kolinjivadi@mail.mcgill.ca no later than 15 November 2019. Feel free to contact us should you have any questions or ideas about this session. If accepted to this paper session, applicants will still need to register through the POLLEN website.
Session description
Over the last decade, the notion of the Anthropocene has come under fierce critique among social scientists, indigenous scholars, and political geographers alike for its unproblematic attribution of a particular mode of physical transformation to all of humanity (Malm & Hornborg, 2014; Haraway, 2015; Todd, 2015; Ellis et al., 2016; Moore, 2016; Castree, 2017; Pulido, 2018; Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2013). In particular, this has meant disentangling “humanity” from Euro-centric imperialism, modernization and capitalism, and its violent modus operandi of dispossession of indigenous, black and brown bodies and land. While some have preferred to more aptly conceptualizing the current area as the Capitalocene (e.g. Moore, 2016) or the Chuthulucene (Haraway, 2016), this session aims at exploring and interrogating the underlying drivers of what Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing (2019) call the ‘Plantationocene’ to advance non-binary conceptions of culture-nature relationships.
Distinguishable from the other ‘cenes’, the “Plantationocene” identifies a common root to the inter-relationships between climate change, ecological collapse, capitalism, systemic racism/white supremacy, labour relations, and growing inequality. It emphasizes the disciplining logics that have characterized the history of racialized human labour and ecological complexity of plantation agriculture: homogeneity, predictability, calculability, and control (Ritzer, 1998, Haraway, 2015). For Tsing (2015), plantation logics refer to the efficiency by which the plantation expands in replicating an idealized blueprint modelled on the characteristics of often theoretically-presumed and controlled conditions of the motherland (e.g. global North). For McKittrick (2013), the capacity to substitute racialized labouring bodies and non-human natures as factors of plantation production is in need of paramount consideration. In this sense, we understand the plantation logic as originating from the central western thought of gendered and racialized reason/nature “hyperseparation” that creates hierarchies of superiority and control between linked up dualistic structures: culture over nature, mind over matter, men over women, master over colonized (Plumwood, 1993; Bird Rose, 2011). Plantation logics are thus not limited only to the physical transformation of the earth in the appropriation of human and non-human “resources”, but also to the ordering of the world that polarizes and hierarchizes people along class, racial, gender, and sexual-orientation lines; one that is geared towards faster and more efficient export (of ideas, of products, of experiences), and an intense regulation of human cognition and behaviour (Davis et al., 2019).
Yet, attempts to carry out plantation logics often fail in the face of continual emergence of multi-species unfoldings, the unpredictable and continuous emergence of relationships rooted in connectivity, care and resistance, even as such unfoldings (also) might serve as new ways for plantation logics to maintain their hegemony and reassert their control and seeming all-pervasiveness (Aldeia & Alves, 2019). It is increasingly crucial to identify ways in which multispecies flourishing takes place, in spite of the violence of simplified landscapes and disconnected communities, and the potential this provides for furthering alternative futures. We therefore aim to bring together a collection of presentations that explore the theoretical and empirical basis of plantation ecologies and ways by which alternative ecologies emerge and are sustained even within the realm of the plantation. We invite contributions of diverse multimedia platforms that consider but are not limited to the following:
- Empirical investigations into unruly relationalities in non-humans and humans alike and their intersections, which do not easily conform to theorized identities or objectified relations within the plantation;
- Contingent and historically-situated examples of the ongoing history of plantation logics in radically transforming spatial and temporal relationships of human-nature entanglements, from the history of agriculture in colonized lands (Luke, 2018), tourism (Duffy, 2015), biodiversity conservation, cheap labour, the “green economy, (Harcourt and Nelson, 2015)” to the academic ‘production’ of knowledge (Welsh, 2019);
- Defying plantation logics through “irrational” acts of care, joy, love, reciprocity, empathy- as the conditions to reinstate life- which cannot be rationalized, are at once rooted in defiance, resistance, and/or rage, and are dedicated to life’s incessant becoming into connectivity (Bird Rose, 2011; Stoetzer, 2018);
- Limits to the Plantationocene concept: theoretical contributions on how far it takes us; pitfalls to avoid, and future research agendas; and
- Explorations of the cognitive, epistemic, philosophical and historical roots of the plantation logic, and of their continuous reproduction through bio-/body- political techniques and cognitive technologies.
References
Aldeia, J. & Alves, F. Against the Environment. Problems in Society/Nature Relations. Frontiers in Sociology 4(Article 29). doi: 10.3380/isoc.2019.00029.
Bird Rose, D. (2011). Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.B. (2016). L’Événement anthropocène. La Terre, l’histoire et nous: La Terre, l’histoire et nous. Points.
Castree, N. (2017). Anthropocene : Social science misconstrued. Nature 541, 289.
Davis, J., Moulton, A.A., Van Sant, L., & Williams, B. (2019). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises. Geography Compass. doi: 10.1111/gec3.12438.
Duffy, R. (2015). Nature-based tourism and neoliberalism: Concealing contradictions. Tourism Geographies 17(4): 529-543.
Ellis, E., Maslin, M., Boivin, N., & Bauer, A. (2016). Involve social scientists in defining the Anthropocene. Nature News 540(7632).
Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities 6(1), 159-165.
Haraway, D., Ishikawa, N., Gilbert, S.F., Olwig, K., Tsing, A.L., & Bubandt, N. (2016) Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene, Ethnos, 81:3, 535-564, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838
Harcourt, W., and Nelson, I. (Eds.) (2015). Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving beyond the ‘Green Economy.’ Zed Books Ltd., London.
Hopes, A. & Perry, L. (2019). Reflections on the Plantationocene: A conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, moderated by Gregg Mitman. Edge Effects Magazine. Nelson Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Luke, T.W. (2018). Tracing race, ethnicity, and civilization in the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. doi: 10.1177/0263775818798030.
Malm, A., & Hornborg, A. (2014). The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative. The Anthropocene Review 1(1), 62-69.
Moore, J.W. (Ed.) (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland; PM Press.
Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.
Pulido, L. (2018). Racism and the Anthropocene. In: G. Mitman, M. Armiero, & R. Emmett (Eds.), Future remains: A cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene (pp. 116-128). Chicago; University of Chicago Press.
Ritzer, G. (1998). The McDonaldization thesis: Explorations and extensions. London ; Sage.
Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. (2011). The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 369(1938), 842-867.
Stoetzer, B. (2018). Ruderal ecologies: Rethinking nature, migration, and the urban landscape in Berlin. Cultural Anthropology 33(2): 295-323.
Todd, Z. (2015). Indigenizing the Anthropocene. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies, 241-254.
Tsing, A.L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Welsh, J. (2019). Dispossessing academics: The shift to ‘appropriation’ in the governing of academic life. European Journal of Social Theory. doi: 10.1177/1368431019854998.
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