Political Life In The Wake Of The Plantation

In 2010, Jamaican police and military forces entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on gun and drug-running charges. By the time Coke was detained, somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred civilians had been killed. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Deborah A. Thomas uses the incursion as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability. In tying theories of politics, colonialism, race, and affect together with Jamaica's history, Thomas presents a robust framework for understanding what it means to be human in the plantation's wake.

Dead bodies, 2004-2005 -- Deviant bodies, 2005/1945 -- Spectacular bodies, 1816/2007 -- Public bodies, 2003 -- Resurrected bodies, 1963/2007 -- Coda. Repairing bodies.

In the timber plantations in northeastern South Africa, laborers work long hours among tall, swaying lines of eucalypts, on land once theirs. In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, timber corporations distributed hot cooked meals as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But life and sustenance are about much more than calories and machinic bodies. What is at stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life—physical, relational, cosmological—in the form of amandla. An Nguni word meaning power, strength or capacity, amandla organizes ordinary concerns with one’s abilities to earn a wage, to strengthen one’s body, and to take care of others; it describes the potency of medicines and sexual vitality; and it captures a history of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle for freedom. The ordinary actions coordinated by and directed at amandla do not obscure the wounding effects of plantation labor or the long history of racial oppression, but rather form the basis of what the Algerian artist Kader Attia calls repair. In this captivating ethnography, Cousins examines how amandla, as the primary material of the work of repair, anchors ordinary scenes of living and working in and around the plantations. As a space of exploitation that enables the global paper and packaging industry to extract labor power, the plantation depends on the availability of creative action in ordinary life to capitalize on bodily capacity. The Work of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of the relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, and the historical decompositions and reinventions of the milieu of those livelihoods and lives. Offering a fresh approach to the existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography from and of late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions of postapartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of custom and its territories. Through detailed descriptions, Cousins explicates the important and fragile techniques that constitute the work of repair: the effort to augment one’s capacity in a way that draws on, acknowledges, and reimagines the wounds of history, keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others.

Taking a multidisciplinary and global approach, this edited book examines the dynamic role of plantations as productive, socio-political and ecological forms throughout imperial and post-colonial worlds spanning multiple and broad temporalities. Showcasing an expansive range of case studies across different geographies, the collection sheds light on the heterogeneity of plantations and offers insights into the afterlives, spectres and remnants of systems that have been analysed as schemes of production, extraction and authority. Focusing on the expansion of plantation systems throughout various political-economic and ecological projects, and across the modern (and post-modern) period, allows the authors to move beyond analyses that often deal with individual empires through human-centered lenses. The contributors explore resistance to the mechanisms of extraction and control that plantations and their afterlives demanded, shedding light on their excesses, contradictions, failures and deviations. Offering a comprehensive treatment of global plantations, this book provides valuable reading for researchers with an interest in the socio-political and environmental effects of colonialism and imperialism in their various guises. Chapters 1, 8 and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

In Plantation Life Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi examine the structure and governance of Indonesia's contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia, which supply 50 percent of the world's palm oil. They attend to the exploitative nature of plantation life, wherein villagers' well-being is sacrificed in the name of economic development. While plantations are often plagued by ruined ecologies, injury among workers, and a devastating loss of livelihoods for former landholders, small-scale independent farmers produce palm oil more efficiently and with far less damage to life and land. Li and Semedi theorize “corporate occupation” to underscore how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship. In so doing, they question the assumption that corporations are necessary for rural development, contending that the dominance of plantations stems from a political system that privileges corporations.

In Violent Utopia Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

"For several decades conflicts within states rather than between them have been the prevalent form of organised political violence worldwide. Most intra-state conflicts since 1945 have originated in insurgencies, not just against incumbent regimes but, more often, against those regimes' external sponsors, whether imperial governments or dominant regional powers. This Handbook focuses on the former group, on the insurgencies and counter-insurgencies fought out as European overseas empires collapsed. Seeking to identify the causal dynamics and violence processes of such violent decolonization, the Handbook will address the most taxing problems in conflict limitation: how to constrain the actions of insurgents and counter-insurgents in asymmetric 'guerrilla wars'; how to mitigate the consequences of proxy involvement in intra-state conflicts; and how to protect civilians in war zones where combatant-non-combatant distinctions have broken down. Underlying these questions is a unifying theme - and a core Handbook objective - the need to recognize the cultural practices of insurgent movements and counter-insurgent forces as a prerequisite to comprehending their violence"--