Message posted on 08/08/2019

CFP "Plantations and their Afterlives: Materialities, Durabilities, Struggles" Symposium, 1-3 April, 2020, ICS, University of Lisbon

                Call for Papers
<br>
<br>«Plantations and their Afterlives: Materialities, Durabilities, Struggles»
<br>Symposium
<br>
<br>1-3 April 2020, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon
<br>
<br>
<br>Convenors: Marta Macedo, Irene Peano, Colette Le Petitcorps
<br>
<br>Organizer: The Colour of Labour: The Racialised Lives of Migrants ERC AdG 2015
<br>- 695573, PI Cristiana Bastos
<br>
<br>Keynote address: Deborah A. Thomas, Department of Anthropology, University of
<br>Pennsylvania
<br>
<br>
<br>Plantations have been crucial institutions for the expansion of imperial and
<br>post-imperial projects. They function as racialised and gendered systems of
<br>land appropriation and of labour recruitment, control, extraction and
<br>reproduction, aiming at the intensive cultivation of cash crops for export.
<br>Such operations have also had political, sovereign dimensions. Furthermore,
<br>plantations have been central to the emergence and reproduction of the
<br>capitalist world system, which in turn heavily transformed eco-systems and
<br>landscapes, leading some scholars to coin the concept of
<br>‘Plantationocene’. However, plantations are not homogeneous forms: in the
<br>past as much as in the present, they have relied on a range of technologies,
<br>relations and patterns of circulation, extraction, and design - they depend on
<br>specific knowledges andpractices shaping both environments and labour
<br>relations. We welcome papers that examine the materialities of plantations
<br>across multiple times and places, their mutations, durabilities and spectral
<br>survivals, taking into account the conflictual dimension of these processes.
<br>
<br>Materialities
<br>
<br>How have the specific requirements of the crops being grown translated into
<br>different disciplinary and spatial technologies for managing ‘nature’ and
<br>people? How did plantation objects, ideas, and living beings circulate and
<br>adapt? How have the different regimes of exploitation (slavery, indenture,
<br>wage labour) coexisted, evolved and transitioned across specific historical
<br>and geographical contexts? How can the various techno-scientific practices at
<br>play in plantations illuminate the racialised, gendered and sexualized
<br>dimension of capitalism? Furthermore, treating plantations as institutions
<br>whose internal relations have pervaded whole societies, we aim to debate these
<br>issues beyond the sole case of agricultural/agro-industrial production, by
<br>including also the sites and types of labour and (re)production that have
<br>developed in the evolution and restructuring of plantation economies, such as
<br>those pertaining to tourism, heritage, domestic service, or construction work,
<br>but also to carceral institutions.
<br>
<br>Durabilities
<br>
<br>Considering plantation techniques and materialities, and their mutations and
<br>transpositions, also means to interrogate their afterlives, spectres and
<br>remnants. Are plantations “back”? Were they ever gone? And where, exactly,
<br>are they? The question concerns not only plantations’ geographical location,
<br>but also the forms in which they might be seen to endure in the present.
<br>Several scholars have addressed these issues, especially in relation to the
<br>legacies, durabilities and afterlives of American slave plantations, in many
<br>ways the locus classicus for the study of plantations. The dismantlement of
<br>plantation units and households in old plantation societies has been shown to
<br>lead to a repurposing of their techniques of management and extraction to new
<br>domains. On the one hand, we aim to broaden the spatiotemporal scope of this
<br>debate. At the same time, we encourage reflections on how these techniques
<br>were transposed to contexts that cannot be easily identified as directly
<br>related to plantation societies (the most classic example being the European
<br>factory), and which explore the subjective and affective dimensions of
<br>plantation hauntings.
<br>
<br>Struggles
<br>
<br>The role of conflicts and struggles in spurring change, and their subjective
<br>dimensions, is another key axis of interest. Transitions were not smoothly
<br>driven by capitalist rationality, or well oiled by the wholesale reproduction
<br>of the hierarchies created in the plantation. They were also the product of
<br>renewed conflictual relations between the working and landowning classes,
<br>which drew from the contradictions inherent in the process of (re)production
<br>of plantations. We especially look for grounded methodological proposals and
<br>empirical analyses that help grapple with the too often silenced forms of
<br>social conflict, protest and “petit marronnage”, built on a socialisation
<br>to resistance which may be specific to plantations and their afterlives.
<br>
<br>
<br>We welcome papers from across disciplinary perspectives, tackling one or more
<br>of these axes, as well as others. Abstracts (maximum 500 words) along with a
<br>paragraph with biographical information, should be sent by email to:
<br>plantationsandtheirafterlives@gmail.com
<br> by October 1, 2019.
<br>Applicants will be notified of the results of the selection process by October
<br>31, 2019.
<br>
<br>Some travel funds will be available for those who do not have access to
<br>institutional support. The publication of a special issue in a peer-reviewed
<br>journal is planned after the symposium.
<br>
<br>
<br>About the keynote speaker:
<br>
<br>Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the
<br>Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also core
<br>faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. She is the author of
<br>Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Entanglement, Witnessing, Repair
<br>(forthcoming), Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational
<br>Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The
<br>Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004). She is also co-director and co-
<br>producer of two films: BAD FRIDAY: RASTAFARI AFTER CORAL GARDENS and FOUR DAYS
<br>IN MAY.
<br>
<br>About the ERC project The Colour of Labour:
<br>
<br>The project explores, through different tracks, different disciplinary
<br>perspectives and a broad spectrum of empirical cases, the co-production of
<br>labour and racialisations. Research within its scope has explored the
<br>trajectories of labour into post-abolition plantations in the Caribbean and
<br>Hawaii, into the migrant mill towns of New England, the multiple displacements
<br>in and within the African West Coast, the entanglements of plantation work and
<br>domestic work in Mauritius, and the processes of segregation and
<br>differentiation of low-class migrants in contemporary Italy.
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