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. <br>_______________________________________________ <br>EASST's Eurograd mailing list <br>Eurograd (at) lists.easst.net <br>Unsubscribe or edit subscription options: http://lists.easst.net/listinfo.cgi/eurograd-easst.net <br> <br>Meet us via https://twitter.com/STSeasst <br> <br>Report abuses of this list to Eurograd-owner@lists.easst.netview formatted text
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