92. Plantations and Epistemic Imperialism: Between Ecological Form and Enduring Logic
Sophie Marie Helene Chao, The University of Sydney; Alyssa Paredes, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor; Kregg Hetherington, Concordia University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
This panel explores plantations as modes of epistemic imperialism and technologies of violence. As situated ecological forms, industrial monocultures impose ways of knowing and being that undermine conditions of life at planetary scales (Chao 2022; Haraway 2015; Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019; Wolford 2021). As enduring technologies of violence, they feed into institutions of incarceration, policing, finance, higher education in the plantation’s wake (Hawkins 2010; McKittrick 2011; Thomas 2019; Williams, Squire, and Tuitt 2021). Contests over knowledge-making lie at the heart of plantation power, past and present. Epistemic imperialism embedded into monoculturalization reconfigures life in ways that are both dehumanizing and more-than-human (Wynter 2003; Davis et al. 2019), civilizational and dispossessory (Scott 1998; Li and Samedi 2021). We envision this panel as a “reunion” for coalitional work that draws linkages across colonial and disciplinary divides in order to burst open “regional closets” (Jegathesan 2021) that have siloed studies based in the Atlantic-, the Pacific-, and the Indian-Ocean worlds. We seek work that identifies the tensions between modern scientific management as violent expressions of governmentality, and as modalities of care and cultivation (Hetherington 2020). We are keen to learn from those investigating the creation, centralization, and transnational transfer of plantation epistemes alongside or against competing claims to expertise (Paredes 2021). Collectively, we ask: how can we recuperate disappearing modes of living, and reconfigure the hegemony of a singular science and the structures of exclusion it sanctions?
