The Plantationocene: On Histories and Narratives of the Plantation

Special issue for Interdisciplinary Literary Studies

Editors:

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India

Somasree Sarkar, Ghoshpukur College, University of North Bengal, India

The concept of the Anthropocene, popularized by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), designates humans as the geomorphic force driving epochal change. Although the Anthropocene is not yet recognized as an official epoch, the suggestion that humans are causing major geophysical changes and pushing the Earth into a terra incognita (Steffen et al. 2007) has garnered significant attention across disciplines. Nevertheless, the concept of the Anthropocene, proposing a universal human influence on the Earth’s geology, has faced criticism for homogenizing human beings and overlooking their anthropological differences. For example, Andreas Malm resists Crutzen’s idea of the Anthropocene as a “geology of mankind” and insists that it is a geology of “capital accumulation” (2016, 417). Therefore, he designates the current epoch as ‘Capitalocene’ instead of ‘Anthropocene.’ Donna Haraway et al. opine that ‘Capitalocene’ accentuates that the epoch is “a historically situated complex of metabolisms and assemblages” (2016, 555). It indicates a history of fossil fuel consumption while implying the existence of a societal hierarchy and hence necessitating the consideration of sociological strata in conjunction with geological strata (Nixon 2017). Although capitalism is a relatively recent development in human history, its origins are embedded in the colonial past that has fostered discriminatory behaviors against colonized communities.

Coerced territorial possessions and the sanction of forced labor on their acquired lands characterize colonial atrocities. Dispossessing land and enforcing cheap labor for commercial purposes establishes a link between investment and property, driving ecological changes and landscape distribution. The extreme transformations of landscapes displace Indigenous peoples, flora, and fauna to introduce exotic crops, thereby alienating plants, animals, and organisms and enabling the plantation system to proliferate (Haraway et al. 2016). This most likely signals the onset of the Plantationocene, an alternative to the Anthropocene that recognizes significant changes in land and environment, as well as the resulting alienation of plants, animals, and humans. The plantation system aims to commercialize plants and cheapen resources and human labor, forming a significant part of the colonial legacy in several parts of the world. Beyond the Anthropocene’s homogenized notion of human agency causing planetary changes, the Plantationocene acknowledges the colonial regime of extraction of land, plants, biota, and humans (Barua 2023). The Plantationocene centers on the plantation system, which relocates plants from one biota to another, leading to the creation of an enclosed monocrop ecology. The expansion of a monocrop ecosystem radically simplifies ecology, diminishes biodiversity, and displaces native flora and fauna. Maintaining such an enclosed arboreal ecosystem requires consistent human labor, so the plantation system can be perceived as providing a contact zone for human slavery or indentured agricultural labor and simplified vegetal ecology (Haraway and Tsing 2019). Plantation involves disciplining both plants and human bodies within a confined space to achieve commercial objectives, necessitating an examination of “more-than-human ethnographies” (Barua 2023). In the Plantationocene, “more-than-human ethnographies” imply human-plant interfaces and suggest “polyvalent connections between the living and material world” (Barua 2023, 15).

While the Plantationocene is characterized by multidimensional dynamics among plants, humans, and materiality, this concept also encapsulates the violence inherent in controlling human bodies, particularly racialized ones. The plantation “spatializes the myth of Western-bourgeois (neo)liberal Man as the default human (selected) to the other (dyselected) rest” (Davis et al. 2019, 6). The plantation economy, a tool for colonial expansion, is interwoven with deep-seated racism and the dehumanization of racialized bodies through the enforcement of bonded slavery and indentured labor on plantations. Consequently, a plantation serves as a site for extraction, racial oppression, slavery, class polarization, and socio-ecological violence. Therefore, the Plantationocene calls for a deeper introspection from multiple perspectives regarding colonial practices, emphasizing experiences related to forced displacement, land grabbing, racism, and significant changes in landscapes resulting from colonial activities. Thus, the Plantationocene encompasses complex issues, including challenges related to drastic ecological changes, commercialization and disciplining of plants and human bodies, racial violence, slavery and indentured labor, human-nonhuman interfaces, and multispecies injustice. All these matters invite analysis through a revisitation of history and a renarration of tales regarding plantation atrocities and ecological disruptions. Recognizing the Plantationocene would mean acknowledging the integral connections between colonialism and planetary crises. In a sense, the Plantationocene reminds us of the acres of conquered land, the erasure of Indigenous identities, the denigration of Indigenous ecologies, and the modernization of the world under colonial pressure. It highlights that the current planetary crisis is part of a broader colonial history that spans several centuries.

In light of the preceding arguments, the proposed special issue aims to recount colonial history, documenting forced land acquisition for the development of plantation agriculture, racial violence in the form of slavery, and cheap agricultural labor on the plantations in the new world. The sugarcane and cotton plantations in the antebellum South and the Caribbean islands played a significant role in drawing slaves from Africa. Moreover, the proliferation of plantation systems in colonized countries such as India, particularly in the form of tea and coffee plantations, drove many indentured laborers from various tribal communities. In Southeast Asia, the European colonizers established large-scale plantations to assert their control over the lands. For instance, in the Malaysian peninsula and Indonesia, giant acres of land were brought under rubber plantation in the early twentieth century, which drew several indentured laborers from India and parts of South Asia. These plantations violently displaced Indigenous inhabitants from their native lands and confined them to smaller regions. The expansion of the plantation economy created wide class divisions and cheapened land resources. The colonial system of land grabbing and the enforcement of monocrop agriculture have been manifested in the neocolonial structures, which have continued to separate lands and Indigenous ecology to reap profits out of land resources. For example, the state has allocated acres of land to establish tea gardens in Assam, India, to pacify civil turmoil. Similarly, European corporations, aided by local businessmen, have developed extensive palm oil plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thus, this special issue aims to focus on literary representations and historical narratives concerning plantations in colonial and neocolonial settings. In doing so, it seeks to revive discussions on protracted colonial impacts responsible for terraforming massive landscapes and damaging Indigenous ecologies. The special issue invites proposals addressing the following issues (but not limited to):

• How does the Plantationocene, unlike the Anthropocene, recognize the anthropological differences?
• How does the Plantationocene engage with the colonial history that records the role of the plantation economy in expanding the empire?
• How have the plantation sites become a human-nonhuman interface?
• How have plantations simplified ecology, alienated Indigenous flora and fauna, sanctioned slavery and forced human labor, and caused multispecies injustice?
• How should the Plantationocene be analyzed without being colorblind or glossing over the issues of violent racialization and dehumanization of humans?
• How do the history and the narratives of the plantation/Plantationocene bring forth the ecological precarities entailed by colonialism?
• How do the neocolonial actions of acquiring lands for commercial plantations continue to alienate and victimize Indigenous communities?

Submission deadlines and instructions

Potential contributors are welcome to discuss other unmentioned areas related to infrastructure with the guest editors. An abstract of 500-word length together with the author’s biographical note (maximum 100 words) will be sent as a single MS Word file by email to the guest editors, Goutam Karmakar (goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in) and Somasree Sarkar (somasree.2008@gmail.com), no later than November 15, 2025.

The guest editors intend to inform authors whose abstracts have been accepted by December 31, 2025, at which point they will be invited to submit a full paper to the guest editors via email by June 30, 2026. Full articles must be no longer than 7,000 words in length, including an abstract of 200 words, 4–5 keywords, endnotes, and references. Manuscript preparation guidelines are available here: https://www.psupress.org/Journals/SubmissionGuidelines/InterdisciplinaryLiteraryStudies.pdf

For questions and informal enquiries, prospective authors should not hesitate to contact the guest editors by email.

About the Journal

Interdisciplinary Literary Studies seeks to explore the interconnections between literary study and other disciplines, ideologies, and cultural methods of critique. All national literatures, periods, and genres are welcomed topics. Access current issues through Scholarly Publishing Collective, Project MUSE, or back content on JSTOR.

References

Barua, Maan. 2023. “Plantationocene: A Vegetal Geography.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113 (1): 13-29.

Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41: 17-18.

Davis, Janae, Alex A. Moulton, Levi Van Sant, Brian Williams. 2019. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises.” Geography Compass 13 (5): 1-15.

Haraway, Donna, and Anna Tsing. 2019. “Reflections on the Plantationocene.” Edge Effects Magazine 1-22. Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 Haraway, Donna, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing & Nils Bubandt. 2016. “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene.” Ethnos 81 (3): 535-564.

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

Nixon, Rob. 2017. “Anthropocene 2.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, 43–46. New York: Fordham University Press.

Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36 (8): 614–21.