Center for the Humanities

Interrogating the Plantationocene

Examining the past and present of plantations, their materialities, the economic, ecological, and political transformations they wrought, and their significance to the making of human bodies, capitalism, and land over the course of four centuries.

This seminar, which ran from January 2019 through May 2020, drew together anthropologists, artists, economists, environmental scientists, geographers, historians, lawyers, literary scholars, and sociologists, among others, to explore and deepen the concept of the Plantationocene. We also considered other ways of naming our epoch (cene) that have recently been proposed, including Capitalocene (conceiving the Anthropocene as a result of ecological regimes inherent to capitalism, with its attendant demands for cheap labor, energy, food, and resources) and Chthulucene (a term that suggests the multispecies becomings that make up the storied histories of human and nonhuman lives). In doing so, we aimed to come to terms with the plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss. At the same time, we aimed to make visible past and present refugia of resistance, where different ways of being, sustained by different economies and forms of knowledge, have flourished.

Contact:
Organizers
  • Monique Allewaert, Associate Professor of English
  • Pablo Gómez, Associate Professor of History and the History of Medicine
  • Gregg Mitman, Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies
  • Sophie Sapp Moore, Postdoctoral Fellow, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
Supplementary Materials

To download the graduate course syllabus, please go here. Selected recorded sessions are available here. Please join our listserv or follow us on social media to receive updates about ways to engage with the seminar from afar.

Support

With generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar program, and support from the Center for Humanities, the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A Multimodal Repository of Plantation Lifeworlds and Afterlives

This multimodal repository brings together scholarly approaches and artistic engagements with the operations and afterlives of past and present monocrop plantations. The platform features three main sections, namely making, unmaking and regeneration, each of which unsettles the conceptual, geographical, temporal, and social coherence of plantation spaces. The repository articulates a multimodal invitation to explore geographically and historically specific efforts at operating within, against and around the logics of racialized extraction. Many of the sources featured foreground reparative renderings of plantation spaces as sites teeming with possibility, creativity and poetics shaped by a history of violence that mark a regenerative sense of futurity.

Making: Making points out that plantations, rather than ideal forms, are different racialized configurations of land, labour and capital across time and space informed by logics of empire and extractive capitalism. This section captures the ways in which local communities, knowledges, geographies and economies were disrupted, adapted and transformed in line with racial capitalist imperatives of production and growth.

Unmaking: Unmaking chronicles liberatory practices and aspirations emerging alongside and against plantation-making efforts. In addition to active resistance and confrontation, liberation was often rooted in the persistence and emergence of human and more-than-human relationships that defied the extractive and racial orders of plantations. Such radically different interspecies modes of being limited the totalizing reach of the plantation racial economy, while also operating as conceptual lenses that decentered the normativity of racial extractive capitalism.

Regeneration: Regeneration chronicles concrete possibilities of futurity grounded in dignity, liberation and awareness that disrupt disciplined ways of knowing embedded in plantation spaces. A regenerative sense of futurity depends on a reparative reading of the past and a radical reckoning with the living legacies of plantation-based regimes of knowledge, dispossession, extraction, and racial violence.

Special Collections Exhibit: Plants, Plantations, Labor, Trade

Past Events

ENVIRONMENTAL AND AGRICULTURAL LEGACIES OF HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES/UNIVERSITIES (HBCUS)

Wednesday, September 29, 2021  Pyle Center, Alumni Lounge 702 Langdon St

4:30 PM – 6:00 PM

For over a century, HBCUs have committed to meeting the educational needs of Black students and the communities from whence they came. Agricultural extension has sought to provide resources for Black farmers, many of whom have been overlooked by the very agencies established to support them. During this panel discussion, Jarvis McInnis, Danielle Hairston-Green, and Monica White will discuss the educational, political, social, cultural, and environmental legacies of HBCUs, including the work of agricultural extension in support of Black community health and wellness.

Danielle Hairston Green is the Institute Director for Human Development and Relationships (HDRI) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.

Jarvis McInnis is the Cordelia and William Laverack Family Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.

Monica White is the Gaylord A. Nelson Distinguished Chair in Integrated Environmental Studies and Associate Professor of Environmental Justice in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This event is co-sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, along with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, Department of English, and Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE).

THE ANTHROPOCENE

Wednesday Feb. 20, 2019, 7:30 PM
“Residual Governance, or How African Anthropocenes Foretell Planetary Futures”
Humanities without Boundaries Lecture
GABRIELLE HECHT
Frank Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security, Stanford University 
H.F. DeLuca Forum, Discovery Building, 330 N. Orchard St.

Thursday Feb. 21, 2019, 7:30 PM
A Roundtable on the Anthropocene, with Gabrielle Hecht, Dan Richter, and Paul Robbins
H.F. DeLuca Forum, Discovery Building, 330 N. Orchard St.

Friday Feb. 22, 2019, 9 AM – 11:30 AM
Anthropocene Seminar with Gabrielle Hecht, Dan Richter, and Paul Robbins
7191 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St.

THE CAPITALOCENE

Wednesday March 27, 2019, 7:30 PM
“Chemical Violence and Decolonial Futures”
Humanities without Boundaries Lecture
MICHELLE MURPHY
Professor of History, University of Toronto
H.F. DeLuca Forum, Discovery Building, 330 N. Orchard St.

Thursday March 28, 2019, 7:30 PM
A Roundtable on the Capitalocene, with Shona Jackson, Jason Moore, and Michelle Murphy
H.F. DeLuca Forum, Discovery Building, 330 N. Orchard St.

Friday, March 29, 2019, 9 AM – 11:30 AM
Capitalocene Seminar with Shona Jackson, Jason Moore, and Michelle Murphy
7191 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St.

THE PLANTATIONOCENE

Thursday April 18, 2019, 7:30 PM
“An Evening of Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing”
DONNA HARAWAY
Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
ANNA TSING
Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Varsity Hall, Union South, 1308 West Dayton St.

Friday April 19, 2019, 9 AM – 11:30 AM
Plantationocene Seminar with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing
7191 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St.

LAND

Thursday September 12, 2019, 7 PM
A Roundtable on Land, with Tania Murray Li, Rafael Marquese, and Monica White.
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium, 816 State St.

Friday September 13, 2019, 9 AM – 11:30 AM
Land Workshop with Tania Murray Li, Rafael Marquese, and Monica White.  
7191 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St.

LABORING BODIES

October 5 to January 5, 2019
Fabrice Monteiro: The Prophecy
Chazen Museum of Art, 750 University Ave, Madison, WI 53706

Wednesday October 9, 2019, 4 PM
“Making Abolition Geography: Social Justice Organizing in Local, State, and International Perspective”
Humanities without Boundaries Lecture
RUTH WILSON GILMORE
Professor of Geography, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York
H.F. DeLuca Forum, Discovery Building, 330 N. Orchard St.

Thursday October 10, 2019, 7 PM
A Roundtable on Laboring Bodies, with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Sarah Besky, and Sasha Turner.
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium, 816 State St.

Friday October 11, 2019, 9 AM – 11:30 AM
Laboring Bodies Workshop with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Sarah Besky, and Sasha Turner.
7191 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St.

VALUE/ECONOMY

Thursday November 14, 2019, 7 PM
A Roundtable on Value/Economy, with Judith Carney, Walter Johnson, and Jennifer Morgan.
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium, 816 State St.

Friday November 15, 2019, 9 AM – 11:30 AM
Value/Economy Workshop with Judith Carney, Walter Johnson, and Jennifer Morgan. 
7191 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St.

SENSORIA

Thursday February 13, 2020, 7 PM
An evening with Marlon James, with a book signing to follow.
Central Library, 201 West Mifflin St. 

Friday February 14, 2020, 10 AM – 11:30 AM
Sensoria Workshop with Marlon James.
6191 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St.

Thursday February 20, 2020, 7 PM
Screening of Daughters of the Dust followed by a conversation led by Paulla Ebron.
The Marquee Cinema, 1308 W. Dayton St.

Friday February 21, 2020, 10 AM – 11:30 AM
Sensoria Workshop with Paulla Ebron.
6191 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St.

FUTURES

Friday October 30, 2020, 12 PM
The Future of Food Justice
A webinar featuring food and environmental justice activists Malik Yakini, Ashlesha Khadse, Kase Wheatley, and Christian Keeve, with commentary by Monica White, Nan Enstad, and Sophie Sapp Moore.
Recording available here.

ABOUT THE JOHN E. SAWYER SEMINAR PROGRAM

The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars were established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The seminars, named in honor of the Foundation’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, have brought together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities and social sciences, for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. Foundation support aims to engage productive scholars in comparative inquiry that would (in ordinary university circumstances) be difficult to pursue, while at the same time avoiding the institutionalization of such work in new centers, departments, or programs. Sawyer Seminars are, in effect, temporary research centers.