Deadline: December 10 11;59 pm
Contact: Dr. Jill Didur l, Full Professor, Concordia University, Montreal
Email: jill.didur@concordia.ca
Phone: 514
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Co-organised by Dr. Jill Didur (Concordia University, Montreal) and Priscilla Jolly (Concordia University, Montreal)
This panel examines how the ongoing legacy of plantation epistemologies and violence are made visible, critiqued, resisted, and imagined ‘otherwise’ through different modes of storytelling (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, visual culture, digital culture, popular media, and policy documents). Taking up Haraway’s call to ‘story otherwise’ for ‘Earthly survival’ (2016), we invite papers that explore different modes of telling plantation stories. Scholars of postcolonial and decolonial studies, Black geographies, and plantation histories (Wynter, Davis et al, Sharma, Chao, Yusoff, Thomas, Jegathesan, Mintz, Besky) have offered key critiques of how Anthropocene discourse risks centering an undifferentiated humanity and a hasty declaration of a ‘post-racial future of generalized climate catastrophe and the dissolution of binary categories delimiting “humanity” and “nature”’ (Baucom 2012). Closely tied to the movement of plants, animals, and people from ‘around the world for capital accumulation and profit’ (Haraway 2015) the birth of the plantation has been singled out as a possible point of departure and an alternative for exploring the history of contemporary inequalities related to the impact of anthropogenic climate change.
The colonial plantation’s focus on long-distance, capital-intensive monocropping, extraction, terraforming, and its reliance on the practices of slavery and indenture has prompted some critics to suggest the alternative neologism of the ‘Plantationocene’ as a more apt approach to understanding the transformation of Earth systems signalled by human actions. Equally important are stories of disruptions in the capitalist/plantionocene networks such as the subsistence plots on the edges of plantations, Wynter’s “plot-plantation dichotomy” (1971), McKittrick’s ‘plantation futures’ (2013), and the related production of new genres and forms of writing. However, scholars of Black embodiment and race are uneasy with how recent ‘multispecies framing minimizes the role of racial politics and leads to a flattened notion of “making kin” that is inadequate for the creation of more just ecologies in the plantation present’. (Davis et al. 2019) We seek work that explores how the relationship between the plantation, the history of empire, and anthropogenic climate change has produced different modes of storytelling that make visible and resist the normalization of the enduring legacy of planation violence and epistemologies in the present. Papers with attention to the role of genre, language, form, citational practice, speculation, and (inter)disciplinary approaches are particularly welcome.
The deadline for abstracts is 10 December 2022, 11.59 pm. Please send abstracts of max. 250 words and a short bio (100 words) to jill.didur@concordia.ca
Posted on October 18, 2022
