Plantation Worlds.
Barua, M.
Duke University Press, 2024.
Paper
doi
link
bibtex
abstract
@book{barua_plantation_2024,
title = {Plantation {Worlds}},
isbn = {978-1-4780-2086-8},
url = {https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18011447},
doi = {10.2307/jj.18011447},
abstract = {In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.},
urldate = {2025-11-19},
publisher = {Duke University Press},
author = {Barua, Maan},
year = {2024},
}
In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.
Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism.
Verges, F.
Goldsmiths, University London, Cambridge, UNITED STATES, 2024.
Paper
link
bibtex
abstract
@book{verges_making_2024,
address = {Cambridge, UNITED STATES},
title = {Making the {World} {Clean}: {Wasted} {Lives}, {Wasted} {Environment}, and {Racial} {Capitalism}},
isbn = {978-1-913380-38-0},
shorttitle = {Making the {World} {Clean}},
url = {http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/concordia-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30867695},
abstract = {An antiracist theory of cleaning. In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services--in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of "decolonial cleaning." To Vergès, the structural denial of the elemental needs of women of color (sanitary pads, access to water, and privacy for basic washing), and why these needs are considered insignificant and trivial, shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining the banal, the trivial, and the elemental, the author addresses cleaning as a necessity rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle, a condition of basic care of the body and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism, white environmentalism, and even, too often, by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building "life-affirming institutions," as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates, struggles against the whitening of cleaning create sites of freedom. "Decolonial cleaning" imagines cleaning as taking care of land, humans, plants, animals, and rivers, not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world.},
urldate = {2025-11-05},
publisher = {Goldsmiths, University London},
author = {Verges, Francoise},
year = {2024},
}
An antiracist theory of cleaning. In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services–in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of "decolonial cleaning." To Vergès, the structural denial of the elemental needs of women of color (sanitary pads, access to water, and privacy for basic washing), and why these needs are considered insignificant and trivial, shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining the banal, the trivial, and the elemental, the author addresses cleaning as a necessity rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle, a condition of basic care of the body and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism, white environmentalism, and even, too often, by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building "life-affirming institutions," as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates, struggles against the whitening of cleaning create sites of freedom. "Decolonial cleaning" imagines cleaning as taking care of land, humans, plants, animals, and rivers, not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world.