Plantation Worlds

by Maan Barua

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027744
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	07/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	23 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Maan Barua is University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge and author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Postcolonial Fauna  1
1. Plantationocene  21
2. The Slow Violence of Infrastructure  64
3. Material Politics  98
4. Accumulation by Plantation  121
5. The Diagram of Connectivity  147
6. Decolonial Cartographies  185
Conclusion. A Reverse Déjà Vu  205
Glossary  217
Notes  221
Bibliography  257
Index  289

Editorial Reviews

Rigorously researched and carefully argued, Maan Barua’s book is an important contribution to several overlapping fields: environmental history, political ecology, and conservation policy. It rests on a formidable knowledge of the uplands of eastern India, of its plants, animals, and rivers, of its varied human communities and their complicated and contested histories. The book effectively bridges worlds usually seen as separate and even opposed: the colonial and the postcolonial, biological science and humanistic scholarship, people and animals.”—Ramachandra Guha, author of, How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States

“Plantation Worlds is a vital recalibration of some of the predominant ideas about the interrelationships among the environment, nature, human, and nonhuman life. In an often remarkable intersection of ethnography, botany, zoology, political theory, and history, Maan Barua makes a much-needed contribution to a vast range of concerns, from decoloniality and theory from the Global South to environmental transformation, human-nonhuman relations, and ontology.”—AbdouMaliq Simone, author of, The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture

"The book’s call for a conversation across epistemologies and for the reciprocity and generosity of Adivasi practices of worldmaking . . . will hopefully resound across many quarters."—Ujjal Kumar Sarma, Reviews in Anthropology

"This text will be of interest to scholars in animal geography, environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and conservation and development in South Asia. Barua’s broader project articulates a sense of place beyond linear narratives of damage to refuse rather than reify unequal power relations."—Dhruv Gangadharan, Social & Cultural Geography

"Plantation Worlds brings readers into the overlapping worlds of its many protagonists, in all of their complexity, precarity, and ambivalent interests. . . . It shines a light on many ways that multispecies communities keep each other alive and coexistent, whether in conflict or cooperation, in the face of encompassing and constantly transforming waves of violence."—Audra Mitchell, AAG Review of Books

"Plantation Worlds is a path-breaking contribution that develops concepts around life-making practices in a Plantationocene in transversal ways and brings fields such as animal geography, ethology, political ecology, environmental anthropology and conservation practices into fruitful dialogues."—Bikash K. Bhattacharya, South Asian Review

From the Publisher

Plantation Worlds is a vital recalibration of some of the predominant ideas about the interrelationships among the environment, nature, human, and nonhuman life. In an often remarkable intersection of ethnography, botany, zoology, political theory, and history, Maan Barua makes a much-needed contribution to a vast range of concerns, from decoloniality and theory from the Global South to environmental transformation, human-nonhuman relations, and ontology.

The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture - AbdouMaliq Simone

"This text will be of interest to scholars in animal geography, environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and conservation and development in South Asia. Barua’s broader project articulates a sense of place beyond linear narratives of damage to refuse rather than reify unequal power relations."

Social & Cultural Geography - Dhruv Gangadharan

"The book’s call for a conversation across epistemologies and for the reciprocity and generosity of Adivasi practices of worldmaking . . . will hopefully resound across many quarters."

Reviews in Anthropology - Ujjal Kumar Sarma

"Plantation Worlds brings readers into the overlapping worlds of its many protagonists, in all of their complexity, precarity, and ambivalent interests. . . . It shines a light on many ways that multispecies communities keep each other alive and coexistent, whether in conflict or cooperation, in the face of encompassing and constantly transforming waves of violence."

AAG Review of Books - Audra Mitchell

Rigorously researched and carefully argued, Maan Barua’s book is an important contribution to several overlapping fields: environmental history, political ecology, and conservation policy. It rests on a formidable knowledge of the uplands of eastern India, of its plants, animals, and rivers, of its varied human communities and their complicated and contested histories. The book effectively bridges worlds usually seen as separate and even opposed: the colonial and the postcolonial, biological science and humanistic scholarship, people and animals.

How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States - Ramachandra Guha