Paper short abstract:

This paper studies capitalism's enchantments and fetishes, its concepts of meaning and value, and how some groups are excluded from these and rendered surplus. The colonial plantation economy sheds light on contemporary racialisations central to capitalism and how its enchantments exclude.

Paper long abstract:

In 1916 in Jalpaiguri district in the Duars region of colonial Bengal, tea estate managers reported a series of stop work protests and groups gathering at night to sing songs and chant verses calling on Kaiser Wilhelm to come and save them from the injustices of colonial and zamindari rule. The Oraons were a 'tribal group' brought to work the tea plantations of northeast India. A series of pseudo-millenarian movements had rent Oraon life since the early 20th century. Dismissed by colonial ethnographers as superstition engendered by German Lutheran missionaries, and disappearing in studies of capitalism and colonialism, these millenarian movements may be seen as attempts at re-enchantment. Capitalism in the colony and in the plantation both mobilised workers (in a literal sense, enabling their migration to where work was required) and immobilised them, containing them in restricted plantations and identifying them with reference to derogatory ethnographic characteristics. They were enchanted as productive labourers, and disenchanted as groups who did not deserve to take part in the fulness of capitalist enchantments. This paper studies the problem of capitalism's enchantments and fetishes, its concepts of meaning and value, and how some groups are excluded from these enchantments and rendered surplus. The colonial plantation economy sheds light on contemporary racialisations central to capitalism, and the exclusions of its enchantments.

Paper short abstract:

This paper builds upon a detailed study of São Tomé plantation cocoa and its labouring practices, that were both racialized and gendered, to discuss the concrete material dynamics of industrial modes of production, imperial and capitalist relations that sustained the modern world.

Paper long abstract:

In the late 19th century, scientific and technical transformations in chocolate factories, aimed at standardizing products and production processes alike, altered the way chocolate was valued, marketed and experienced. From an exquisite beverage drunk by a wealthy few, chocolate powders emerged as one of the most popular mass market foods in Europe. Following on Mintz steps and his urge for connecting production and consumption stories, this paper focuses on São Tomé plantation cocoa and Cadbury's chocolates to discuss the concrete material dynamics of industrial modes of production, imperial and capitalist relations that sustained the modern world.

Despite the use of concepts such as materiality or materialism in the history and anthropology of commodities, very often cash-crops and the labor necessary to produce them are presented as abstract or disembodied categories. This paper, on the contrary, takes seriously the materiality of cocoa and builds upon a detailed study of plantation labouring practices that were both racialized and gendered. It will examine the production of cocoa for the market and the production of segregated spaces and regulated race and gender relations as part of the same process. Experimental and brutal management governing people and environment were an integral part of the commodification process of cocoa. By showing factories dependence on plantation cocoa this paper will also highlight the racialized dimension of modern capitalism.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the reconfiguration of racial hierarchies in the context of emancipation in British Guiana, focusing on class struggles between Madeiran indentured labours and African-Guyanese.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the migration of men and women from the Island of Madeira to British Guiana at the aftermath of the emancipation of slaves in British colonies. Recruited as indentured labourers to work mainly in agricultural labour since 1835, Madeirans soon left plantations and became shopkeepers. In a context in which racial hierarchies were profoundly reconfigured and in which plantation system was restructured, Madeirans were never considered as white or as European. I argue that to understand the social place of Madeirans in British Guiana requires a more subtle analysis of the contrasts established, by the British colonial agents, between Madeirans and the African-Guyanese. In parallel, this paper tries to show how these contrasts resulted from changing conjunctions between class, race, and colour in plantation societies

Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes to trace the genealogies connecting contemporary agro-industrial production, and its migrant labour management, in Italy with the development of the plantation system and of subsequent patterns of racialisation in processes of primitive accumulation that began in the 19th century.

Paper long abstract:

Building on fifteen years of engaged, militant research and activism on the issue of migrant labour exploitation, the paper will seek to identify the afterlife of the plantation model as a racialising machine for labour extraction and disciplining in contemporary Europe. More specifically, I will put analyses of plantation systems and their afterlives in world history (e.g. Beckford, Best, Curtin, McKittrick, Mintz, Robinson, Smith, Trouillot, Wacquant, Wagley) to the test of current dynamics of migrant labour exploitation, with particular reference to the Italian agro-industrial sector.

Patterns of spatial segregation, of racialization/dehumanisation and of labour standardisation are crucial to the management of migrant labour and its reserve army, especially as far as the export-oriented farming sector is concerned. The analysis of these contemporary forms of containment and violent extraction, but also of resistance against them (for example in the wide appeal to Rastafarianism by West African farm workers) can highlight the (spectral) persistence of the trans-Atlantic trade and the plantation system, whose Mediterranean antecedents (Curtin) also left a mark in the culture of racialisation (Epstein). At the same time, more complex genealogies of racialization and exploitation can be highlighted, pointing to the ways in which the plantation developed in parallel with other systems founded on primitive accumulation and extraction: in the 19th century the invention and consolidation of a colour line internal to the Italian nation was crucial within a process that also relied on labour coercion, violent disciplining and extraction.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation engages recent advances in the global history of capitalism and their focus on plantation economies and labour regimes from a global historical anthropology perspective. The paper offers a genuinely anthropological history of capitalism since around 1815.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation engages recent advances in the global history of capitalism and their focus on plantation economies and labour regimes from a global historical anthropology perspective. If recent new global histories of capitalism have focused on US-American plantations and thus reveal a Western-centric angle, social anthropologists like Sidney Mintz, Erik Wolf and Rolph-Michel Trouillot have researched and theorised the complex, multi-layered responsiveness of local political economies in a changing capitalist world-system.

This understanding of responsiveness guides my reconstruction of the changing incorporation of peripheral regions into the capitalist world-system and that incorporation's articulation in regimes of superexploitation; first via plantations and extractive industries in colonised territories and, second, with the beginning of the Cold War, as postcolonial nation with outsourced, super-exploitative export-oriented industrialisation in special economic zones and related regimes.

Based on global archival and ethnographic research for the period since 1800, the presentation relates the succession of capitalist labour regime to variegated articulations of racism and class formation. The paper argues that such an anthropological history of capitalism necessarily develops their arguments based on research in the alleged peripheries pf the global system and sheds light on the lineages of the postcolonial, neoliberal state.

Paper short abstract:

Do the past institutions created by the workers in the margins of the plantation constitute a particular background for resistance to wage labour in contemporary neoliberal policy? I examine this aspect with regards to the dissidence of domestic workers in Mauritius and its impacts on racialization.

Paper long abstract:

Do the past institutions created by the workers of the plantation household, in the margins of the plantation, constitute a particular background for resistance to wage and flexible labour in contemporary neoliberal policies? This question emerged during my fieldwork with women employed as domestic workers by the foreign and Mauritian elite who have a residence in the south-western coast of Mauritius. I argue that a sense of belonging to a class, sustained by a continuous socio-economic organisation for subsistence, is reviving among women massively employed in domestic service in the coast, despite state-manage ethnic division. This idea results from an approach of domestic service from the point of view of domestic workers, which pays attention to their issue with the social reproduction of their own household, and to its consequences on their moral disposition to serve their employers. I aim to unveil the undercurrent process of dissidence characterizing women practices in front of their domestic service employers, on the basis of a common ethic of subsistence rooted in the historical formation of the creole class of workers of the plantation. I argue that the analysis of the process of dissidence is fundamental to the understanding of the ways in which the racial and ethnic categories that naturalise social groups are actually shifting in the labour market. This research finally inscribes the current domestic service jobs that have been created by the economic policy of property development in Mauritius, within the long history of the plantation society and its class struggles.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper considers how racialized cotton plantation regimes from the early twentieth century continue to structure ongoing settler modes of indigenous dispossession and disavowal in the Argentine Chaco (Qompi lands).

Paper long abstract:

Native people have not disappeared, yet the myth of the "vanished native" remains a key mechanism of settler colonial ideologies to this day. This paper considers how racialized cotton plantation regimes from the early twentieth century continue to structure ongoing settler modes of indigenous dispossession and disavowal in the current agribusiness frontiers of the Argentine Chaco (Qompi lands). Argentina was officially forged as a European immigrants' "white men's country" that had eliminated its indigenous population; yet the nation's tropical cash crop industries always relied heavily - and explicitly - on native and creole labor. Based on ethnographic research among settler and Qom populations, this paper seeks to unpack how settler disavowal of native land and labor persists in what I call the "postplantation present": a time when soy agribusiness and attendant mass deforestation have largely ravaged the smaller plantation economies that had previously institutionalized the area's race politics. I show how, despite having built their plantations on native land and labor, my settler informants still talk, act and feel like founders in an "empty land." Their doing so, I argue, both stems from and reproduces the racialized concepts of labor and land that the plantation system had engendered, albeit through newly intensified sentiments of loss, fear and colonial nostalgia in the face of increasingly scarce resources. This paper contributes to understandings of how colonial plantation legacies continue to "silence the past" (Trouillot) for some more than others in an era some have called the "plantationocene".

Paper short abstract:

Building on long-term ethnographic research in the Mexican federal state of Veracruz, the paper uncovers a persistent urban-rural dichotomy that shapes exploitation, identity formation and struggles of oil workers and related peasant communities.

Paper long abstract:

As a historical pillar of the Mexican economy, the oil sector features prominently in national narratives of economic growth and wealth. The sector was expropriated after the Mexican Revolution and henceforth led by the state-owned company PEMEX. With the Mexican oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s, PEMEX became a veritable symbol of modernity's promises. Allegedly, two generations of the Mexican working class enjoyed the fruits of this economic growth. Yet, this dominant narrative of successful development stands in stark contrast with the reality of enduring colonial dependencies in postcolonial Mexico. This paper argues that oil extraction in Mexico shares and reproduces the precarious, exploitative, and racialised labour regimes of other export-oriented sectors such as plantations and special economic zones (SEZ).

The focus is on the oil rich regions of the Mexican Gulf Coast Area, in the federal state of Veracruz. Here, the processing and distribution of crude oil takes place in the town of Poza Rica, where the its permanent PEMEX staff is exclusively recruited. Meanwhile, the extraction activities take place in the nearby former indigenous community Emiliano Zapata, which has for decades been stuck with only the temporary day-labourer jobs at the precarious margins of the industry. Building on long-term ethnographic research, the paper uncovers a persistent urban-rural dichotomy that shapes exploitation, identity formation and struggles of oil workers and related peasant communities and how these have recently been exacerbated through the neoliberal restructuring of the Mexican oil sectors imposed by the Mexican Energy Reform 2013/14.

Paper short abstract:

I focus on the use of suzhi amongst migrant workers in Shenzhen and how it relates to ethnic exclusion and social hierarchies in the process of class formation. Suzhi portends a racist practice mediating collective solidarities and exclusions.

Paper long abstract:

The multiple dimensions of the process of class formation in China have been a matter of increasing debate. For more than a decade, China specialists have been discussing the meanings and implications of the concept of suzhi, usually translated as "quality", and its critical role in the post-Maoist era of the People's Republic of China. Some scholars have situated suzhi as constitutive of the country's "neoliberal governmentality", expressed in coding the value of human subjectivities and bodies. Others have called for a historicist approach that avoids reifying neoliberalism in a context where socialist and other Modernities are still valid paradigms. In this presentation, I propose a different perspective on suzhi as interconnected with the process of class formation. I argue that suzhi discourse encompasses ideas of civilisation and ways of behaving and being that are racist in nature. These discourses and practices are built around the historical reality of the Han and have gained special relevance in the post-Maoist hegemonic project. Hence, suzhi operates as a mediator of working-class formation on the lines of ethnic and regional differentiations where Han and "hanified" ethnic groups are favoured and those groups seen as pious—e.g. Uyghur and Tibetan—are marginalised. I present two ethnographic cases, collected during my year-long fieldwork in Shenzhen between September 2018 and July 2019, to characterise and analyse the use of the concept of suzhi by Han migrant workers and how it conveys ideas and practices of ethnic exclusion embedded in the country's neoliberal hegemonic project.

Paper short abstract:

Building on ethnographic work with Thai migrant workers and the history of Zionism, this paper describes the process of "ecological racialization" in Israel today as an interplay between the construction of a racial imaginary and the transformation of the environment through agricultural labor.

Paper long abstract:

Historically, agriculture has played an essential strategic and ideological role in the Zionist settler-colonial project. Indigenous Palestinians were portrayed as having caused the deterioration of the biblical "land of milk and honey" into a desert (Zerubavel 2019), and settlers were tasked with redeeming it, establishing control over territory (Kimmerling 1983) and transforming themselves into "new Jews" in the process (Neumann 2011). In today's Israel, farming is economically and strategically marginal. However, in the rural regions where it remains important, the sector relies heavily on the labor of migrants from Thailand, who are often thought of as "natural workers" with "green thumbs." Building on my own ethnographic work with these migrants and their employers as well as on the historiography of Zionism, my paper will describe the interplay between the construction of a local imaginary of race and the practice of transforming the natural environment through agricultural labor - a conjoined process we might call "ecological racialization." Israeli farming communities were established on a small scale to provide settlers with a livelihood, and their structure still bears a closer affinity to the settler landscapes of northern North America (Cronon 1991) than to the paradigmatic plantations of the Caribbean (Mintz 1985), though their recent integration into global markets brings them closer to the latter. Connecting local and global scales, I aim to show that the "intimacies of four continents" (Lowe 2015) are at play in the way Palestinians, Jews and Thais are racialized through their roles in transforming the landscape.