Short abstract:

This panel gathers contributions that consider colonial plantations and their legacies as a central feature of that geopolitical economy and, hence, as core-sites for critical ethnographies of labour and capitalism to uncover the entangled formation of racist hierarchies and class struggles.

Long abstract:

As anthropologists search for new horizons in and beyond Europe while the world is shattered by omnipresent economic inequality and an unequivocal resurgence of the far-right, it is important to review the conditions that gave birth to the contemporary geopolitical economy.

This panel calls for contributions that consider colonial plantations and their legacies as a central feature of that geopolitical economy. We call for critical engagements with the works of Sidney Mintz, Rolph-Michel Trouillot, Ann Stoler and other anthropologists who have for a long time identified plantations and other export industries as formative locations for a predatory-capitalist modernity and postmodernity that feeds on the production, distribution, and consumption of cheap commodities by way of changing, super-exploitative regimes of labour and their international division. Past and present plantations (and other export-oriented industries) are core-sites for critical ethnographies of labour and capitalism to uncover the entangled formation of racist hierarchies and class struggles.

We call for papers that view race-making and class struggles as intertwined processes. What are the linkages between pseudo-scientific theories that undergird racism and ethnicisation and capitalism's changing modes of exploitation? Which modes of exploitation require pseudo-scientific theories as antidotes to movements for workers rights and justice? How do plantation systems and other export-oriented industries adapt in a changing geopolitical economy? How are new modes of exploitation forged in those systems? How do we make good use of anthropology to support struggles confronting right-wing notions of race, ethnicity, and fake markers of non-economic identity, past and present?