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Accepted Paper:
Settler Colonial Afterlives in Argentina's Soybean Frontier
Tamar Blickstein
(University of Venice - Ca' Foscari)
This paper explores how the current "soy boom" in Argentina is shaped by settler colonial attachments to the racial regimes of previous plantation monocrops like cotton, revealing the continuities of the plantationocene, and a tendency that I call "monocultures of the settler mind."
Paper long abstract:
The global shift to large-scale mechanized agribusiness models is often imagined as a new kind of frontier--one that departs from the labor-intensive plantations that once institutionalized racialized hierarchies of exploitation, and from the settler farming homesteads of indigenous dispossession. Nevertheless, the logics of previous plantations and homesteads continue to shape the way today's capital-intensive food systems are managed and imagined by local actors on the ground. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper considers how the current "soy boom" in Argentina is reinforced by settler colonial attachments to the racial regimes of previous plantation monocrops like cotton, revealing a tendency that I call (playing on Vandana Shiva's famous phrase) "monocultures of the settler mind." This paper contributes to ethnographic understandings of how the plantationocene unfolds in the postplantation era of agribusiness.