Contribution short abstract

This contribution examines how plantation afterlives shape touristified futures in Mauritius, showing how heritage, resorts, and smart-city developments narratively rework colonial landscapes - and how local actors contest these future imaginaries.

Contribution long abstract

The afterlives of the sugar-cane plantation continue to shape Mauritius’s socio-ecological landscape, creating uneven access to land, labour, and mobility. Promoted as a major pillar of sustainable development, tourism has become a key arena in which these spatial histories are reworked and future visions for the island negotiated. Drawing on discussions of Political Ecologies of Futurity (Moulton & Harris 2025) and situating the case within wider debates on the Plantationocene as an analytical concept (Wolford 2021; Chao et al. 2024), I explore how the interplay of heritage, place-making, and nature amid global socio-ecological change has become pivotal in struggles over touristic futures.

I examine three contemporary configurations that translate plantation logics into new regimes of touristic value creation: (1) the heritage-making of plantation houses, where curated atmospheres sanitise histories of forced labour; (2) coastal resorts that aestheticise colonial architecture to stage fantasies of authenticity and harmony with nature; and (3) smart-city projects on former sugar-cane land that recast extractive relations as sustainable, future-oriented urbanism. Across these settings, the plantation is not merely preserved or nostalgically revived but narratively futurized - mobilised as a storytelling device that legitimises tourism-led development while obscuring socio-ecological violence. Finally, the paper highlights contestations of these narratives, particularly from environmental initiatives, community actors, and local artists who craft counter-imaginaries that challenge dominant visions of touristic growth and articulate post-plantation futures.