Starseed

Artists, Healers, Writers

[tipsy3695kiss]

theyre called “meadowsweets” hahsisngqhdjxnsudufj 😭

[notchainedtotrauma]

[fatehbaz]

The burial ground tells us that the legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree both shape and are part of the environment we presently inhabit. […] [T]he plantations of transatlantic slavery underpinned a global economy; […] this plantation history […] lingered long after emancipation and independence movements […].

[T]he idea of the plantation is migratory. Thus, in agriculture, banking, and mining, in trade and tourism, and across other colonial and postcolonial spaces - the prison, the city, the resort - a plantation logic characteristic of (but not identical to) slavery emerges in the present both ideologically and materially. 

With this, differential modes of survival emerge - […] the blues, marronage, revolution, and more - revealing that the plantation, in both slave and postslave contexts, must be understood alongside complex negotiations of time, space, and terror. […]

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Past colonial encounters created material and imaginative geographies that reified global segregations through “damning” the spaces long occupied by Man’s human others. Here, damning can be understood in two interlocking ways: as a fencing in and as a condemnation of racial-sexual difference. The uninhabitable - in particular, the landmasses occupied by those who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were unimaginable, both spatially and corporeally - is the geographic (non)location through which the plantation emerged. From Caliban’s “uninhabited” island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to the regions within Africa identified as too hot to be livable, the landmasses deemed uninhabitable presented a geographic predicament upon “discovery.” […] [A] “new symbolic construct of race,” which coincided with post-1492 colonial arrangements, organized much of the world according to a racial logic. […]

The colonial enactment of geographic knowledge mapped “a normal way of life” through measuring different degrees of humanness and attaching different versions of the human to different places. […] [I]n the sites of toxicity, environmental decay, pollution […] inhabited by impoverished communities […] the [current] geographies of the racial other are emptied out of life precisely because the historical constitution of these geographies has cast them as lands of no one. So in our present moment, some live in the unlivable, and to live in the unlivable condemns the geographies of marginalized to death over and over again. Life, then, is extracted from particular regions […]. We can collectively think of several places that are considered lifeless […]: war-torn countries, reservations, ghettos, what is referred to as “the global South.” […] This suggests that the spaces of otherness have hardened through time […].

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What if its practices of racial segregation, economic exploitation, and sexual violence mapped not a normal way of life but a different way of life?

What if we acknowledged that the plantation is, as Toni Morrison writes, a space that everybody runs from but nobody stops talking about, and thus that it is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our present spatial organization […]? […] In her 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Wynter explains that not only does the rise of the plantation correspond with the rise of the novel - which points to two new socioeconomic systems of world making - but the plantation itself was the contextual setting through which many fictional books revolved. She goes on to say that the market economy of the plantation, and the stories that explain the value of the economy of the plantation, unraveled into a justified and “official history of the superstructure” that hid - but did not erase - what she calls “secretive histories.” Secretive histories can be found in […] the plots of land that were given to some slaves so that they could grow food to nourish themselves and thus maximize profits [plantation managers wanted to save money, rather than paying to feed slaves, by encouraging slaves to grow their own subsistence food] - plots of land that also became the focus of resistance to the overriding system of the plantation economy [those food plots were sites where slaves could commune, practice growing food, and organize rebellion and escape]. In both cases, the plot illustrates a social order that is developed within the context of a dehumanizing system as it spatializes what would be considered impossible under slavery: the actual growth of narratives, food, and cultural practices that […] challenge systemic violence. […]

—

If we believe that the city is the commercial expression of the plantation and its marginalized masses, and that the plantation is a persistent but ugly blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles, Wynter’s essay asks that we seek out secretive histories that are not invested in rehearsing lifelessness […]. The plantation that anticipates the city, then, does not necessarily posit that things have gotten better as racial violence haunts, but rather that the struggles we face, intellectually, are a continuation of plantation narratives that dichotomize geographies into us/them and hide secretive histories that undo the teleological […] underpinnings of spatiality.

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All text above by: Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 3, November 2013 (No. 42), pages 1-15. At DOI: 10.1215/07990537-2378892 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

“Closure” is central to the definition and delimination of utopian spaces, and colonial figures like Grainger certainly wanted to understand New World plantation spaces as utopias. But the image of the utopian plantation was, in reality, a fleeting colonial fantasy, compromised by various “fugitive” species and diseases emanating from within and without the plantation. Rampant anxiety over the permeability of plantation borders […] gave rise to an emphasis on “plantation hygiene” in the eighteenth century, which continued to shape the management and maintenance of racialized plantation spaces in the Americas even into the twentieth century (see, for example, the case of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments). […]

An understanding of the plantation’s status as a particularly privileged site for the production of empirical knowledge in the eighteenth century increasingly interrupted the Edenic, fantastical imperatives of poetry written in and about the British West Indies […]. In one […] line of James Grainger’s 1764 four-book poem, The Sugar-Cane, the poet warns that in the years to come, the island of St. Christopher - known today as St. Kitts - may be transformed into a barren wasteland […]. Although the poem begins […] [by] celebrating the wonders of agriculture on the islands […] it soon devolves into a catalog of environmental disasters, storms, and diseases that relentlessly threaten the integrity and purity of the colonial “green plantation”. […] As Grainger’s ominous lines about the bewailing barren island suggest, the mid-eighteenth century marked a critical turning point in colonial fantasies - literary, cultural, environmental, and economic - of New World sustainability. […] Looming threats to the Atlantic slave trade terminated beliefs that the brutal plantation economy of the West Indies and the southern colonies would be endlessly replenished by slave labor from abroad. […]

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Amid these twinned environmental and economic anxieties, the New World plantation was transformed […] to a tainted geography that enclosed usable bodies and usable lands to be put in the service of increasingly experimental purposes at the hands of the planter class. The conjoining of racialized subjects and the environment in colonial discourse further transformed the plantation into a privileged site for experimental investigations into natural history and medicine, for scientific and medical experimentation on all kinds of “specimen” on the plantation, including botanical species, agriculture crops, livestock, and enslaved persons. Through its cataloguing of Caribbean diseases and natural remedies, and its oblique references to medical experiments on the enslaved (Grainger writes of “Medicines of such amazing efficacy, as I have had occasion to make trials of in these islands”), Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane offers a powerful articulation of […] the “experimental plantation,” an enclosed site from which empirical knowledge is produced, extracted, and transplanted from tropicalized lands and bodies. […]

Throughout the poem, British models of temperature agriculture on the colonial plantation are continually undone by a tropical environment […]. Indeed, […] the poem […] belies an anxiety about the disordering, tropicalizing forces of various “fugitive” species in the Caribbean, including tropical diseases, wild animals, and maroon communities […]. In The Sugar-Cane, anxieties about slave rebellion and marronage contaminate Grainger’s depiction […]. Ultimately, […] the image of the plantation as an ecologically enclosed, protected space of British cultivation and experimentation is revealed to be a fragile colonial fantasy […].

—

The footnote apparatus of The Sugar-Cane further registers an important transition […] to the rise of more systematic regimes of scientific and agricultural experimentation in plantation spaces in the eighteenth century.

In her comprehensive history of agricultural innovation in the Deep South during the years between 1730 and 1815, the “region’s golden era,” […] Chaplin argues that planters were highly influenced by contemporary economic and historical thought. […] Chaplin’s account figures the eighteenth-century plantation zone of the Deep South as a space for empirical secularism; it focuses primarily on the ways that planters interpreted and were influenced by thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment […]. Chaplin goes on the argue that many Lower South whites turned to modern scientific pursuits on the plantation to fight against an enervating tropical climate thought to weaken white bodies and minds. This understanding of the eighteenth-century Deep South plantation as a space of empirical modernity that constantly worked to ward off a dangerous tropical environment fits nicely with Grainger’s plantation empiricisms in the British West Indies. […] Grainger himself was a Scot […].

At the time, the work done to produce the plantation zone as a secular space of empirical modernity depended on the obscuring of Africanist and Indigenous knowledge systems […]. Although the footnotes in The Sugar-Cane practically overflow with knowledge about […] plant and animal species […], the poem is nearly silent about Native and African medicinal practices […]. As Kelly Wisecup notes, Grainger’s inclusion of African and [Indigenous] names for West Indian plants suggests that he learned about native flora, fauna, and “indigenous remedies” from observations of and encounters with African and Indigenous inhabitants of the island. The Sugar-Cane benefits from, but ultimately elides, the expertise, treatments, and experiments of the enslaved […].

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All text above by: Britt Rusert. “Plantation Ecologies: The Experimental Plantation in and against James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane”. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 13, Number 2, Spring 2015, pages 341-373. At: doi dot org slash 10.1353/eam.2015.0015 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[fatehbaz]

[T]he American militarization of science would usher in a new era of ecological thought drawn from the notion of isolated landscapes permeated with nuclear radiation. […] Western colonizers had long configured tropical islands into the contained spaces of a laboratory, which is to say a suppression of island history and Indigenous presence. This generation of AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] ecologists embraced nuclear testing as creating a novel opportunity to study a complete ecosystem through the trace of radiation. […] [T]he Pacific Islands have long been fashioned as laboratories for western colonial interests, from the botanical collecting of James Cook’s voyages to […] structural anthropology. […]

The declassification of a 1957 memo from Brookhaven National Laboratory’s medical researcher Dr [R.C.], the doctor in charge of testing and caring for the hundreds of Marshallese exposed to radiation, has confirmed suspicious that it was the islanders as much as the environment that were subject to an AEC experiment. To his colleagues he wrote, ‘The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.’ Arguments like this appear elsewhere in AEC records. For instance, the director of the AEC Health and Safely Laboratory described neighboring Utirik Atoll in 1956 as ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world’ but that it will be ‘very interesting’ to get data from the environment and islanders when they are returned there. Referring to genetic tests about the impact of radiation on fruit flies and mice, he observed of the Marshall Islanders:

‘While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that these people are more like us than mice.’ […]

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In claiming Micronesia and expanding the American exclusive economic zone, Truman tripled the territorial size of the United States. Although the land-base of Micronesia is 846 square miles, the oceanic territory, vital to US naval and airforce transit, represents three million square miles. […] With the advent of the far more powerful hydrogen weapons, the AEC in 1954 cordoned off an enormous area of the Pacific, banning the passage of ships or planes for 400,000 square miles. […] Estimated at one thousand times the force of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki […] [in] addition to spreading lethal levels of radiation over 5000 miles of the Pacific, Bravo’s fallout was detected in the rain over Japan, in lubricating oil of Indian aircraft, in winds over Australia, and in the sky over the United States and Europe. It caused the radiogenic illness of the crew of a Japanese freighter 1200 miles away. […]

When Rongelapese women began giving birth to babies without skulls and without skeletons (‘jellyfish babies’ and ‘grape babies’), infants with severe brain damage and missing limbs, scientists informed them that these miscarriages and defects were ‘to be expected in a small island population.’

Although scientists from the AEC Division of Biology and Medicine had ample evidence of the extensive radiological contamination of Rongelap, they allowed the islanders to return in order to deflect criticism of the AEC’s atmospheric testing program, and thus exposed the islanders to another 22 nuclear tests on Enewetak […]. The US military films of Micronesia [from 1951] […] juxtapose the modernity of America […] to ‘distant and primitive’ yet vitally important ‘test islands … a giant lab in the middle of an ocean.’ To quote this Hollywood-produced film: […] [A]n outdoor laboratory: Entewak Atoll in the Pacific. […] [T]hree years have passed, three years to bring new and improved atomic weapons to this secluded equatorial land […]. [Image of an American man with suitcase entering his car and waving goodbye to son and dog]. Now the proving grounds come alive like a university campus […] individual test islands, seemingly like so many science buildings on college grounds. […] Even the foilage has been bulldozed 'for elbow room’ as one AEC film declares […].

[T]he narrator declares, 'the islanders are a nomadic group, and are well pleased that the Yanks are going to add a little variety to their lives.’

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All text above by: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey. “The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific". Cultural Geographies, Volume 20, Number 2, Special Issue: Islanding cultural geographies (April 2013), pages 167-184. First published 31 October 2012. At: doi dot org slash 10.1177/1474474012463664 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

Hundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions around the country - in addition to those in the South - became newly dependent on an industry that itself is dependent on the continuation of conditions under which “criminals” and criminality can be continually produced (“socially constructed”). Norton offers an interesting case study of a rural prison archipelago that developed in upstate New York based on arguments by local officials that buildings constructed for the 1980 Winter Olympics would serve the prison industry in the future. New York State built thirty-nine new state prisons between 1982 and 2000, all of them in rural counties. But it was the forty-fifth state senate district in the far northern region of the state that built more than any other district, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, there were fourteen prisons located in the district, more than twice any other. Norton shows that a short-term opportunistic argument to win the Olympic bid depended on a vision of a future archipelago of prisons and, indeed, a steady supply of prisoners to fill them. […]

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[A]t the height of the US prison-building boom in the 1990s, a prison opened in rural America every fifteen days. John Eason studies this phenomenon in detail, documenting the proliferation of prison building in rural America - specifically in poor, rural, southern towns - for the past fifty years. During this time the total number of prison facilities tripled […].

Moreover, Eason found that from 1980 to 2006, nearly 28 percent of all rural prisons were built in just three southern states, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. […] Hurling also offered a nuanced, regional examination of southern rural prison town archipelagoes. She followed the development of four such archipelagoes […] [including] in the West Texas Plains (one out of every five new rural prisons in the 1990s opened in Texas, the state with by far the largest number of new prisons) […].

Anne Bonds, citing examples from the Pacific Northwest, has documented arguments by local community leaders that prison building is the answer to poverty and resultant decline in social service provision needs. […] Williams, for example, studied the development of the thirteen-prison archipelago in Florence County, Colorado, starting back in 1871. He shows that state and local governments depended on the lobbying “myth” that prisons would bring economic development in order to find communities willing to accept new prisons, even though the profits of those prisons have accrued to industries outside of the local community. […]

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It is not only prisoners’ labor that is increasingly commodified by work programs on the inside; their bodies and lives themselves can be bought and sold as well. With prisoners, in addition to laboring for abhorrently low wages on the inside of prisons, the profits of which accrue to the state and private entities, many local and regional economies depend on the income generated from the “purchase” of incarcerated bodies from other jurisdictions to continue filling carceral sites that were built during the 1980s and 1990s construction boom. 

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All text above by: Karen M. Morin. “Cattle Towns, Prison Towns: Historical Geographies of Rural Carceral Archipelagoes". Historical Geography, Volume 47, Number 1, pages 141-165. Published 2019. At: doi dot org slash 10.1354/hgo.2019.0004 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

Chicago, Illinois is often considered to be on the periphery of the plantation. William Cronon's famous narrative of Chicago's relationships with the "Great West" positions the burgeoning city at the edge of American expansion into plantation agriculture in the Midwest and industrial farming on a national scale. [...] [W]e could also characterize the city as an anticipatory hub between the twin plantation figures of the pre-war American South and America's 20th century colonies [in Central America, the Philippines, and beyond]. During the Reconstruction years, Chicago emerged as a logistical center, channeling America's railroads and telegraph lines into itself. As parts of this communications node, Chicago newspapers and military police served to convert white anxieties about Black migration from the plantation South into new techniques and technologies of prediction that became transportable across a newly imaginable informational plane of US imperialism. [...] [I]n Chicago between 1875 and 1890, [...] white anticipations of African American migration from plantations in the South were translated into new information sciences and policing techniques that made their way to plantations in places like the Philippines. [...]

[S]uch feelings were fundamental to linking plantations which at first seem so spatially and temporally distant. [...]

---

On May 3, 1879 the Chicago Tribune published a greatly anticipated investigatory series entitled, “The Negro Exodus: Causes of the Migration from the Negro’s Point of View” [...] the latest in a long sequence of deeply uneasy reports dating from 1860. From its location at the communicative center of all major US rail and telegraph lines, the Chicago Tribune undertook an imagined responsibility to inform its Midwestern audience of Black peoples’ movements and behaviors. [...] At the climax of the “Negro’s Point of View” series, [...] May 3, the Chicago Tribune presented its showstopping report from its correspondent in Vicksburg, Mississippi entitled “Letters Written by Negroes in Kansas to their Friends South”. In this report, the writer discusses his skepticism of earlier methods of [...] interviews with Black migrants. [...] [The newspaper] conducted its fact-gathering through the mass surveillance of Black peoples' letters [...] [to assess] inner motivations [...] about Black peoples’ “perceptions, enjoyments, and reasons” [...]. Such informational appetites became the anticipatory basis for 20th century enumerative practices. As Colin Koopman argues, informational fastening, or the atomization and separation of facts from Black peoples’ bodies, became commonplace during the Great Migration in the practice of racial statistics, criminology, and health policy directed at Black migrants [...].

---

White Chicagoans’ prolonged concern over predicting Black behaviors and intentions materialized in 1877, when the city became a central hub of militarized response to a nation-wide railroad strike. Adjutant General Richard C. Drum, who commanded the Military Division of the Missouri (Western Frontier) in Chicago from 1873 to 1878, took control of Chicago’s military response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In 1879, after his final year in the city, Drum moved to Washington, DC and proposed the establishment of the Military Information Division (MID) [...]. The MID, which formally established in 1885, maintained close ties to Chicago's local information collection system, adopting a Bertillon identification system of collecting and storing intelligence cards at the time that the National Association of Chiefs of Police established their central bureau of identification in Chicago in 1896 [...]. By the tun of the 20th century, Chicago's police force had expanded tenfold [...], and Drum's MID had amassed over 300,000 intelligence cards [...].

---

The affective atmosphere into which the MID intensified its own predictive techniques later traversed the Pacific Ocean into the Philippines. Alfred McCoy argues that the American introduction of communication technologies and surveillance techniques in governing the Philippines constituted the United States’ first information revolution (McCoy 2009: 18). Colonial police trained in the anxious habits of the MID, rendered the Philippines a laboratory for securitized speculation. McCoy further contends that these informational “capillaries of empire” embedded themselves into the Philippines’ plantocratic-security state as well as US domestic surveillance practices. I add to McCoy’s argument by suggesting that trained feelings of white apprehension translated into imperial mechanisms for governing the Philippines through systems of intelligence cards, telecommunications infrastructure, policing units, and management sciences. Reminiscent of the psychological investigatory projects that saturated Chicago’s public life, the MID and its successors developed techniques for psychological examination and personality typing led by another Chicagoan, Harry Hill Bandholtz. [...] Bandholtz sharpened the MID's informational sciences by training Philippines police forces in the neurotic art of collecting every imaginable fact about Filipino behaviors [...].

---

Ultimately, the US colonial plantocracy in the Philippines built its authority around information infrastructures which had been trained on apprehensive practices and feelings emanating from Chicago’s racialized geography. [...] [T]he informational networks that extended from the image of the American South, through the anticipation of Chicago's public, [...] animated the governance of colonial plantations in the Philippines [...].

---

All text above by: Jolen Martinez. "Plantation Anticipation: Apprehension in Chicago from Reconstruction America to the Plantocratic Philippines" (2024). An essay from an Intervention Symposium titled Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood. The symposium was introduced and edited by Alyssa Paredes, Sophie Chao, and Andrés León Araya. The symposium was hosted and published by Antipode Online, part of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Published online 4 January 2024, at: antipodeonline.org/2024/01/04/plantation-methodologies/ [In this post, bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

Escape. Mobility and containment. Surveillance isn’t new. Imperial anxiety about potential subversion. Modern imperial approaches to security and surveillance, forged and practiced on plantations to prevent Black movement and rebellion.

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Questions of movement, food security, technologies of war, border control, strategies of surveillance, practices of sustainability, and ecological and land concerns, which have all become central to more recent discourses […], have long been integral to the discussion and understanding of Maroon life and survival. […]

Maroon insecurity […] structured relations between the Maroons and the plantation and impacted the organization of daily life across both frontiers as well as the deployment of a range of surveillance assemblages. […] A sense of insecurity generated by the sustained presence of Maroon communities manifested as colonial affect. […] [T]his feeling gave rise to, and was made evident through, the consolidation and reinforcement of colonial governmental policies and laws, the intensified regimentation of plantation labor, and colonial military aggression. This insecurity can also be noted in historical accounts such as Bryan Edwards’s History, Civil and Commercial, of the West Indies. Writing in the period leading up to the Second Maroon War in Jamaica (1795-96), Edwards’s account offers a general sense of the social panic that Maroon communities elicited at that time for the Jamaican planter class: “There was something sufficiently appalling in the idea that many of the disciplined negroes might escape into the vastness of the interior, and there gather round them new and more formidable bands of Maroons, to spread terror and havoc through surrounding estates. Jamaica was but too well acquainted with the losses […] inflicted by a Maroon War, and naturally dreaded the repetition of such a misfortune.” Edward’s description notably names and mobilizes a particular discourse of dread. […]

—

A certain unknowability is also expressed in the articulation of the fear of “new and more formidable bands of Maroons.” […] While Edwards begins by attempting to mark a distinction between the Maroons (signified as the unruly inhabitants of the interior) and “many of the disciplined negroes” this distinction becomes tenuous and porous. […] This unknowability becomes linked to the colonial mobilization and deployment of a range of “surveillance assemblages,” to apprehend ([…] both to identify and detain) the Maroons. However this, in turn, also produces “affective and affected entities that create fear but also feel the fear they create, an assemblage of contagions.” In the case of colonial plantation society, this in/security was not just enabled by the Maroons’ use of guerilla strategies and tactics, which complicated and unsettled the limits of visibility and invisibility as modes of producing knowledge about the Maroons, but we might also note that the very practice of marronage itself variously enacted a “concatenation of disloyal and irreverent lines of flight - partial transient, momentary, and magical.”

This unknowable yet insistent threat of marronage, as Simone Browne has shown, is important to “the historical formation of surveillance.”

Maroons were integral to the production, development, and refinement of security techniques, and they serve to catalogue various colonial attempts to track and manage black bodies through tactics of power and immobility. Browne, in her work, contends that in fact “‘bio’ (of the body) and ‘metric’ (pertaining to measurement) has long been deployed as a technology in the surveillance of black mobilities” and as strategies “of black stabilities and containment.”

She importantly urges that “rather than seeing surveillance as something inaugurated by new technologies, such as automated facial recognition or unmanned autonomous vehicles (or drones), to see it as ongoing.” 

These were tools that were developed, utilized, and deployed in efforts to “govern black people on the move.”

As Browne puts it, they were “technologies concerned with escape.”

As agents variously engaged in different modes of flight, Maroons, then, enable use to chart the colonial refinement of practices and technologies of security and surveillance while at the same time, inviting attention to a range of strategies and tactics including subversion, stealth subterfuge, sabotage, and collaboration as counter response.

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Text above by: Ronald Cummings. “Maroon In/Securities.” Small Axe (2018) Volume 22, Issue 3, pages 47-55. Published 1 November 2018. At: doi dot org slash 10.1215/07990537-7249126 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first lines/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

Chicago, Illinois is often considered to be on the periphery of the plantation. William Cronon's famous narrative of Chicago's relationships with the "Great West" positions the burgeoning city at the edge of American expansion into plantation agriculture in the Midwest and industrial farming on a national scale. [...] [W]e could also characterize the city as an anticipatory hub between the twin plantation figures of the pre-war American South and America's 20th century colonies [in Central America, the Philippines, and beyond]. During the Reconstruction years, Chicago emerged as a logistical center, channeling America's railroads and telegraph lines into itself. As parts of this communications node, Chicago newspapers and military police served to convert white anxieties about Black migration from the plantation South into new techniques and technologies of prediction that became transportable across a newly imaginable informational plane of US imperialism. [...] [I]n Chicago between 1875 and 1890, [...] white anticipations of African American migration from plantations in the South were translated into new information sciences and policing techniques that made their way to plantations in places like the Philippines. [...]

[S]uch feelings were fundamental to linking plantations which at first seem so spatially and temporally distant. [...]

---

On May 3, 1879 the Chicago Tribune published a greatly anticipated investigatory series entitled, “The Negro Exodus: Causes of the Migration from the Negro’s Point of View” [...] the latest in a long sequence of deeply uneasy reports dating from 1860. From its location at the communicative center of all major US rail and telegraph lines, the Chicago Tribune undertook an imagined responsibility to inform its Midwestern audience of Black peoples’ movements and behaviors. [...] At the climax of the “Negro’s Point of View” series, [...] May 3, the Chicago Tribune presented its showstopping report from its correspondent in Vicksburg, Mississippi entitled “Letters Written by Negroes in Kansas to their Friends South”. In this report, the writer discusses his skepticism of earlier methods of [...] interviews with Black migrants. [...] [The newspaper] conducted its fact-gathering through the mass surveillance of Black peoples' letters [...] [to assess] inner motivations [...] about Black peoples’ “perceptions, enjoyments, and reasons” [...]. Such informational appetites became the anticipatory basis for 20th century enumerative practices. As Colin Koopman argues, informational fastening, or the atomization and separation of facts from Black peoples’ bodies, became commonplace during the Great Migration in the practice of racial statistics, criminology, and health policy directed at Black migrants [...].

---

White Chicagoans’ prolonged concern over predicting Black behaviors and intentions materialized in 1877, when the city became a central hub of militarized response to a nation-wide railroad strike. Adjutant General Richard C. Drum, who commanded the Military Division of the Missouri (Western Frontier) in Chicago from 1873 to 1878, took control of Chicago’s military response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In 1879, after his final year in the city, Drum moved to Washington, DC and proposed the establishment of the Military Information Division (MID) [...]. The MID, which formally established in 1885, maintained close ties to Chicago's local information collection system, adopting a Bertillon identification system of collecting and storing intelligence cards at the time that the National Association of Chiefs of Police established their central bureau of identification in Chicago in 1896 [...]. By the tun of the 20th century, Chicago's police force had expanded tenfold [...], and Drum's MID had amassed over 300,000 intelligence cards [...].

---

The affective atmosphere into which the MID intensified its own predictive techniques later traversed the Pacific Ocean into the Philippines. Alfred McCoy argues that the American introduction of communication technologies and surveillance techniques in governing the Philippines constituted the United States’ first information revolution (McCoy 2009: 18). Colonial police trained in the anxious habits of the MID, rendered the Philippines a laboratory for securitized speculation. McCoy further contends that these informational “capillaries of empire” embedded themselves into the Philippines’ plantocratic-security state as well as US domestic surveillance practices. I add to McCoy’s argument by suggesting that trained feelings of white apprehension translated into imperial mechanisms for governing the Philippines through systems of intelligence cards, telecommunications infrastructure, policing units, and management sciences. Reminiscent of the psychological investigatory projects that saturated Chicago’s public life, the MID and its successors developed techniques for psychological examination and personality typing led by another Chicagoan, Harry Hill Bandholtz. [...] Bandholtz sharpened the MID's informational sciences by training Philippines police forces in the neurotic art of collecting every imaginable fact about Filipino behaviors [...].

---

Ultimately, the US colonial plantocracy in the Philippines built its authority around information infrastructures which had been trained on apprehensive practices and feelings emanating from Chicago’s racialized geography. [...] [T]he informational networks that extended from the image of the American South, through the anticipation of Chicago's public, [...] animated the governance of colonial plantations in the Philippines [...].

---

All text above by: Jolen Martinez. "Plantation Anticipation: Apprehension in Chicago from Reconstruction America to the Plantocratic Philippines" (2024). An essay from an Intervention Symposium titled Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood. The symposium was introduced and edited by Alyssa Paredes, Sophie Chao, and Andrés León Araya. The symposium was hosted and published by Antipode Online, part of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Published online 4 January 2024, at: antipodeonline.org/2024/01/04/plantation-methodologies/ [In this post, bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

[A]nti-homeless laws [...] rooted in European anti-vagrancy laws were adapted across parts of the Japanese empire [...] at the turn of the 20th century. [...] [C]riminalising ideas transferred from anti-vagrancy statutes into [contemporary] welfare systems. [...] [W]elfare and border control systems - substantively shaped by imperial aversions to racialised ideas of uncivilised vagrants - mutually served as a transnational legal architecture [...] [leading to] [t]oday's modern divides between homeless persons, migrants, and refugees [...].

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By the Boer Wars (1880–1902), Euro-American powers and settler-colonial governments professed anxieties about White degeneration and the so-called “Yellow Peril” alongside other existential threats to White supremacy [...]. Japan [...] validated the creation of transnational racial hierarchies as it sought to elevate its own global standing [...]. [O]ne key legal instrument for achieving such racialised orders was the vagrancy concept, rooted in vagrancy laws that originated in Europe and proliferated globally through imperial-colonial conquest [...].

[A]nti-vagrancy regulation [...] shaped public thinking around homelessness [...]. Such laws were applied as a “criminal making device” (Kimber 2013:544) and "catch-all detention rationale" (Agee 2018:1659) targeting persons deemed threats for their supposedly transgressive or "wayward interiority" (Nicolazzo 2014:339) measured against raced, gendered, ableist, and classed norms [...]. Through the mid-20th century, vagrancy laws were aggressively used to control migration [and] encourage labour [...]. As vagrancy laws fell out of favour, [...] a "vagrancy concept" nonetheless thrived in welfare systems that similarly meted out punishment for ostensible vagrant-like qualities [...], [which] helps explain why particular discourses about the mobile poor have persisted to date [...].

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During high imperialism (1870–1914), European, American, and Japanese empires expanded rapidly, aided by technologies like steam and electricity. The Boer Wars and Japan's ascent to Great Power status each profoundly influenced trans-imperial dynamics, hardening Euro-American concerns regarding a perceived deterioration of the White race. [...] Through the 1870s [...] the [Japanese] government introduced modern police forces and a centralised koseki register to monitor spatial movement. The koseki register, which recorded geographic origins, also served as a tool for marking racialised groups including Ainu, Burakumin, Chinese, [...] and Korean subjects across Japan's empire [...]. The 1880 Penal Code contained Japan's first anti-vagrancy statute, based on French models [...]. Tokyo's Governor Matsuda, known for introducing geographic segregation of the rich and poor, expressed concern around 1882 for kichinyado (daily lodgings), which he identified as “den[s] for people without fixed employment or [koseki] registration” [...].

Attention to “vagrant foreigners” (furō-gaikokujin) emerged in Japanese media and politics in the mid-1890s. It stemmed directly from contemporary British debates over immigration restrictions targeting predominantly Jewish “destitute aliens” [...].

The 1896 Landing Regulation for Qing Nationals barred entry of “people without fixed employment” and “Chinese labourers” [...], justified as essential "for maintaining public peace and morals" in legal documents [...]. Notably, prohibitions against Chinese labourers were repeatedly modified at the British consulate's behest through 1899 to ensure more workers for [the British-affiliated plantation] tea industry. [...]

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Simultaneously, new welfaristic measures emerged alongside such punitive anti-vagrancy statutes. [...] Such border control regulations were eventually standardised in Japan's first immigration law, the 1918 Foreigners’ Entry Order. [...] This turn towards instituting racialised territorial boundaries should be understood in light of empire's concurrent welfarist turn [...]. Japanese administration established a quasi-carceral workhouse system in 1906 [in colonized territory of East Asia] [...] which sentenced [...] vagrants to years in workhouses. This law still treated vagrancy as illegal, but touted its remedy of compulsory labour as welfaristic. [...] This welfarist tum led to a proliferation of state-run programmes [...] connecting [lower classes] to employment. Therein, the vagrancy concept became operative in sorting between subjects deemed deserving, or undeserving, of aid. Effectively, surveillance practices in welfare systems mobilised the vagrancy concept to, firstly, justify supportive assistance and labour protections centring able-bodied, and especially married, Japanese men deemed “willing to work” and, secondly, withhold protections from racialised persons for their perceived waywardness [...] as contemporaneous Burakumin, Korean, and Ainu movements frequently protested [...]. [D]uring the American occupation (1945–1952), not only were anti-vagrancy statutes reinstituted in Japan's 1948 Minor Offences Act, but [...] the 1946 Livelihood Protection Act (Article 2) excluded “people unwilling to work or lazy” from social insurance coverage [...].

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Imperial expansion relied on not only claiming new markets and territories, but also using borders as places for negotiating legal powers and personhood [...]. Japan [...] integrated Euro-American ideas and practices attached to extraterritorial governance, like exceptionalism and legal immunity, into its legal systems. [...] (Importantly, because supportive systems [welfare], like punitive ones, were racialised to differentially regulate mobilities according to racial-ethic hierarchies, they were not universally beneficial to all eligible subjects.) [...]

At the turn of the century, imperialism and industrial capitalism had co-produced new transnational mobilities [which induced mass movements of poor and newly displaced people seeking income] [...]. These mobilities - unlike those celebrated in imperial travel writing - conflicted with racist imaginaries of who should possess freedom of movement, thereby triggering racialised concerns over vagrancy [...]. In both Euro-American and Japanese contexts, [...] racialised “lawless” Others (readily associated with vagrancy) were treated as threats to “public order” and “public peace and morals”. [...] Early 20th century discourse about vagrants, undesirable aliens, and “vagrant foreigners” [...] produced [...] "new categories of [illegal] people" [...] that cast particular people outside of systems of state aid and protection. [...] [P]ractices of illegalisation impress upon people, “the constant threat of removal, of being coercively forced out and physically removed [...] … an expulsion from life and living itself”.

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All text above by: Rayna Rusenko. "The Vagrancy Concept, Border Control, and Legal Architectures of Human In/Security". Antipode [A Radical Journal of Geography] Volume 56, Issue 2, pages 628-650. First published 24 October 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for criticism, teaching, commentary purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

The link between warfare and technological innovation has been well documented [...]. World War II was a particularly intense crucible of technological change, and the repurposing of military technologies and industries in the forging of a new post-war consumer [economy] is crucial [...]. Processes of technological bricolage turned the machines of war onto the natural world as global powers competed to cement their economic and imperial hegemony. In Great Britain’s post-war “groundnut scheme” in its East African territories (1946-51), this collision of nature, military hardware, and technical expertise was part of efforts to both produce more fats for the British diet and to demonstrate to the world (most importantly the United States) that, through a newly energized science-led developmentalism, British colonialism still had a “progressive” role to play in the postwar world.

The aim was to produce millions of tons of peanuts across Tanganyika using the latest methods of advanced scientific agriculture. The environmental conditions in the north, where the scheme was to begin, were known to be especially trying, not least the dry climate [...]. But faith in the power of mechanized agriculture was such that any natural limits were thought to be readily surmountable.

The groundnut scheme was to be, as its Director put it in an interview with the Tanganyika Standard, a “war” with nature, and an “economic Battle of Alamein” waged over some three million acres by an army of colonial technicians - many recruited from military ranks - and local laborers, for many of whom the scheme represented their first entry into the wage labor market.

But it wasn’t just the rhetoric of war that was repurposed.

Lancaster bombers were kitted out to survey and discover “new country” in East Africa for agricultural development. [...] [T]ractors and bulldozers from military surplus stores in Egypt proved unable to tackle the hard ground and tough vegetation, so the planners turned to a novel solution: repurposing surplus Sherman M4A2 tanks. The Vickers-Armstrong factory in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne set about rearranging key elements of the tanks’ construction [...]. The tractors, christened “Shervicks” for their hybrid origins, were [...] thought to be particularly suited to large-scale earth-moving and to the kind of heavy duty “bush clearing” that was required in Tanganyika.

Officials sought to dismiss concerns that large-scale bush clearing would have wider environmental consequences, using the well-worn colonial trope that any observed changes in local climate or erosion patterns were due to the “primitive” agricultural practices of the locals, not to the earth-moving practices of the colonists.  [...] As the plants continued to wilt in the sun, [...] [t]he stakes were high. As [J.R.] of the Colonial Development Corporation put it in a letter: “Our standing as an Imperial power in Africa is to a substantial extent bound up with the future of this scheme. To abandon it would be a humiliating blow to our prestige everywhere.” The only option left was to try and bend the weather itself to the scheme’s will, by seeding the clouds for rain. [...] “Balloon bombs” (photographic film canisters tethered to weather balloons) and a repurposed Royal Navy flare gun were used to target individual clouds [...]. The scheme itself has survived as a cautionary tale of governmental hubris, but it is instructive too as a case study of how technologies of war have been turned against other foes.

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All text above by: Martin Mahony. “The Enemy is Nature: Military Machines and Technological Bricolage in Britain’s ‘Great Agricultural Experiment.’“ Environment and Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2021), no. 11. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. doi:10.5282/rcc/9191. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Images and their captions are shown unaltered as they originally appear in Mahony's article. Public Domain Mark 1.0 License for images: creativecommons dot org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/]

[fatehbaz]

Most books on the Bengal delta begin by describing it as “riverine,” […] the land is the product of fluvial action […]. [I]n thinking about Bengal, one tends to imagine the ricepaddy fields […]. It was not so all the time; Bengal was […] [not] really a land of [such extensive] farming […]. Traveling through Bengal in the eighteenth century, the French traveler Orme saw a highly sophisticated water-based economy - the blessing of rivers - irrigated […] by the monsoon rains and annual flooding. […] The rivers were not just channels of water; they carried a thriving trade, transporting people and goods from one part of the delta to another. Today, Bengal is generally seen as comprising lush green rice paddies […]. Rivers are often presented as causing immense grief [through seasonal flooding] […]. Clearly, there is a mismatch here. […] How (and when) did Bengal’s social milieu transform from water-based to land-based? […] Bengal’s essential character as a fluid landscape was changed during the colonial times through legal interventions that were aimed at stabilizing lands and waters, at creating permanent boundaries between them, and at privileging land over water, in a land of shifting river courses, inundated irrigation, and river-based life.

Such a separation of land and water was made possible not just by physical constructions but first and foremost by engineering a legal framework that gradually entered the popular vocabulary. […] BADA, which stands for the Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Act, [was] a law passed by the colonial British rulers in 1825, following the Permanent Settlement of 1793. […] The environment of Bengal can be described as hybrid, where the demarcation between land and water is neither well-defined nor permanent. Nature here represents a borderless world, or at best one in which borders are not fixed lines on the ground demarcating a territory, but are negotiated spaces or zones. Such “[…] spaces” comprise “not [only] lines of separation but zones of interaction…transformation, transgression, and possibility” (Howitt 2001, 240).

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Current boundaries of land and water are as much products of history as nature and the colonial rule of Bengal played a key role in changing the ideas and valuations of both. […] The debate on what constituted productive and unproductive uses of land preceded the application of English property law not only to establish permanent zamindari (a common term for the system of landlordism) settlement of land tenure in India, but also to valorize land in what had essentially been a land-water hybrid environment. The colonial land revenue system, by seeing land as more productive (being able to yield revenue) and useful, began the long historical process of branding the rivers of Bengal as uncivil and in need of control. […] The problem with deltaic land is its non-permanent nature, as silt is stored by rivers: rivers do not always flow along a certain route […]. The laws that the colonial British brought to Bengal, however, were founded upon the thinking of land as being fixed in place. […]

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Experiments to fine-tune the land-based economy began in 1760 when Bengal, and its ceded territories, came under the East India Company rule. […] To entrench the system, the Permanent Settlement of 1793 created zamindars (or landlords) “in perpetuity” - meaning for good. The system was aimed at reducing the complexities of revenue collection due to erratically shifting lands and unpredictable harvests in a monsoon-dependent area […]. Alarmed at the possibility of dismemberment of their estates, the zamindars decided to bind tenants to the same conditions to which they themselves were bound by the colonial government, and one of their actions was to create patni tenures or perpetual leases. […]

It also meant that the right to collect rent from the tenants, often through the use of force, devolved to the lower layers, making the upper-layer zamindars more of a juridical rather than a real social entity in the eyes of the peasants. The patnidars, finding how much trouble this arrangement took off their own back, created dar-patnis or patnis of the second degree […]. The dar-patnis created se-patnis or patnis of the third degree. The East India Company, therefore, had to legalize, through Regulation VIII of 1819, the creation of such formations, thus giving a de jure recognition post facto […].

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The regulation, although innocuous and simple, was of great historical potency: it became the key that unlocked the door to environmental and socio-economic changes of unparalleled magnitude. From a riverine community, within a hundred years, Bengal was transformed into a land-based community. […]

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The meaning of property also changed as a result of this law: the cultivators began to lose the right to occupy the land that they had enjoyed since ancient times […].

[T]he Company then began to contemplate the problematic issue of legalizing the fictional entities of chars […]. The law that was created for this purpose - and still rules the rights of ownership of charlands - is the Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Regulation Act (BADA) of 1825. […] BADA was meant to establish a set of rules to guide the courts to determine the claims to land “gained by alluvion” or accretion, and the resurfaced land previously lost by diluvion or erosion. Even if one takes it for granted that chars are technically non-land in the sense that they exist within river banks, the difficulty remains that when a piece of land is lost to bank erosion, it may not arise in exactly the same location or arise at all within the foreseeable future. This means the owner has no certainty that they will get it back when it resurfaces or when another char rises nearby. […] Thus, the key to establishing land rights in the court of law remained the payment of rent, even on diluviated land. […] New accretions in large navigable rivers would be the property of the state […].

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All text above by: Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt. “Commodified Land, Dangerous Water: Colonial Perceptions of Riverine Bengal.” In: “Asian Environments: Connections across Borders, Landscapes, and Times.” Edited by Ursula Munster, Shiho Satsuka, and Gunnel Cederlof. RCC Perspectives, no. 3, 17-22. 2014. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary teaching purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

[T]hey frequently transgress the spatial boundaries imposed by humans to organize and govern spaces […]. [W]etlands spread out and do not conform to the straight and consistent lines between land and water. […] The smells of wetlands, of decomposing vegetation, of sulphur, were […] off-putting for [British] settlers in Aotearoa […]. Soon after the British-led military invasion of the Waikato region in 1863 and the confiscation of 480 000 ha of Maori lands, [...] [t]he ‘great swamp region of the Waikato’ was described as a picture of ‘desolation’ and ‘stagnant water’ where the ‘ground quaked and quivered beneath’ one's feet, and opened up unexpectedly to suck people down into ‘horrible depths of [the] black, stinking bog’. […] The omnipresent dangers of ‘damp vapour arising’ were deemed ‘highly prejudicial to residents’ health throughout Aotearoa. […] The ‘tepid swamps’, it was reported, poisoned the ‘otherwise pure air’ […].’ The Napier Swamp Nuisance Act enabled local government officials to ‘fill in’ (meaning to drain, establish levees, and build up the soil) any parcel of land deemed a muddy watery odorous ‘nuisance’ without the consent of the landowners. […] [P]oliticians suggested [that Aotearoa] be decontaminated through strategic interventions to remove and remake wetlands […]. Such ideas, which fused medical and socio-economic theories, justified indigenous dispossession and drainage works […].

Text by: Meg Parsons and Karen Fisher. “Historical smellscapes in Aotearoa New Zealand: Intersections between colonial knowledges of smell, race, and wetlands.” Journal of Historical Geography Volume 74, pages 28-43. October 2021.

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On 24 December 1928 Italy’s fascist regime launched […] a fourteen-year national land reclamation programme aimed at [...] Italy's ‘death inducing’ swamps […]. The Pontine Marshes, a marshland spreading across 75,000 hectares south of Rome was given top priority […]. [T]he fascist regime used an extensive propaganda machinery to promote the programme […] as a heroic quest for producing an 'ideal' [...] landscape [...]. Newsreels documented step by step the struggle […], with Mussolini himself often featuring, overseeing the project, or even working the land. […] Nearly 3,000 newsreels and many documentaries were produced [...]. This was [...] [among] Italy's most important public works project[s] [...], a transformative enterprise that [...] would engage with an "untamed" natural environment and [force] it into a sanitised version of ideal fascist nature. [...] [The marshes] were linked to the idea of wilderness, [...] undisciplined, uncivilised, and unproductive [...]. This policy […] aimed […] [at] removing “unhealthy” [...] areas, through the process of sventramento (disembowelment). […] The construction of New Towns [...] in the Pontine Marshes [...] aimed at producing the 'ideal' settlement [...]. [These newly constructed] municipal buildings often boasted prominent towers [....] reigning supreme over the Marshes [...].

Text by: Federico Caprotti and Maria Kaika. “Producing the ideal fascist landscape: nature, materiality and the cinematic representation of land reclamation in the Pontine Marshes.” Social & Cultural Geography Volume 9. 2008.

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[I]n Recife in the Northeast of Brazil [...] the transformation of the city was predicated on [...] [a] notion of whiteness that required the enclosure of wet, amphibious space to make dry land. [...] Racialised groups – of black, indigenous, and mixed heritages – and the houses, marshlands, and mangroves where they lived, were subject to eradication [...]. [F]rom the 1920s to 1950s, during the rise to hegemony in Brazil of [a form of eugenicist, modernist nationalism,] [...] [the] idea's heartland [was] the Northeast. [...] Recife is also a centre of Brazilian black culture [...]. One of the key sites in Brazil's slave and sugar trades [...], the city was [...] [a] hub. Many of these people lived in what came to be called mocambos, a word that designated an informal dwelling, but came to mean much more. [...]. Mocambos were seen as [...] the place where exploited labour was kept out of sight. [...] They were also [...] the inheritance [...] of the quilombo - the community of escaped slaves. [...] In July 1939, the proto-fascist administration [...] of Agamenon Magalhães, put in place by Getúlio Vargas' repressive Estado Novo, launched the Liga Social Contra o Mocambo (Social League Against the Mocambo, LSCM). The League emerged out of a tellingly named “Crusade” against the mocambos. [...] Mocambos were characterised as repellent, unhygienic, and dangerous: “the mocambo which repels. The mocambo which is the tomb of a race … a sombre landscape of human misery … which mutilates human energy and annuls work" [...]. These were the decades of the embranquecimento of the Brazilian population through public policies of immigration, miscegenation, and sterilisation [...]. This white supremacist ideology was inseparably a politics of nature. Magalhães wrote [in 1939]: The idle life, the life that the income of the mocambos provides [...]. It is a life of stagnant water. … [that] generates in its breast the venom of larvae, which are the enemies of life. Enemies of life, as are the mocambos and the sub-soil of cities, where the polluted waters contaminate pure waters [...]. Attempts to “cleanse” the city functioned through a distinct process: aterramento, the making of land. [...] Or as 1990s mangue beat [mangrove beat] musicians [...] put it, “the fastest way also to obstruct and evacuate the soul of a city like Recife is to kill its rivers and fill up its estuaries” [...].

Text by: Archie Davies. "The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 46, Issue 2, pp. 270-283. First published 29 November 2020.

[fatehbaz]

"defending civilization against bugs"

lol the mosquito sculpture

see Pratik Chakrabarti's Medicine and Empire: 1600-1960 (2013) and Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (2012)

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Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in December 1899 he gave a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce [...]. [H]e argued that "in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with the microscope."

Text by: Rohan Deb Roy. "Decolonise science - time to end another imperial era." The Conversation. 5 April 2018.

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[A]s [...] Diane Nelson explains: The creation of transportation infrastructure such as canals and railroads, the deployment of armies, and the clearing of ground to plant tropical products all had to confront [...] microbial resistance. The French, British, and US raced to find a cure for malaria [...]. One French colonial official complained in 1908: “fever and dysentery are the ‘generals’ that defend hot countries against our incursions and prevent us from replacing the aborigines that we have to make use of.” [...] [T]ropical medicine was assigned the role of a “counterinsurgent field.” [...] [T]he discovery of mosquitoes as malaria and yellow fever carriers reawakened long-cherished plans such as the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) [...]. In 1916, the director of the US Bureau of Entomology and longtime general secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejoiced at this success as “an object lesson for the sanitarians of the world” - it demonstrated “that it is possible for the white race to live healthfully in the tropics.” [...] The [...] measures to combat dangerous diseases always had the collateral benefit of social pacification. In 1918, [G.V.], president of the Rockefeller Foundation, candidly declared: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some decided advantages over machine guns." The construction of the Panama Canal [...] advanced the military expansion of the United States in the Caribbean. The US occupation of the Canal Zone had already brought racist Jim Crow laws [to Panama] [...]. Besides the [...] expansion of vice squads and prophylaxis stations, during the night women were picked up all over the city [by US authorities] and forcibly tested for [...] diseases [...] [and] they were detained in something between a prison and hospital for up to six months [...] [as] women in Panama were becoming objects of surveillance [...].

Text by: Fahim Amir. "Cloudy Swords." e-flux Journal Issue #115. February 2021.

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Richard P. Strong [had been] recently appointed director of Harvard’s new Department of Tropical Medicine [...]. In 1914 [the same year of the Canal's completion], just one year after the creation of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine, Strong took on an additional assignment that cemented the ties between his department and American business interests abroad. As newly appointed director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of United Fruit Company, he set sail in July 1914 to United Fruit plantations in Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. […] As a shareholder in two British rubber plantations, [...] Strong approached Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the tire and rubber-processing conglomerate that bore his name, in December 1925 with a proposal [...]. Firestone had negotiated tentative agreements in 1925 with the Liberian government for [...] a 99-year concession to optionally lease up to a million acres of Liberian land for rubber plantations. [...]

[I]nfluenced by the recommendations and financial backing of Harvard alumni such as Philippine governor Gen. William Cameron Forbes [the Philippines were under US military occupation] and patrons such as Edward Atkins, who were making their wealth in the banana and sugarcane industries, Harvard hired Strong, then head of the Philippine Bureau of Science’s Biological Laboratory [where he fatally infected unknowing test subject prisoners with bubonic plague], and personal physician to Forbes, to establish the second Department of Tropical Medicine in the United States [...]. Strong and Forbes both left Manila [Philippines] for Boston in 1913. [...] Forbes [US military governor of occupied Philippines] became an overseer to Harvard University and a director of United Fruit Company, the agricultural products marketing conglomerate best known for its extensive holdings of banana plantations throughout Central America. […] In 1912 United Fruit controlled over 300,000 acres of land in the tropics [...] and a ready supply of [...] samples taken from the company’s hospitals and surrounding plantations, Strong boasted that no “tropical school of medicine in the world … had such an asset. [...] It is something of a victory [...]. We could not for a million dollars procure such advantages.” Over the next two decades, he established a research funding model reliant on the medical and biological services the Harvard department could provide US-based multinational firms in enhancing their overseas production and trade in coffee, bananas, rubber, oil, and other tropical commodities [...] as they transformed landscapes across the globe.

Text by: Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity and context.]

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[On] February 20, 1915, [...] [t]o signal the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), [...] [t]he fair did not officially commence [...] until President Wilson [...] pressed a golden key linked to an aerial tower [...] whose radio waves sparked the top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a galvanometer, [...] swinging open the doors of the Palace of Machinery, where a massive diesel engine started to rotate. [...] [W]ith lavish festivities [...] nineteen million people has passed through the PPIE's turnstiles. [...] As one of the many promotional pamphlets declared, "California marks the limit of the geographical progress of civilization. For unnumbered centuries the course of empire has been steadily to the west." [...] One subject that received an enormous amount of time and space was [...] the areas of race betterment and tropical medicine. Indeed, the fair's official poster, the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," [the construction of the Panama Canal] symbolized the intertwined significance of these two concerns [...]. [I]n the 1910s public health and eugenics crusaders alike moved with little or no friction between [...] [calls] for classification of human intelligence, for immigration restriction, for the promotion of the sterilization and segregation of the "unfit," [...]. It was during this [...] moment, [...] that California's burgeoning eugenicist movement coalesced [...]. At meetings convened during the PPIE, a heterogenous group of sanitary experts, [...] medical superintendents, psychologists, [...] and anthropologists established a social network that would influence eugenics on the national level in the years to come. [...]

In his address titled "The Physician as Pioneer," the president-elect of the American Academy of Medicine, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, credited the colonization of the Mississippi Valley to the discovery of quinine [...] and then told his audience that for progress to proceed apace in the current "age of the insect," the stringent sanitary regime imposed and perfected by Gorgas in the Canal Zone was the sine qua non. [...]

Blue also took part in the conference of the American Society for Tropical Medicine, which Gorgas had cofounded five years after the annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Invoking the narrative of medico-military conquest [...], [t]he scientific skill of the United States was also touted at the Pan-American Medical Congress, where its president, Dr. Charles L. Reed, delivered a lengthy address praising the hemispheric security ensured by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and "the combined genius of American medical scientists [...]" in quelling tropical diseases, above all yellow fever, in the Canal Zone. [...] [A]s Reed's lecture ultimately disclosed, his understanding of Pan-American medical progress was based [...] on the enlightened effects of "Aryan blood" in American lands. [...] [T]he week after the PPIE ended, Pierce was ordered to Laredo, Texas, to investigate several incidents of typhus fever on the border [...]. Pierce was instrumental in fusing tropical medicine and race betterment [...] guided by more than a decade of experience in [...] sanitation in Panama [...]. [I]n August 1915, Stanford's chancellor, David Starr Jordan [...] and Pierce were the guests of honor at a luncheon hosted by the Race Betterment Foundation. [...] [At the PPIE] [t]he Race Betterment booth [...] exhibit [...] won a bronze medal for "illustrating evidences and causes of race degeneration and methods and agencies of race betterment," [and] made eugenics a daily feature of the PPIE. [...] [T]he American Genetics Association's Eugenics Section convened [...] [and] talks were delivered on the intersection of eugenics and sociology, [...] the need for broadened sterilization laws, and the medical inspection of immigrants [...]. Moreover, the PPIE fostered the cross-fertilization of tropical medicine and race betterment at a critical moment of transition in modern medicine in American society.

Text by: Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Second Edition. 2016.

[fatehbaz]

[D]ebt and indebtedness [...] produc[e] forms of spatial enclosure [imprisonment] that do not rely on the spectacular [singular moments of blatant literal physical violence] but are, rather, achieved through temporal openings and foreclosures. To be clear, this frame does not obscure the many forms of carceral enclosure [...]: the prison, the checkpoint, the security wall. Historically, enclosure is understood as the privatization of land. But Wang extends the concept of enclosure to encompass time. Wang demonstrates that [...] mobility is policed through [...] an apparatus of punishment that solicits time as the form of spatial enclosure. [...]

[D]ebilitating infrastructures turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies. [...] [C]heckpoints [...]; administrative bureaucratic apparatuses that stall and foreclose travel, mobility for work, [...] the capacity to move and change residences - baroque processes to apply for permits to travel [...], absence of public services such as postal delivery [...]; and finally [...] denial of resolution, suspension in the space of the indefinite [...]. In fact, slow death itself is literalized as the slowing down of life [...]. [Land] itself becomes simultaneously bigger - because it takes so long to get anywhere - and smaller, as transit becomes arduous [...] where it is so difficult to travel between areas without permits and identifications. Movement is suffocated. Distance is stretched and manipulated to create an entire population with mobility impairments. And yet space is shrunken, as people are held in place, rarely able to move far. [...]

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Time itself is held hostage.

This is the slow aspect of slow death: slow death can entail a really slow life, too, a life that demands constant calibration of different speeds and the relation of speed to space. [...]

The suspended state of the indefinite, of waiting and waiting (it) out, wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc. [...]

Time thus is the meter of power; it is one form that physical enclosure takes on. The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall “lack of jurisdiction over the function of one’s own senses” (Schuller 2018: 74) endemic to the operation of colonial rule [...]. [T]his process entails several modes of temporal differentiation: withholding futurity, making impossible anything but a slowed (down) life, and immobilizing the body [...]. Julie Peteet (2008) calls the extraction of nonlabor time “stealing time” [...].

[T]he extraction of time [...] produce[s] a depleted and therefore compliant population so beholden to the logistics of the everyday that forms of connectivity, communing, and collective resistance are thwarted. The extraction of time functions as the transfer of “vital energy” [...], an extraction that recapitulates a long colonial history of mining bodies for their potentiality. [...]

Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time.

Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work; the checkpoints affectively expand labor time [...].

Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities of bodies [...].It’s not just that bodies are too tired to resist but that the experience of the “constant state of uncertainty” becomes the condition of being. [...]

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All text above by: Jasbir K. Puar. "Spatial Debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism in Palestine". South Atlantic Quarterly (2021) 120 (2), pages 393-414. Published April 2021. DOI at: doi dot org slash 10.1215/00382876-8916144 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for criticism, teaching, commentary purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

[W]hat counted as knowledge? […] [In] British plantation societies from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean […] [there was a] “process by which authorship is attributed to matters of fact.” […] Although colonial naturalists drew upon European models and ideas, the plantation societies of the Atlantic were far removed from the […] [social] world of London gentlemen. […] [W]hile metropolitan propaganda would seem to preclude the possibility of free and enslaved blacks, Native Americans, women, and even white colonial men as reliable testifiers, in practice European science depended upon such informants. Enslaved and free blacks and Amerindians were seen as both uniquely knowledgeable about the natural world and potentially dangerous as a result of this knowledge. Colonials [white people living in the colony, not living in London/Britain] therefore served as buffer zones ‘‘between the metropolitan place of knowledge ratification and the volatile site of exotic secrets.’’ […] While colonials acknowledged the authority of their black and indigenous informants as experts about American nature, they represented such expertise as merely the raw materials out of which they fashioned new natural knowledge. […] Colonial naturalists suggested that it required their verification and experimentation to transform the local expertise of their informants into stable, universal knowledge suitable for European audiences. By translating local knowledge into a universal register, colonials laid claim to the status of authors of new knowledge about American nature. […]

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The Maryland physician Richard Brooke was no stranger to the transatlantic circuits of natural history. In 1762, the physician sent the Society of Arts a sample of a tea made from the ‘‘red-root’’ shrub that, he promised, could take the place of Chinese tea while providing additional health benefits. This letter was part of a series of missives that Brooke contributed to metropolitan societies and publications describing New World nature, letters that built his transatlantic reputation as a curious gentleman. […] Brooke claimed that the tea provided ‘‘wonderful Relief in obstinate Coughs,’’ ‘‘raise[d] the Spirits in vapourish People, and occasion[ed] better rest.’’ The physician reported that he learned of this tea from an unnamed Native American 20 years earlier, but he characterized himself as ‘‘the first and only Person who ever prepared this tea.’’ Personhood, in this case, seemed only to have applied to Europeans or Euro-Americans. By disregarding the personhood of the Native American who first shared the remedy with him, Brooke simultaneously highlighted the indigenous source of his knowledge claim and proclaimed himself as author of it.  Asserting the right to name the tea as the ‘‘first’’ person to discover it, Brooke ‘‘has taken the Liberty to call it Mattapany, which is the Indian name of the Place where he was born.’’

He added that if his tea should prove popular with ‘‘the ladies in England,’’ it would give him ‘‘great Pleasure to think that Mattapany will frequently be pronounced by the prettiest lips in the Universe.’’ The term ‘‘Mattapany’’ primarily highlighted Brooke’s personal history, rather than memorializing the Native American who revealed the virtues of the root. […]

Brooke’s letter regarding Mattapany tea is useful for thinking about authority, authorship, and vernacular knowledge in British plantation societies. Brooke did not deny the indigenous source of the natural knowledge that he reported to the Society of Arts; to the contrary, he highlighted its origins. But while the physician recognized the authority of his unnamed indigenous informant to understand the natural properties of the red-root, he did not represent the Native American as the individual who should be credited for the introduction of this new knowledge claim. Instead, Brooke placed himself in the role of author. He did so by verifying its efficacy, reporting it to the London society, and providing samples of the shrub so that the society’s members could test the tea for themselves. Brooke thereby transformed local American knowledge into a form that his European audience would have seen as acceptable, stable, and even universal. […]

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[T]he authority of Amerindians and blacks regarding New World nature was critical to the success of British plantation societies. Colonists relied on the expertise of Amerindians and free and enslaved blacks to tend fields, heal the sick, serve as pathfinders and guides, navigate local waterways, prepare food, and perform a host of other duties that relied on detailed local knowledge about the natural world. Knowledge of the medicinal and culinary properties of local plants, in particular, was a practical necessity. Enslaved Africans adapted their rich heritage of herbalism and healing […]. The success of plantations relied on the appropriation of both the labor and the specialized agricultural knowledge of enslaved Africans […]. From the rice field to the sick room, the authority of Amerindians and free and enslaved blacks to speak locally as experts about American nature was reaffirmed daily. […]

Yet it was quite another thing to be represented as the author of new scientific knowledge before a European audience. […] Rather than being antiauthors who left almost no trace in published accounts, black and indigenous informants’ presence in colonials’ publications and correspondence lent epistemological authority to their texts. As Parrish has argued, some claims even required indigenous or African origins in order for them to be credible. That colonial naturalists relied on a person of Amerindian or African descent is made clear in their various texts, yet the identity of the particular informant was rarely provided. […] Historians of science have noted the importance of identity for establishing the credibility of claims in early modern natural philosophy. The Royal Society, for example, included the names of the gentlemen who witnessed an experiment, trusting that the credibility of the individual gentlemen would translate into credibility for the experiment […]. Slaves and Indians did not, therefore, appear in naturalists’ texts as fellow claimants or as independent authors of new knowledge. Rather, they appeared as necessary components of white naturalists’ credibility - in essence, instruments of their knowledge creation. […]

Colonials positioned themselves as not merely the brokers or go-betweens of American natural knowledge, but as alchemists of sorts, turning the base materials of local knowledge into something more precious.

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All text above by: Kathleen S. Murphy. “Translating the vernacular: Indigenous and African knowledge in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic.” Atlantic Studies Volume 8, Issue 1, pages 29-48. March 2011. DOI at: doi dot org/10.1080/14788810.2011.541188 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

I think a lot about postcolonial itself and of course love. […]

When I think about postcolonial […] [i]t should be a series of acts or practices or a way that I encounter and move my body or the way that I encounter others and respect or honor [them] […] in some way. […] That’s like the luck and the question of and the desire that language inspires in me or offers me is that […] the real interaction I have with language is not that a word means something but what I might do in a relationship to that word on my way toward it […].

When I’m thinking about ideas of translation, I’m thinking a lot like many of us are about knowledge […]. But when I’m thinking about these knowledges - and there are many indigenous artists who speak about this […] - but the importance of having a knowledge that I don’t have to translate and most importantly that can’t be translated, that, to me, is an intimacy […]. I guess, the basic ways I’m thinking about this is that because we live in America, because the power of Western structures […] of empire, of nation, and the government, all of these things, because they have created this system in which they decide what […] to extract […]. This is why we don’t let indigenous peoples into certain conversations. This is why we don’t want […] trans, non-binary, and non-gender conforming peoples in conversations. […]

To me, we have a knowledge with each other that other people might not understand. […] I do not know what it’s like to be a black queer woman which is a knowing my partner has, she does not know what it’s like to be a native, a Mojave […], and that doesn’t mean we won’t build our own knowledges together […]. I really believe in misunderstanding or not understanding. I think it’s one of the most natural states of our being and yet here we are together. Here we are and living in that tension and it really is that tension where we exist as a third or a fourth entity. […]

I do think love […]. I think that it is the willingness, the ability or the luck of being in the space between what we know of one another and again very valuably what we don’t know about one another and yet can still be alongside. […] [E]verything else is naturally in relationship to other beings and other life, whether it’s my river or the plant. For me, a place I think a lot about is for the stranger. What does that mean for the stranger to treat the stranger as a beloved […].

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[We are] constantly pressing on this idea of, “What do we mean by human? Who can even be human […]?” [U]nimaginable violence […]. Who knows how many American drones right now are moving toward autonomous death […]. [S]ometimes the smallest gesture […] I think of them as touch. […] It’s lucky that there’s evidence or there’s a reply back that the things I do touch other people’s lives […]. [I]t’s language beyond language. […] [We are] demanding something beyond a statistic […]. America has put on us a stamp in some ways. The same terrible mathematics that created and maintained chattel slavery for so long. To me, one of the true losses is the offed separation of what this empire has done to anyone outside the recognizable and familiarity with a flesh body of power. […] There’s no word I can put on the system of enslavement in America and how that has not stopped. It has just reorganized itself throughout time […]. We’re in a state where brown, black, queer, trans, and all of these other people, people in general, are not allowed to defend themselves. […] [W]e have to be passive, submissive, not speak back […]. It’s like, “No, we want to live.” If you want to live, life is such that you will fight for that life no matter what you have to do. […] I think too, just about […] any kind of life, to watch a plant push up through the ground in the desert, and to watch it incrementally try to live. […] I am most sensual in those moments of anger. It doesn’t mean I lose my mind in it, but […] to not have my mind pretending it knows more than what my body in that moment is sensual to what’s happening. For me, that’s something that is very much American Empire, what we might call White Supremacy […]. But Western culture has tried so hard to dislocate us from our different sensualities […].

As much as those violences and angers also teach us about what is tender, what is touch. […] I don’t just mean identity but genealogies like, “Where have you come from? How did you arrive here?” It’s not even necessarily about how you arrived here but now that you’re here, how do we arrive to place? Then now that you’re here, how do I receive and how do we receive one another in this place? It truly is a practice that I’m still learning. […] I teach in the academy. That’s one of the most extractive structures of knowledge. I struggle with it a lot. What does it mean to be a part of the academy […]? I had said, “I don’t know that poetry is a home. I believe it is one pathway home, either to return me to home or to carry me to a home that doesn’t exist yet.”

I’m thinking about what language is. It was a gift […].

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We had an adult [Mojave language] learner who was just fed up in this conversation, he’s like, “Listen, I just need to be able to tell my son that I love him, he was eight years old.” Our elders said, “We don’t have a word for love, there’s no word for love.” She was getting increasingly emotional. She’s like, “Well, we have to be able to say something, it can’t just be that we don’t have love.” Of course, we know the sentiment or whatever the emotional condition of that is. Finally, one of the elders, her aunt, said, “Well, what is it you want to tell him?”

The learner had no words. She held her chest, she made some gestures like where her son might be standing next to her, where there was nobody there, and like back to her chest.

She was crying, because she’d reached a point where she felt failed by language, she felt like a failure in some ways to this language, she felt it was challenging what it means to be Mojave, and who we are. When she breaks down, our elders do what they do, because they’re not old people, they’re beyond that, they’re an energy that is who we are.

Among the few that were there, they were like, “Okay, we know what that means, you want to say, I would die for you.”

“You want to say you are my eye.” […]

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That’s a little bit of a constellation I carry with me constantly about language, about its physicality, where it comes from […]. [A]s much as I’m a very tiny part in whatever energy is of the world, I feel like the land imagined me. […] I feel like, “You know what, Natalie, quit pretending you know something.” There’s a certain care I want to have with language in this space […]. I just want to be careful, and I don’t mean careful as in not making a mistake […]. I want it to be another way of touch, like I say touching myself or someone I love or someone I don’t know. […] How do we keep that space in between? Which is unknown, which is fallibility of language, fallibility of imagination, and also the complete possibility of it. […] [M]y great grandmother was the first person I lost in a way that I knew what loss was. […] For me, the reason why I’m bringing her up is because she was the first person who taught me that I did love, and I learned it when she was gone. It’s not that I didn’t feel things like it, but when she was gone, my body understood what love was. […] [S]he was a double amputee, she required insulin shots, she had wounds. We had to be very careful with small things like giving her a cup […]. [S]he would ask me to rub her legs which were not there, I did it for her. I didn’t question her. I didn’t understand it. But I don’t know that there was a truer touch than me touching what was not there […].

The ways I touch people is the way I exist.

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All text above are the words of: Natalie Diaz. Interviewed by David Naimon. Transcript from: “Between the Covers Natalie Diaz Interview.” Between the Covers Podcast. Produced by Tin House. November 2020. Published at: tinhouse dot com/transcript/between-the-covers-natalie-diaz-interview/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]