#black methodologies

[fatehbaz]

From July 20 to July 30, 1874, an estimated 12.5 trillion insects flew over an area encompassing 198,000 square miles between Minnesota and the Rio Grande [...]. [T]he red-legged creatures [the now-extinct Rocky Mountain locust] devoured entire fields [...]. The hoppers also gnawed curtains and clothing hung up to dry [...]. There were reports of hordes of grasshoppers so thick they halted a Union Pacific train at Stevenson station, near Kearney, Nebraska. [...] [C]hickens and turkeys feasted on grasshoppers. The digested insects tainted the meat and eggs with a reddish-brown oil. [...] Conservative estimates put the grasshopper damage to agriculture in 1874 at [...] 74 percent of the total value of U.S. farm products. [...]

In addition to the unprecedented size, scope, and duration of the 1874 grasshopper plague, [...] the nation suffered from financial panic caused by the September 1873 collapse of the banking house of Jay Cooke and Company ["the Panic of 1873"]. [...] Initially, governors and local officials also hesitated to admit the extent of the grasshopper damage for fear that negative publicity about the region would impede development and investment. [...] Newspapers [...] resisted reporting negative details [...] as a result of their dual role as both local media and unofficial immigration agents promoting western settlement. [...]

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The history of the grasshopper relief effort illustrates the particular attitudes of local and federal officials, western promoters, and easterners toward charity during the nineteenth century. [...]

Inherent skepticism of unrestricted charity and the belief that, with the exception of natural disaster victims, the poor were mainly to blame for their own situation influenced the grasshopper relief effort in 1874-75. Victims received public and private support because the nation viewed them as deserving poor, meaning that their condition had not resulted from their immorality, idleness, or individual failure. [...]

The response to the grasshopper plague of 1874-75 was similar to that following the 1871 Chicago Fire, which caused nearly $200 million in damage. Both disasters, although local or regional in nature, drew national interest and the sympathy of residents living in the East [...]. Similar to western boosters who argued that too much aid might render farmers "soft," many prosperous Chicagoans had feared unfettered charity and the "potential dark side" of fire relief in 1871. [...]

According to historian Karen Sawislak, the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, an organization established by the mayor and composed primarily of wealthy citizens, was "internally at war between a form of humanitarianism and conservative impulses, between a commitment to aid the poor and a desire to preserve what they viewed as the proper social order of their city." [...]

As a result [...], the Chicago relief society required a thorough investigation of every person seeking assistance.

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The Nebraska Relief and Aid Association employed similar "tests" for grasshopper victims to ensure that only "worthy" residents received temporary aid. To receive assistance, Nebraska farmers pledged an oath that they possessed nothing of value that could be sold for food or clothing. In a letter published in the Worcester Daily Spy, a Nebraska man described this process: If a man wants help he must go to one of the officers of the relief society and make a sworn statement that he has got nothing that he can sell to get anything with [...].

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As winter edged closer, many western newspapers that had downplayed the extent of the suffering now urged officials to appeal for outside assistance [...]: Thrift, enterprise, industry, and economy was exhibited in and around nearly every poor cabin I visited [...].

In 1876 Governor John S. Pillsbury of Minnesota organized and chaired a conference in Omaha on October 25-26 for governors and scientists from grasshopper states. [...] In concluding that the Rocky Mountain locust presented a problem too great for anyone state to handle, the governors recognized and justified federal assistance to farmers [...].

In 1877, for example, the Nebraska Legislature passed the "Grasshopper Act," which labeled the insect a "public enemy" and required all able-bodied citizens to assemble and fight the pest.

Calling for a sort of "grasshopper army," the law mandated that all male residents between the ages of sixteen and sixty perform two days' labor eradicating grasshoppers after they hatched. Non-compliance brought a $10 fine."

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Similarly, when a warm spring in 1877 caused thousands of grasshopper eggs to hatch prematurely in Dakota Territory, Governor John L. Pennington proclaimed May 4 a day of "humiliation, fasting and prayer" and ordered fields with eggs to be burned immediately. Banks, businesses, and schools closed to allow Dakota citizens to observe the proclamation and help ward off a possible invasion.

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The initial reactions by western newspaper editors and officials to deny the need for outside assistance reflected the widespread belief that welfare should be local and limited. Later, when soliciting donations from other states, western delegates tried to maintain the public perception of western farmers as brave, patriotic, and resilient. [...] Skepticism of unfettered charity [...] and the need to exhaust local resources before appealing for outside assistance guided the response [...].

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All text above by: Alexandra M. Wagner. "Grasshoppered: America's Response to the 1874 Rocky Mountain Locust Invasion." Nebraska History 89 (2008): 154-167. URL: http :// www. nebraskahistory . org /publish/publicat/history /full-text/ NH2008Grasshoppered.pdf [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[means-testing the poor. framing settler agriculture as "patriotic". Chicago institutions acting like Chicago institutions. bugs fucking up railroad companies. btw: despite the swarms of billions, Rocky Mountain locusts were extinct less than thirty years later.]

[fatehbaz]

Who gets to be human? On Black geographies, damned people living in inhospitable places, other ways of knowing and being, and racist legacy of European academic epistemologies.

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The idea of the plantation is migratory. [...] 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 […]. If we believe that the city [the prison, the resort, other "postcolonial spaces"] 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 […]. [R]acial violence haunts, [...] the struggles we face, intellectually, are a continuation of plantation narratives that dichotimize geographies into us/them and hide secretive histories that undo the teleological [...] underpinnings of [colonial, imperial, modern] spatiality.

Text by: Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 3, November 2013 (No. 42), pages 1-15. [Emphasis mine.]

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Registering the marine world as central to the making of modernity - from slave ships and sea-borne empires to container logistics and the industrialized extraction of its resources (from fish to fossil fuels) - we encounter the constant of colonialism in the haunting racism that produces the violent grammar of inhospitality, today etched on the body of the contemporary migrant. [...] This is to interrupt and rework Occidental historiography, sociology, and philosophy, and to puncture their faith in rendering the world transparent to their will. […] Promoting the instability of critical language is to take responsibility for what Achille Mbembe calls the becoming-black of the world: where the production of subjection provokes alternative knowledge, practices, and politics […]. Today the increasing use of drones in the Mediterranean as part of the technology of governance marks the latest abandonment of social responsibility to the bio-surveillance of unwanted bodies and discarded lives. Smart borders take migrants far below the category of “bare life,” [...] and extends the racial profiling written into the historical premises that betray their deep incubation in the refusal to register the languages and limits of the white myths [...]. From the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean: seas of dispossession and unbelonging have constantly demonstrated the political, juridical, and onto-epistemological limits of modernity. They promote a constant critique of the epistemic foundations of Western [colonial "liberalism"]. Those on the water, the wretched of the sea, the damned [...], who cannot source their identity in the territory of the nation-state, are without rights. They have no social [...] validity. [...] Yet they simultaneously [...] exist, persist, and resist. [...] The algorithm sputters in the dark while cut-up, bricolage, collage, and montage work the critical gaps [...]. The archives unwind to expose other computations of time and further folds in space: the promise of foreign cartographies [...].

Text by: Iain Chambers. A section by Chambers in the essay co-authored by Tiziana Terranova and Iain Chambers. “Technology, Postcoloniality, and the Mediterranean.” e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021. [Emphasis mine.]

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[T]he framing of the inhumanities forces a reckoning with the humanist liberal subject that orders the humanities: an invisible and indivisible white subject position [...]. In Césaire’s (2000 [1972]) Discourse on Colonialism, he suggested that “at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism [...]”. In another searing critique of [White, European, liberal/colonial] humanism, Fanon (1961) tied the unrealized figure of a true humanism to the earth, as a wretched counterpoint, whereby the inhuman residues of the colonial project abide as discarded matter […]. Those blackened colonial afterlives in “modernity’s project of unfreedom” (Walcott 2014, 94) are still very much present in the political geologies of climate change vulnerabilities, the wasting effects of racial capitalism, and neo-extractivist economies […]. The narrative arc of humanism, Scott (2000) suggested in conversation with Wynter, is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age humanist script [...]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of man [as universal concept] was underscored by the racial division of life and nonlife. […] In its simplest iteration, there are forms of life on one side and nonlife on the other; nonlife that is constituted through death, and more recently in Mbembe and Povinelli’s writing through forms of social death, exhaustion, and extinguishment, wherein nonlife emerges as a zone of governance. The gravitational pull that centers these divisions between life and nonlife is the human subject as it is conceived through a Western normative frame [...]. As new forms of racialized beings were articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century paleontology in the context of colonialism, geology was also articulating new origins of the earth, as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). [...] Historically, this normative sphere of humanism was racist and specifically antiblack, and without challenging that history, it remains so, every time the universal or human is invoked. Some of the greatest challenges, of course, came from anticolonial thinkers struggling to make sense of their painful histories in their fullest terms, such as Fanon (1959, 1961), Césaire, Glissant, C. L. R. James and Wynter. As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of humanism that underlies it” (154). For Wynter (2000), “what is called the West [...] begins with the founding of post-1492 Caribbean” (152). Wynter challenged the geographical imaginary that the Americas and Caribbean are somehow an epistemological outside to Western knowledge […].

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020. [Emphasis mine.]

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But what becomes of the native-occupied “uninhabitable” zones is a geo-racial reorganization. The “new symbolic construct of race,” which coincided with post-1492 colonial arrangements, was spatially organized according to a new […] logic. […] That is, the uninhabitable […] is underscored by racial and sexual differences. To transform the [land] […], and make this transformation profitable, the land must become a site of racial-sexual regulation, a geography that maps “a normal way of life” […] This is expressed through uneven geographies: spatial arrangements [...]. The inhabitability [...] also produces [...] forms of geographic nonexistence, which differ from what was assumed was "not there." [...] [W]hat Edouard Glissant describes as the "real but long unnoticed" places [...]: cultural sharings, new poetics, new ways of being [...]. Those who occupy the spaces of Otherness are always already encountering space and therefore articulate how genres or modes of humanness are intimately connected to where we/they are ontologically as well as geographically. To return to an earlier discussion, spaces of Otherness are “palpitating with life.” [...]

Text by: Katherine McKittrick. “Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter.” Demonic Grounds: Black Women and The Cartographies of Struggle. 2006. [Emphasis mine.]

[fatehbaz]

Giebert secured Liebig's agreement to produce extract of meat on the Rio Uruguay, and [...] Liebig's Extract of Meat Company (henceforth Liebig's) was founded [...]. By the early 1870s, extract was being produced and shipped directly to Europe [...]. Their vast factories were fed by vaster ranches, and the company became one of the largest landowners on the American continent [...]. Their phenomenal growth was secured in the early 20th century by the invention of a dry stock cube, aimed at a mass market: the Oxo cube. Liebig, then, was not just a scientist, but an entrepreneur and a European celebrity [...]. [H]undreds of thousands of cattle, bred on millions of hectares of land, were slaughtered by thousands of hands, and boiled by hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal, to produce a salty goop. [...]

But Liebig's were not alone in building agricultural and industrial food empires in this part of South America. Liebig's’ major competitor was another British food company, Bovril. [...] Bovril was founded by an Edinburgh butcher, John Lawson Johnston. [...] By the 1890s it was a multimillion-pound business, not least thanks to their own extraordinarily successful marketing [...].

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Key to that success was its memorable name: Bovril came from bos, or bovine.

But Vril?

Lawson Johnston was an enthusiastic imperialist (see Figure 1), and a fan of a blockbuster novel, first published in 1871 by the sometime Secretary of State for the Colonies, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, called The Coming Race.

The heroic figures at the centre of the novel are a race of superhumans. They are wise and strong and balanced. Their insights and cultural strength are produced by a force which they can channel to powerful effect. That force is Vril.

The novel, and the virile race of the Vril-Ya, became a cultural phenomenon, with huge readerships and cultural spin-offs like the three-day-long 1891 Vril-Ya Bazaar at the Royal Albert Hall, a kind of Victorian Comic Con.

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In the novel, Bulwer-Lytton was responding to fears over the demise of white Europeans as a race. He was writing at the end of a long crisis of European soil fertility, and growing awareness of hunger and malnourishment.

Johnston was directly channelling these concerns to suggest that meat, and meat extract, was not just a saviour of the physical man, but of the metaphysical empire. It was a bulwark against the demise of European virility.

The connections between meat, race, and the white imperial subject were explicit in Bovril [...]. The subterranean Vril-Ya offered a utopian vision of a revived imperial subject. [...] In Britain, fears of degeneration reached a peak in the early 20th century, with the Anglo–Boer War [...]. In one famous 1905 Bovril poster, a huge cow leans over a small bottle of Bovril: “Alas! My Poor Brother” (see Figure 2). The whole strength of the beast is miraculously distilled into the tiny bottle. [...]

In the opening chapters of The Coming Race, we meet the narrator, an American, visiting a mine in Africa [...]. The affiliation between racial and geological thinking is no coincidence [...]. The central premise of advertising stock cubes and Bovril was always the same: to consume a stock cube was to consume vastness. The mighty atom, the ox in a box, the bull in a bottle. [...]

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Bovril and Liebig's relied on low-quality cattle, cheap land, and arid, natural pastures [...]. Demand for land took Liebig's and Bovril to Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay, and then to Namibia, Rhodesia, Sudan, South Africa, and Australia. [...] Firstly, in South America: enclosure; secondly, in Southern Africa, colonialism, expulsion, and the land grant; finally, in Australia: slavery and primitive accumulation. [...]

With the creation of this new corporate structure [...] [Bovril] “owned 438,000 acres of freehold land [...]." The jewel in the crown was the estancia of Las Talas, from where ranching operations were directed. Bovril bought Las Talas from Kemmerich, who appears to have bought it from the family of the former Governor of Entre Ríos and Argentine Minister of War Pascual Echagüe, who died there in 1867 [...]. Echagüe was a key figure in frontier expansion. [...] Echagüe was partly, no doubt, thinking of his own land: he had been Minister of War under Urquiza during genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples in the Chaco in the 1850s. These campaigns, like those to “conquer the desert” in the south, “enriched the military corporation itself, since the state rewarded officers [with land] [...]." The legacy of this fresh conquest was embedded in Bovril's and Liebig's’ land empires in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. [...]

Liebig's was a transnational company. In Rhodesia, the company mobilised an intimate relationship with the British imperial state. In 1911, they secured the single largest colonial land grant: a ranch of over half a million hectares, larger, by an order of magnitude, than any other concession in the colony. The probity of this land acquisition came under parliamentary scrutiny over reports of slavery, dispossession, expulsion of Indigenous groups [...].

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But all that land, cattle, and effort, would never have been mustered if British people had not taken, by their millions, to the malty, salty tastes of Oxo and Bovril.

Imperialism was central to their appeal. The companies used famous imperialists like Stanley as spokespeople (see Figure 5), actively supported campaigns by Cecil Rhodes, and became the quasi-official food of imperial armies in the Boer War and beyond [...].

This is a mirror of McClintock's focus on the "individual" dimensions [...]. [He] argues that “the expropriation and commodification of land and nature … rends not only a material rift between land and labour but also an internalized rift in our cognitive and experiential understanding of ourselves as functional organisms existing as a part of a larger ecosystem” [...].

The companies made imperial dominion over land into a consumable product. They also [...] made dominion itself an ownable asset [...]. Through these companies and their practices, the notion of whiteness as dominion became more than an elite ideology operating among those who actually owned the earth, but a mass phenomenon, transmitted through forms of share ownership, consumption, and identification.

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All text above by: Archie Davis, "Race in the Metabolic Rift: The Metaphor and Materiality of Whiteness," Antipode, volume 57, issue 5 (22 May 2025): pages 1846-1871. DOI: https : // doi . org /10.1111 /anti.70029 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me for accessibility. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[fatehbaz]

Originally, I'd attached these tags about British imperial forestry to a post about United States treatment of forests, Indigenous peoples, and land administration from 1900-ish to 1935-ish, during a transition period when clear-cutting logging was threatening profit so the US turned to a German-/British-influenced "sustained yield" forestry paradigm:

And in response, someone added:

In the midst of the first Empire Forestry Conference of scientists, academics, and colonial administrators in 1920, the chairman of the Forestry Commission of Britain, Lord Lovat, said that forests were "grown for use and not for mere ornament ... Forests are national assets only so far as they supply the raw material for industrial development."

Rajan (in Modernizing Nature) directly quotes professor of forestry at Oxford, R.S. Troup, who had been influential in the Indian forest service; at the same forestry conference in 1920, Troup promoted sustained yield like this: "Conservation was a 'wise and necessary measure' but it was 'only a stage towards the problem of how best to utilise the forest resources of the empire'. The ultimate ideal was economic management [...], which regarded forests as capital assets, fixed annual yields in such a manner as to exploit 'to the full interest on this capital [...]' and aimed for equal annual yields so as to sustain the market and provide regular supplies of timber to industry."

An accessible summary of the shift to sustained yield: [Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Economic Development, 1800-1950. S. Ravi Rajan. 2006.] Concise look at the trajectory from Royal Navy timber reserves; to British foresters training in German traditions before joining as officers in the powerful British-Indian land administration bureaucracy and then training US land managers.

From Rajan:

"[An] extremely important aspect to the repackaging [of forestry science and management] [...] [and] a critical principle that stands out here is that of sustained yield, or sustainability (Nachhaltigekeit). This concept was fundamental [...]. By the turn of the [twentieth] century a large pan-colonial [British-United States] scientific community was in existence, trained in the German and French tradition of forestry [...]. Following the revolt of 1857, the government of [British] India sought to pursue active interventionist policies [...]. Experts were deployed as 'scientific soldiers' [...]. Dietrich Brandis [...], considered the founder of Indian forestry [...] married Rachel Marshman, who was [...] also the sister of the wife of General Havelock, a close friend of Lord Dalhouse, the then governor-general of India. On Havelock's recommendation, Brandis was put in charge of the forests of [...] Burma [...] and was subsequently appointed inspector-general of forests of India. [...] He also trained prospective foresters of the forest department of the USA, including Gifford Pinchot. [...] Chancellor Bismarck gave the visiting British Prime Minister Gladstone an oak sapling [...]. Prussia prided itself on helping devise [...] modern forest management. [...] [T]he Forestry Commision [...], [or] [t]he Imperial Visionaries, as they became known, believed that an increase in primary production in the tropical dependent empire would result in the growth of the British economy. [...] They deemed their own job to be serving the imperial economy."

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And this may sound stark to us today, but this early twentieth-century pitch is actually kinda toned-down compared to the framing that British land managers used earlier in the nineteenth century, which had sought to turn much of India into a "forest products" extraction hub. First for British Navy ship construction and extracting Mysore's spices and timber, then for railroad construction and things like teak, and then grassland ecosystems and Himalayan foothills were deliberately converted to more "industrious" monoculture timber plantations of pine and acacia species which Britain imported from Canada and Australia respectively.

Elsewhere, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley described it like this:

'These forest reserves [...] did not necessarily represent "an atavistic interest in preserving the 'natural' [...]" but rather "a more manipulative and power-conscious interest in constructing new landscapes [...]."' While Sharae Deckard adds: '[T]he subversive potential of the "green" critique [...] was defused by the extent to which growing environmental sensibilities enabled imperialism to function more efficiently by appropriating botanical knowledge and indigenous conservation methods [...].'

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This has also been covered by:

Vinita Damodaran, Richard Grove, Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Jonathan Saha, Gregory Barton, Rohan D'Souza.

More summaries of the situation (shorter length, accessible):

"Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism? European Forestry, Colonial Forests and the Agenda of Forest Management in the British Empire, 1800-1900". S. Ravi Rajan, In: Nature and Orient: Essays on Environmental History of South and South East Asia, 1998.

"'Dominion over palm and pine': the British Empire forestry conferences, 1920-1947". J.M. Powell, Journal of Historical Geography, Volume 33, Issue 4, October 2007.

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And the book:

Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History: Empire, Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand.

Edited by Damodaran and D'Souza, with work from conferences hosted by Grove, in 19 chapters including:

"Worlds Apart? The Scottish Forestry Tradition and the Development of Forestry in India" (K. Jan Ootheok); "Redeeming Wood by Destroying the Forest: Shola, Plantations and Colonial Conservancy on the Nilgiris in the Nineteenth Century" (Deborah Sutton); "Nature's Tea Bounty: Plant Colonialism and 'Garden' Capitalism in the British Empire" (Jayeeta Sharma); "Industrialized Rainforests: The Ecological Transformation of the Sri Lankan Highlands, 1815-1900"; "Forestry and Social Engineering in the Miombo Woodlands of South-Eastern Tanganyika" (Thaddeus Sunseri)

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And also:

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. GA Barton, 2002.

"Colonialism and Green Science: History of Colonial Scientific Forestry in South India, 1820-1920". VM Ravikumar Vejendala, Indian Journal of History of Science, 47:2, pages 241-259, 2012.

"Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Unearthing the Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History." Vinitia Damodaran and Richard Grove, in Nature's End: History and the Environment, 2009.

"The Reconfiguration of Scientific Career Networks in the Late Colonial Period: The Case of Food and Agriculture Organization and the British Colonial Forestry Service" by Jennifer Gold, and "A Network Approach to the Origins of Forestry Education in India, 1855-1885" by Brett M. Bennett. Both chapters are form Science and Empire, 2011.

Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism. Joseph Morgan Hidge, in Series in Ecology and History, 2007.

Nature and Nation: Forests and Development in Peninsular Malaysia. Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, 2005. And also: "Peninsular Malaysia in the context of natural history and colonial science." Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, 2009.

"Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 1". Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Lee Peluso, Environment and History 12, no. 1, pages 31-64, February 2006.

[fatehbaz]

Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity, a way in which subjects get (what Wynter names) “selected” or “dysselected” from geography and coded into colonial possession through dispossession. The color line of the colonized was not merely a consequence of these structures of colonial power or a marginal effect of those structures; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). Richard Eden, in the popular 1555 publication Decades of the New World, compares the people of the “New World” to a blank piece of “white paper” on which you can “paynte and wryte” whatever you wish. “The Preface to the Reader” describes the people of these lands as inanimate objects, blank slates [...]. [Basically, "Man" is white, while non-white people are reduced to an aspect of the landscape, a resource.] Wynter suggests that we [...] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people [...]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. This refiguring of slaves trafficked to gold mines is borne into the language of the inhuman [...].

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The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, [...] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in [...] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. [...] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here [...]. While [this industrialization] [...] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with [...] coal [in the nineteenth century], the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) [...]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery [...].

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Catherine Hall’s project Legacies of British Slave-Ownership makes visible the complicity in terms of structures of slavery and industrialization that organized in advance the categories of dispossession that are already in play and historically constitute the terms of racialized encounter of the Anthropocene. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. As the project empirically demonstrates, these legacies of colonial slavery continue to shape contemporary Britain. A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and [...] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished and investments were made in the Great Western Cotton Company, for example, and in cotton brokers, as well as in big colonial land companies in Canada (Canada Land Company) and Australia (Van Diemen’s Land Company) and a number of colonial brokers. Investments were made in the development of metal and mineralogical technologies [...].

The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power [...]. The slave trade [...] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers from both the Caribbean plantations and the antebellum South. Enslaved “free” African Americans predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new “industrial slavery,” [...].

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The labor of the coffee - the carceral penance of the rock pile, “breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone, Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads - is the carceral future mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). [...] [T]he racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and empire building - and continues to sustain it.

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All text above by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. At: e-flux dot com slash journal/97/252226/white-utopia-black-inferno-life-on-a-geologic-spike/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity and context. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[fatehbaz]

British ships carrying plants and seeds from around the world arrived in Botany Bay on January 20 1788. This story is overshadowed by convict ships and Royal Navy vessels, but the cargo on board also had a lasting impact. Colonists, convicts and Indigenous Australians were all affected [...]. Some of these plants [...] were food sources [...]. Others were attempts to expand the British Empire. Could the new territory be exploited as a tropical plantation? In the parliamentary debate over destinations for convict transportation [considering potential locations for sending prisoners], Sir Joseph Banks and James Matra, both members of James Cook’s 1770 expedition [to the South Pacific], spruiked the potential of the new colony as an extension of the empire. Matra claimed the colony was “fitted for production” of “sugar-cane, tea, coffee, silk, cotton, indigo and tobacco”. Banks claimed Botany Bay was an “advantageous” site, with fertile soil [...].

Two plants carried by the First Fleet stand out as examples of botanical imperialism: prickly pear cactus (Opuntia) and sugarcane.

Banks, as head of the Royal Society of London [and as a close adviser to King George, and also as a plant-collecting botanist who turned the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London into the world's leading botanical garden], selected these species as experiments to compete with European trade rivals. His goal was to break a Spanish monopoly in producing fabric dye and to expand British cultivation of sugar outside the West Indies.

Prickly pear cactus was imported because it is the preferred food of the cochineal insect.

Dried cochineal were crushed to make a vibrant, colourfast scarlet dye for textiles. Discovered in the New World by Spanish colonists, cochineal replaced kermes, another insect that had provided red dye since antiquity. Cochineal dye was ten times stronger than kermes or vegetable dyes.

From cardinals’ capes to British officers’ red coats, cochineal was a product for elite consumers signifying power, wealth and prestige.

New Spain, based in Mexico, had a monopoly on cochineal. Banks wanted to break the stranglehold on the scarlet dye by establishing production in New South Wales.

Plants infested with the precious insects were imported from Brazil in 1788. The project soon failed when the cochineal died, but the cacti survived. Colonists used cacti as natural fences and drought-resistant animal fodder.

Without insects to feed on them the plants spread, uncontrolled, to cover more than 60 million acres of eastern Australia by the 1920s. Poison, crushing and fire failed to stop the cactus. [...] Opuntia cacti remain an environmental hazard. [...] The roots of these early imperial projects are deeply embedded in Australian culture and history, with an enduring legacy.

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All text above by: Garritt C. Van Dyk. "The botanical imperialism of weeds and crops: how alien plant species on the First Fleet changed Australia". The Conversation. 25 January 2024. [Some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized text within brackets added by me for clarity and context.

[fatehbaz]

When you tag things “#abolition”, what are you referring to? Abolishing what?

Prisons, generally. Though not just physical walls of formal prisons, but also captivity, carcerality, and carceral thinking. Including migration prevention and barriers to mobility; national borders; indentured servitude; inability to move due to, and labor coerced through, debt; police and policing; de facto imprisonment and isolation of the disabled and medically pathologized; privatization and enclosure of land; sacrifice zones at the periphery; the urge to punish; categories of “criminality"; and [nationalism, rent, debt, capitalism, plantation monoculture, etc., of course].

In favor of other, better lives and futures.

Specifically, I am grateful to have learned from the work of these people:

Katherine McKittrick on imaginative geographies; emotional engagement with place; legacy of imperialism/slavery in conceptions of physical space and in devaluation of other-than-human lifeforms; legacies of racism/imperialism in academia and the sciences; escaping enclosure; plantation “afterlives” and how plantation logics continue to thrive in contemporary structures/institutions like debt colonies, workplace environments, prisons, etc.; a range of rebellions through collaborative acts, refusal of the dominant order, and subversion through joy and autonomy.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on “abolition geography”.

Macarena Gomez-Barris on landscapes as “sacrifice zones”; people condemned to live in resource extraction colonies deemed as acceptable losses; place-making and ecological consciousness; and how “the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the prison” are analogous spaces of captivity.

Liat Ben-Moshe on disability; informal institutionalization and incarceration of disabled people through physical limitation, social ostracization, denial of aid, and institutional disavowal; and "letting go of hegemonic knowledge of crime”.

Achille Mbembe on co-existence and care; "necropolitics" and bare life/death; historical evolution of chattel slavery into contemporary institutions through control over food, space, and definitions of life/land; the “explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary resource extraction” and modern institutions.

Sylvia Wynter on the “plot against the plantation”; "plantation archipelagos"; the “revolutionary demand for happiness”; "secretive histories"; the remaking of the planet after Portuguese/Spanish plantation agriculture colonies from 1450s to 1490s cemented slavery and race in European practice in ways that infected discourses, sciences, institutions, ways of thinking.

Robin Maynard on "generative refusal"; solidarity; shared experiences among homeless, incarcerated, disabled, Indigenous, Black communities; to "build community with" those who you are told to disregard in order "to re-imagine" worlds; envisioning, imagining, and then manifesting those alternative futures which are "already" here and alive.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey on indentured labor; the role of plants, food, and botany in enslaved and fugitive communities; the nineteenth-century British Empire's labor in the South Pacific and Caribbean; the twentieth-century United States mistreatment of the South Pacific; the legacy of race/empire in academia and the sciences; panoptic imperial vision through cartography and aerial surveillance; and the role of tropical islands as "laboratories" for profit-oriented planting and isolated open-air prisons for Britain and the US.

AM Kanngieser on "deep listening"; “refusal as pedagogy”; and “attunement and attentiveness” in the face of “incomprehensible” and immense “loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities”.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on “the undercommons”; fugitivity; dis-order in academia and institutions; and sharing of knowledge; refusal; practice.

Lisa Lowe on "the intimacies of four continents" and how British politicians and planters feared that official legal abolition of chattel slavery would endanger Caribbean plantation profits, so they devised ways to import South Asian and East Asian laborers.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay on “rehearsals with others’.

Phil Neel on p0lice departments purposely targeting the poor as a way to raise municipal funds; the "suburbanization of poverty" especially in the Great Lakes region; the rise of lucrative "logistics empires" (warehousing, online order delivery, tech industries) at the edges of major urban agglomerations in "progressive" cities like Seattle dependent on "archipelagos" of poverty; and the relationship between job loss, homelessness, gentrification, and these logistics cities.

Leniqueca Welcome on Caribbean world-making; "the apocalyptic temporality" of environmental disasters and the colonial denial of possible "revolutionary futures"; limits of reformism; "infrastructures of liberation at the end of the world."; "abolition is a practice oriented toward the full realization of decolonization, postnationalism, decarceration, and environmental sustainability."

Tim Edensor on urban "ghosts" and “industrial ruins”; "haunting" in debris; searching for the “gaps” and “silences” in the official narratives of nations/institutions, to pay attention to the histories, voices, lives obscured in formal accounts.

Alison Mountz on migrant detention; "carceral archipelagoes"; and the “death of asylum”.

Ann Laura Stoler on "imperial debris" and ruination; haunting and "living in (postcolonial) ruins"; "imperialist nostalgia" and European leisure tourism as a form of intellectual/immaterial colonization related to the nineteenth-century "salvage" mission of colonial/imperial ethnography.

Elizabeth Povinelli on "geontopower"; imperial control over "life and death"; how imperial/nationalist formalization of private landownership and commodities relies on rigid definitions of dynamic ecosystems.

Pedro Neves Marques on “one planet with many worlds inside it”; “parallel futures” of Indigenous, Black, disenfranchised communities/cosmologies; and how imperial/nationalist institutions try to foreclose or prevent other possible futures by purposely obscuring or destroying histories, cosmologies, etc.

Peter Redfield on how metropolitan residents try to hide slavery and torture/punishment on the periphery of Empire; early twentieth-century French penal colony in tropical Guiana/Guyana; the torture of the prison relies on the metropolitan imagination's invocation of exotic hinterlands and racist civilization/savagery mythologies.

Iain Chambers on racism of borders; obscured and/or forgotten lives of migrants; and disrupting modernity.

Kodwo Eshun on African cosmologies and futures; “the colonial present”; and imperialist/nationalist use of “preemptive” and “predictive” power to control the official storytelling/narrative of history and to destroy alternatives.

Megan Ybarra on place-making; "site fights"; solidarity and defiance of migrant detention; and geography of abolition/incarceration.

Sophie Sapp Moore on resistance, marronage, and "forms of counterplantation life"; "plantation worlds" which continue to live in contemporary industrial resource extraction and dispossession.

Deborah Cowen on “infrastructures of empire and resistance”; imperial/nationalist control of place/space; spaces of criminality and "making a life at the edge" of the law; “fugitive infrastructures”.

Jasbir Puar on disability; debilitation; how the control of fences, borders, movement, and time management constitute conditions of de facto imprisonment; institutional control of illness/health as a weapon to "debilitate" people; how debt and chronic illness doom us to a “slow death”.

Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo on “remaining open to the gifts of the nonhuman” ecosystems; hinterlands and peripheries of empires; attentiveness to hidden landscapes/histories; defying surveillance; and building a world of mutually-flourishing companions.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on reciprocity; Indigenous pedagogy; abolitionism in Canada; camaraderie; solidarity; and “life-affirming” environmental relationships.

Anand Yang on "forgotten histories of Indian convicts in colonial Southeast Asia" and how the British Empire deported South Asian political prisoners to the region to simultaneously separate activists from their communities while forcing them into labor.

Avery Gordon on haunting; spectrality; the “death sentence” of being deemed “social waste” and being considered someone “without future”; "refusing" to participate; "escaping hell" and “living apart” by striking, squatting, resisting; cultivating "the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Black Atlantic"; alternative, utopian, subjugated worldviews; despite attempts to destroy these futures, manifesting these better worlds, imagining them as "already here, alive, present."

Kanwal Hameed and Katie Natanel on "liberation pedagogy"; sharing of knowledge and subversion of colonial legacy in universities; "anticolonial feminisms"; and “spaces of solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release”.

[fatehbaz]

In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental railroad [...]. [T]housands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work [...] on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. [...] Recruited and reviled as "coolies," their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers, whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th century. [...]

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Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the U.S. When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until 2015.

Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system.

In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as those workers came to be known, inaugurated [...] “a new system of [...] [indentured servitude],” which would endure for nearly a century. [...]

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Bonaparte [...] agreed to sell France's claims [...] to the U.S. [...] in 1803, in [...] the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue [Haiti] with their enslaved workers helped establish a booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana. On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. [...] On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings – Black people who did the backbreaking labor [...]. By the war’s end, approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value had vanished.

Desperate to regain power and authority after the war, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” [...].

Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana planters’ racial hope [...].

To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When 140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were “young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior to “the vast majority of our African population.” [...] But [...] [w]hen they heard that other workers earned more, they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away. The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871, were “fond of changing about, run away worse than [Black people], and … leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”

When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization for nearly a century.

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All text above by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022. [All bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]