Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology's “Regional Closets”

Abstract

AbstractIn 2015, Donna Haraway introduced the Plantationocene concept as an alternative to the Anthropocene in Environmental Humanities. Engaging Black feminist scholars who were thinking about the plantation before Haraway's Plantationocene, this article argues that a transregional centering of Black feminist scholarship within plantation studies is a mutually productive and ethical endeavor that affirms the rightful place of Black feminist scholars in the field of anthropology and builds more robust transnational feminist forms of restorative justice. Analyzing Black, Indigenous and feminist critiques of the Plantationocene, this article is a “reparative reading” (Sedgewick 2003) response to Lynn Bolles' call to identify the “ways of ‘miseducation’ in anthropology” (Bolles 2013, 58) and seeks to repair the erasure of Black feminists' contributions to plantation studies outside the Americas and Afro‐Caribbean contexts, specifically in South Asian studies. Situating new research among landless, minority Tamil plantation residents through a re‐reading of plots on Sri Lanka's tea plantations, I suggest that thinking alongside Black feminist scholarship outside plantation studies' “regional closets” (Alexander 2005) is not only an ethical choice but also one of co‐survival and liberation within the white habitus (Bonilla‐Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006) of anthropology.