Countering durian plantationocene visuality and the erasure of natureculture histories in Malaysia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Large-scale durian plantations are now a major threat, causing deforestation and displacing the Orang Asli, the aboriginal peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, from their customary lands. This paper focuses on visual representations of the durian plantations and/or forest to discuss two contrasting views of the landscape. We analyse durian plantation corporate investment videos wooing public investors and videos of the Temiar Orang Asli’s resistance against forced evacuations by the durian companies in Gua Musang, Kelantan. The landscape presented in the corporate video is one that silently but violently erases the Indigenous Peoples of the land and their natureculture histories through high modernist ideology and aesthetics. Counterposing the corporate plantationocene visuals against the raw footage from the amateur videos shot on mobile phones, the Orang Asli galvanize emotionally moving countervisuality as witness to their resistance against the violence enacted by corporate occupation. By doing so, they are actively using visual documentation to tell their side of the story and to demand justice. Drawing from posthumanism, environmental humanities and critical visual studies, this paper presents a decolonial critique of the modernist/developmentalist discourse and highlights the violence of the erasure of natureculture in an extractive economy.