Experimental Science for the ‘Bananapocalypse’: Counter Politics in the Plantationocene

Abstract

ABSTRACT The plantation has become a landscape of political impossibility. Its industrial modes of production and scientific management pose existential threats to local lifeways, stymie social justice movements, and unleash persistent ecological harms. This article argues that a renewed scientific sensibility offers a way to expand local strategies for transformative political praxis in the face of other political constraints. It introduces the notion of ‘science-in-vivo’, a method of experimentation that has emerged in the context of Philippine banana plantations ravaged by the ‘incurable’ fungal disease Fusarium Wilt Tropical Race Four, also known as Panama Disease. Literally ‘science within the living body’, the method combines secular and non-secular thought, and gathers human, nonhuman, and extrahuman forces in ways that break down some of the hegemonic antagonisms that define plantation life. It was inspired, originally, by a series of God-given dreams about microbes in the forests of southern Mindanao.