Indonesia’s Plantationocene

Abstract

In this short article I explore what a race-centered concept of the Plantationocene, developed mainly by scholars working in the Americas, yields analytically when it travels to another context. Race is not a concept in common use in contemporary Indonesia. Yet Cedric Robinson’s expanded concept of racialism as the practice of forging differences among people for the purpose of extraction, while treating such differences as innate, is profoundly resonant. To make this argument I first outline Indonesia’s colonial plantation regime and its racialized legacies. Then I draw on ethnographic research I conducted with Pujo Semedi to show how contemporary oil palm plantation corporations produce a racialized form of difference as a core element of their social, spatial, and political organization. In Indonesia’s plantation zone, I suggest, racialism is embedded in routine practices and arrangements, and so thoroughly normalized it passes without note.