Subalternization of a Postplantation City

Abstract

This short piece for a special forum on the Plantationocene responds to Wendy Wolford’s article in the Annals on this topic, with an appreciation of its conditions of possibility in the challenge that Black Geographies has made to the whiteness of Anglo-American geography. Rather than presuming a plantation logic, I suggest returning to the complexity of the agrarian Marxist tradition, also in geography, recognizing its failure to learn from the theoretical contributions of people of color who comprise the planetary majority. Shifting gears, I turn to a surprising historical geography of space making from the South African city of Durban, in which postplantation subalterns effected a surprising transformation in the peripheries and interstices of the racist city, through spatial practices that still hold the seeds of proletarian survival and collective Black liberation.