Unruly River and Plantation Logics

Abstract

In this contribution to the Plantationocene forum, we ask what and how the Plantationocene allows us to see. Considering the unruly Colorado, we think through how both the delimitation of time into epochs in the form of “cenes” and the search for plantation logics might limit what we can see and understand, by excluding the unruliness of both nature and people, and by insisting on a historical vision that maintains European agency, even if rendered as a problem. We turn to other theories of time and place to attend to the forms of life that confound settler colonial plantation logics and ask whether, despite scholars’ intentions to create a critical model of our entangled social and environmental planetary histories, the Plantationocene instead risks producing Native absence.