Worldmaking, Power, and Ecologies in the "Negrocene" J. T. Roane (bio) Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century. By Neel Ahuja. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 221 pages. $27.95 (paper). Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. By Malcom Ferdinand, translated by Anthony Paul Smith. New York: Polity Books, 2022. 300 pages. $24.95 (paper). Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice. By Hilda Lloréns. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. 224 pages. $30.00 (paper). Leaving Ocho Rios, we head into the mountains and the country, passing through Fern Gully, a lush green tent that encompasses the road's edges with ferns and a plethora of other tropical plants as well as large overhanging trees. We are heading to the homeplace of my partner's grandmother and mother, a well-kept home with land in rural St. Mary Parish, Jamaica. My partner's family introduces me to this place through their memories and stories of it. As we traverse farther into the mountains along the winding roads that extend from the North Coast into the interior, I grow in awe of the distinctive microclimates and vegetation through which we pass. At some point after the forest and series of cow farms and other places that my partner and his family point out along the way, the sweeping green of grass fields, ruinate, and forest are sometimes broken up by groupings of papayas, breadfruit, bananas, ginger, yam, various vegetables, and coffee. In some places the cultivation of these plants represents the vestiges of commercial farming, bananas still growing despite the loss of a processing plant long since abandoned following shifts in the geography of global crop production. Many farms remain, cultivating foodstuffs for local truck markets: we see a cabbage truck along the way, coming down likely to sell to wholesalers in bigger towns and cities on the coast [End Page 163] if not for export. Many of these cultivated plants, however, are set in small parcels of land adjoining homes and offer residents a cornucopia overhanging their aluminum rooftops and spreading out into the small parcels of land that surround their homes.1 After three trips into the country including a journey to Bob Marley's birthplace at Nine Mile, I come to identify breadfruit trees as places where houses are likely—even when I cannot see a house because an old structure has given way or, for some houses, because they are hidden behind a verdant wall as we wind through this mountainous topography. Breadfruits hanging above people's homes along with fruit trees, vegetable plots, chicken coops, and other evidence of food self-reliance suggest—at least to me as an outsider—Jamaica's enduring alternative modalities of cultivation and stewardship against the backdrop of the land tenure regime that evolved after slavery.2 I am indebted to Sylvia Wynter's theorization of the plot and its genealogy in the context of the Caribbean and specifically Jamaica for helping elucidate social-spatial relations translated from rural to urban communities in the US context.3 The plot's reorganization is as a living logic, a hybridized cultural praxis with capacity for incremental and radical transformation, translation, and translocation prompted by intracommunal dynamics and their expression in dialogic relation with the forces that impinge on Black placemaking from outside.4 Neither breadfruit nor banana nor many of the other plants that Jamaicans cultivate in their yards are indigenous to the region. Africans transplanted ackee, bananas, chocolate, plantains, and yam. Colonists brought breadfruit from the Pacific. However, it is in the partial indigenization of these plants, in excess of the logics and organization of mass production and profitability, that interests me as a point of connection and departure for this review. Around the diaspora, the plot and similar localized traditions serve as formations of basic food autonomy reflecting hybrid maroon and indigenous genealogies of cultivation, intimate through opposition with but not predetermined by the boom-and-bust cycling of settlement, extractivism, racial capitalist cultivation, ecocide, and disposal.5 This everyday practice of baseline food resilience and self-sufficiency resonates across the Atlantic in the South African context...
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May 11, 2023
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