Plantation Worlds

By: Maan Barua

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Synopsis: In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
Book Size:: 312 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9781478025610
Related ISBNs:: 9781478020868
Publisher:: Duke University Press
Date of Addition:: 08/30/24
Copyrighted By:: Artists Rights Society
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: Nonfiction, Outdoors and Nature, Social Studies, Earth Sciences
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.