The Global Plantation Symposium

Plantations were and are sites for labor and production. As physical, economic and material interventions in a landscape, they also exist powerfully in people’s imaginations. As our title suggests we are also interested in the plantation’s iterations across temporal and spatial geographies, for we wonder if the transformations they wrought across the globe might also create possibilities to imagine the intimacies and particularities of time and space differently.

We want to ask: how and where have plantations been imagined and represented and why? If the plantation is a site of convergence, of interspecies interaction and of human and commodity flows, what has been lost or occluded in the enduring representation of plantations as the opposite of industrial and “modern” sites of labor and production? What are the implications of a term like plantationocene? And while historically a site of unfree labor and enslavement in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, what alternative constructions of freedom, and other-worldly economies of knowledge, resilience and resistance might we find within its various constructions?

Finally, how might we construct or explain a visual vocabulary of plantations and their afterlives in ways that help us to understand the politics of race, representation and labor in our contemporary moment?

This symposium will bring together scholars and artists from around the world to interrogate representations of plantations across a range of geographic locales as well as disciplinary and aesthetic modes.

For registration details, visit: https://globalplantation.princeton.edu/registration/