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74785-01 - Seminar: The City After the Plantation (3 CP)
| Semester | spring semester 2025 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | Kenny R. Cupers (kenny.cupers@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | The plantation, as a race-making institution and a planet-shaping economic system, has become central to current scholarly debates about the making of the modern world. Fueled by enslavement and land alienation at an unprecedented scale, plantations transformed earthly ecologies into monocultural machines aimed at cash-crop production for the global market. Scholars have explored how this system fueled global capitalism and environmental change, and how its afterlives continue to shape political rule and racial inequality today. They have also shown how plantation afterlives, particularly in North America, inform patterns of anti-black violence and incarceration and the urban horizons of decolonization. Yet the impact of this scholarship for global urban history has thus far remained limited. If the plantation is more than a precursor to the rise of the industrial city, how do its histories matter for our understanding of urban lives in a planetary age? In this seminar course, we explore how the durability, transformation, pervasiveness, and failures of the plantation system raises new questions and engenders new research agendas for global urban history. How did the twentieth-century boom in plantations shape urban lifeworlds and politics in Africa and Asia? How did the so-called “Green Revolution” build on plantation legacies and what are their consequences for cities? What do plantation histories of land dispossession and enslavement tell us about cities, their extensions, and their undersides? How do plantation legacies explain patterns of unfree labor, racialized containment, and infrastructural violence in cities and borderlands? How does the “counter-plantation,” its plots and provision grounds, explain the historical development and political ecology of cities, including the food systems that undergird them? What are the archives and research practices through which these questions can be answered? Recent scholarship has begun to situate urban history in a planetary framework. To articulate the stakes and contours of an emerging “planetary turn” in global urban history, we will attend to the plantation through engagement with the environmental humanities and new histories of capitalism. Altogether, the course aims to explore how a focus on the plantation can make global urban history more accountable to always-situated questions of planetary habitability. In addition to discussion seminars, the course features the following lectures by invited speakers: “Plantation or the slum: Crossing spatiotemporal routes” by Irene Peano “The Brazilian Plantation’s Past and Future” by Ana Gisele Ozaki “Nairobi’s Postcolonial Plantation Systems” by Wangui Kimari |
| Learning objectives | Critical understanding in environmental and urban humanities scholarship on the plantation |
| Bibliography | Edgar Tristram Thompson, “The Plantation as a Social Institution” in: The Plantation (University of South Carolina Press, 1932 / 2010): 1-20 Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (New York: Penguin Books, 2015) Manjapra, Kris. 2018. “Plantation Dispossession: The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism.” In American Capitalism: New Histories, edited by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, 361–388. New York: Columbia University Press. Nightingale, Carl. Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) Petitcorps, Colette Le, Marta Macedo & Irene Peano, eds. Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, and Afterlives (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) Ferdinand, Malcolm. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (London: Wiley & Sons, 2022) McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place” Social & Cultural Geography 12, 8 (2011): 947–963. Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” Savacou 5, no. 1 (1971): 95–102 Guldi, Jo. The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021 Beckford G L (1972) Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World. Oxford: Oxford University Press Wacquant, Loic 2002. “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US.” New Left Review 13: 41–60. Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003) Thomas, Deborah A. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019) Goffe R (2023) Reproducing the plot: Making life in the shadow of premature death. Antipode 55(4):1024-1046 Heynen N (2021) “A plantation can be a commons”: Re‐earthing Sapelo Island through abolition ecology. Antipode 53(1):95-114 Ouma S and Premchander S (2022) Labour, efficiency, critique: Writing the plantation into the technological present-future. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 54(2):413-421 McKittrick, Katherine. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17, 3 (2013): 1–15. Moulton, Alex A. “Plotting a New Course for Environmental Humanities: Provision Grounds, Race, and the Future.” Environmental Humanities 1 July 2024; 16 (2): 271–290. Paredes, Alyssa, Sophie Chao, Andrés León Araya, eds. “Introduction: Intervention Symposium - Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood” Antipode Online, January 2024 |
| Comments | Open to MA students from other programs with the priority for CU and CS MA students on timely registration. |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| wöchentlich | Wednesday | 14.15-18.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| täglich | See individual dates | ||
Dates
| Date | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday 19.02.2025 | 10.15-12.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| Wednesday 19.02.2025 | 14.15-18.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| Wednesday 26.02.2025 | 10.15-12.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| Wednesday 26.02.2025 | 14.15-18.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| Wednesday 05.03.2025 | 10.15-12.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| Wednesday 05.03.2025 | 14.15-18.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| Wednesday 19.03.2025 | 10.15-12.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| Wednesday 19.03.2025 | 14.15-18.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
| Modules |
Modul: Kulturtechnische Dimensionen (Master's degree program: Cultural Techniques) Module: Fields: Environment and Development (Master's degree program: African Studies) Module: Fields: Governance and Politics (Master's degree program: African Studies) Module: The Urban across Disciplines (Master's degree program: Critical Urbanisms) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment details | pass/fail |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Urban Studies |