Organizer: The Cornell University Southeast Asia Program

Description:

On the banana plantations of Mindanao, the Philippines’ southernmost region, activists involved in an anti-chemical campaign decry their exposure to pesticide drift as an infringement on both their person and their personhood. Such forms of plantation-driven dehumanization draw the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds into a tight embrace. This seminar offers the notion of plantation liberalism as a means of overcoming some of the “regional closets” (Jegathesan 2021) that persist in studies of Southeast Asia. Plantation liberalism is the property-oriented vision of personhood introduced by agrarian colonialism that continues to define the contours of environmental activism today. To trace its genealogy in the Philippines, this seminar outlines how American planters of the early 20th century drew on racial ideologies, inherited from the Antebellum South, to project limited personhood onto Mindanawon natives and to impose private property as the path towards their “benevolent assimilation.” It then demonstrates how those ideals became the narrative terrain on which activists continue to articulate environmental campaigns, and on which their claims for justice continue to be adjudicated. By illuminating the transfer of these ideas between Philippine Mindanao and the Black Atlantic, this seminar seeks modes of transregional scholarship attentive to connection and comparison, but sensitive to the contingencies of historical context.

Click here to register.