This article is written by Pepri Saputra, who specializes in the representation of asylum seekers and refugees in right-wing populist discourse in various parts of the world. His essay discusses how concepts of race and land figure in the rhetoric and ideology of reactionary populists in the European Union and the United States, especially in relation to immigration.

In the fall of 2021 I did a secondment at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) in Middelburg, the Netherlands. The secondment was originally planned for the spring of 2023, but because of the pandemic and visa delays, I had to move a few things around. So instead of traveling to the Deep South of the United States, I ended up in the Deep South of the Netherlands: the province of Zeeland.

In late September, a humanitarian crisis unfolded under a bridge in Texas. Thousands of migrants, many of them originally hailing from Haiti, converged on the border town of Del Rio, in the hope of finding asylum in the United States. The Plantationocene concept is central to the Race Land project. It is also a useful framework to explain the turn of events in Haiti and Del Rio.

Just three months after Joe Biden’s inauguration, journalists and columnists already laud him as a transformational president who has brought progressivism back in U.S. politics. Such observations are hyperbolic, to say the least.

How does the plantation persist in current-day life? First of all, as popular tourist destinations (especially in the U.S. South), they continue to shape mass perceptions about how slavery supposedly functioned.

In the spring of 2017, I traveled to Louisiana to do research in New Orleans and attend a conference in Lafayette. It was one of my first forays into a more interregional approach to study the U.S. South: the southern states as part of a broader hemispheric community based on authoritarian politics and plantation economies.