The plantation

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. As distorted sites of memory, many of these plantations project a romanticized image of the Old South, with happy enslaved workers, gallant landlords, and gracious plantation mistresses, thus disregarding the brutal racialized labor regimes that made these farms profitable. The romantic image of the plantation reached a global audience through blockbuster films and TV series such as Gone with the Wind and North and South. Although more critical movies like the Academy Award-winning Twelve Years a Slave challenge traditional ideas about plantation life, and although museums like the Whitney Plantation tell the story from the perspective of enslaved people, it will take some time to deconstruct the false yet well-established narratives that depict plantations as harmonious, organic communities instead of the capitalist labor camps they actually were.

Plantations were ubiquitous throughout the Western hemisphere. This is the Savonet Plantation, once owned by Dutch enslavers on the Caribbean island of Curaçao (photo by author)

Plantations still exist as sites of mono-culture production. Think for instance of oil palm plantations, which are located in tropical zones around the globe. Palm oil can be found in many products; if you took a shower today or ate a sandwich, chances are you put the plantation in your hair (it’s in shampoo) or on your bread (it’s in margarine too). Because of the large-scale nature of plantation agriculture, these farms are often environmentally destructive and lead to the extermination or displacement of indigenous populations, both human and nonhuman. It is hard to imagine nowadays that the flat Mississippi Delta was once a lush jungle where panthers roamed. But then the planters came. The Choctaw were forced off their tribal lands and the tropical forest was cut down to clear the land for cotton. Such patterns reappear whenever plantation agriculture manifests itself in a specific area, with disastrous consequences that may eventually assume global proportions – when humans encroach on habitats of exotic species, we may catch a virus we are not resistant to.

An oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo (photo by T.R. Shankar Raman)

Finally, the plantation is also a political institution, a way to organize and exploit power primarily on the basis of race, but also on the basis of economic class. The plantation thus serves as a social blueprint to protect the interests of white and often well-to-do people. A very obvious recent example is the new voting law of Georgia, which was drafted by Republican lawmakers and enacted on March 25. The law contains voting restrictions that primarily target people of color. These restrictions are reminiscent of the segregationist system that determined politics and social relations in the U.S. South until the 1960s; opponents of the bill such as Stacey Abrams dubbed it “Jim Crow in a suit and tie,” explicating its racial and class dimensions. The setting below attests to the endurance of the plantation complex. We see the Republican governor of Georgia Brian Kemp signing the voting restrictions bill, surrounded by six of his fellow party members. On the wall behind the governor hangs a painting of a plantation, the quintessential guardhouse of white supremacy.

Photo from Brian Kemp’s Twitter feed