Abstract

The plantation continues to expand across contemporary frontiers, remaking social orders and ravaging ecologies in the service of value extraction through commodity production. This talk revisits the ‘strange industrial order’ of the plantation in 1950s Indonesia at a time of deep contestation in which estate workers were organising to reinvigorate the unfulfilled goals of anticolonial struggles. Reading this moment through the anxieties of European planters in the British archive, the talk covers how these struggles deeply disturbed the localised racial labour order of the plantation, while also working against the extractive tributaries of the international order. Further, the talk will reflect on how keeping alive a historical consciousness around how industrial racial regimes are produced, disturbed, and fractured is vital to countering the harms of our plantation present.

Dr Lisa Tilley is currently Lecturer in Politics and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Her work focuses on political economy/ecology, race, and historical/present-day colonialism, extraction and expropriation, especially in Southeast Asia. She also co-convenes the CPD-BISA working group and is Associate Editor of Global Social Theory.

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By: Martin Wingfield
Last updated: Friday, 7 February 2020