Plantations were the engine of European expansion. Plantations produced the wealth—and the modus operandi—that allowed Europeans to take over the world. We usually hear about superior technologies and resources; but it was the plantation system that made navies, science, and eventually industrialization possible. Plantations are ordered cropping systems worked by non-owners and arranged for expansion. Plantations deepen domestication, re-intensifying plant dependencies and forcing fertility. Borrowing from state-endorsed cereal agriculture, they invest everything in the superabundance of a single crop. But one ingredient is missing: They remove the love. Instead of the romance connecting people, plants, and places, European planters introduced cultivation through coercion.[xxvi] The plants were exotics; the labor was forced through slavery, indenture, and conquest. Only through extreme order and control could anything flourish in this way; but with hierarchy and managed antagonism in place, enormous profits (and complementary poverties) could be produced. Because plantations have shaped how contemporary agribusiness is organized, we tend to think of such arrangements as the only way to grow crops. But this arrangement had to be naturalized until we learned to take the alienation of people from their crops for granted.
Consider sugar cane, a key participant. No one loves plantation sugar cane. Puerto Rican cane workers go out to “defend themselves” (se defienden) and “do battle” (bregando) with the cane.[xxvii] Yet between the 17th and the 19th centuries, sugar cane plantations produced much of the wealth that fueled European conquest and development. The cane was moved across the warm zones, redefining regions; and so too came owners, managers, and laborers.[xxviii] Slaves were sent from West Africa to the New World. Contracted coolie labor from India and China moved into the Pacific. Peasants were conquered and coerced in the Indies. And in forging a new antagonism to plantation plants, humans changed the very nature of species being. Elites entrenched their sense of autonomy from other species; they were masters not lovers of nonhuman beings, the species Others who came to define human self-making. But for planters this was only possible to the extent that human subspecies were formulated and enforced: Someone had to work the cane. Biology came to signify the difference between free owners and coerced labor. Colored people worked the cane; white people owned and managed it. No racial laws or ideals could stop miscegenation, but they could guarantee that only those of the white race could inherit property. Racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each dowered marriage and inheritance.[xxix]
From the first, fungi were there, ready for niches to fill. Fungi constrained smallholder sugar cane; after it is cut, cane must be processed immediately to avoid fungal fermentation. The huge scale of cane plantations, and their savage labor discipline, are in part a response to fears of fermentation, which inspire on-site, expensive mills—and the desire to keep them running continuously. Yet fungal fermentation turned out to be a gift to the planters. It didn’t take Caribbean planters long to observe that molasses, a byproduct of sugar milling, suited ubiquitous local yeast spores and quickly changed to alcohol. Rum was born, and the deadly but profitable “triangle trades” proffered rum for more African slaves, and thus more sugar production, and thus more distillers and financers in England or New England. Long before sugar became an object and symbol of mass consumption (thus cementing the expectation of species-autonomous publics whose species-unrecognizeable foods mysteriously appeared from afar), fungally fermented rum made plantation sugar profitable—spreading it across the field of European conquest.[xxx]
At the edge of respectability, rum charged sea-faring masculinities in which trade became adventure. Fermentation thus detracted attention from the cruelty of shore-bound domestication, both human and nonhuman.
White women became agents of racial hygiene. By dividing us firmly into races, plantations remade human species being, the practice of being human. Racial separation—depending as it does on marriage and family organization—required additional transformations of gender. In the plantation zones, with their unsettled mixtures of native and foreign, free, bound, and enslaved, wild and tame, disease and plenty, things could so easily go awry. Here white women became responsible for maintaining the boundaries—of homes, families, species, and the white race. Tropical fungi were one small part of their problem; molds and infections could get out of hand. Keeping their homes free of mildew, mosquitoes, and miscegenation, white women in the tropics became models of species and subspecies alienation.[xxxi]
By the late 19th century, discourses of scientific hygiene and eugenics informed white women’s species segregations. Pasteurian germ theory was tested and boosted in the tropics, where white-controlled spaces could be organized as laboratories, with microorganisms stopped at the border of white homes. White women were called to follow their husbands to the tropics to keep things clean.[xxxii] Re-imported to the metropole, such public and private hygiene charged class dichotomies, informing distinctions between those women Ehrenreich and English once contrasted as the “sick” and the “sickening.”[xxxiii] Vulnerable upper class women became the angels of the house; poor women were blamed as the agents of infection. Both received renewed mandates to reproduce. Poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive.[xxxiv] Privileged families were charged with the advancement of the race; women must bear its heirs.
The boundaries of the home became the expected boundaries of love. With the fetishization of the home as a space of purity and interdependence, extra-domestic intimacies, whether within or between species, seemed archaic fantasies (the community, the small farmer) or passing affairs (feminism, animal rights). Outside the home, the domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests reigned. Moreover, this kind of family fetish reappeared in mid-20th century U.S. mass culture—and once again in our times now—as the United States assumed a global leadership that allowed it to draw from older regimes of colonial culture. Here love is just not expected outside family walls. Within the family, other species can be accepted; pets are models for family devotion. But the model of the loving and beloved pet does not spread love; it holds it tight inside the family.
U.S. publics learn to imagine themselves as compassionate, moral people because they love their children and their pets. They learn that this love makes them “good people”—unlike terrorists, who only hate. They imagine that this love equips them to make decisions for the whole world; it creates a moral hierarchy in which American “goodness” is qualification for global leadership. Other peoples, and other species, are judged by their ability to live up to U.S. standards of domestic intimacy. If they are properly engaged with family love, they may deserve to live. Others risk becoming “collateral damage” in U.S. projects to improve the world; to eliminate them may be unfortunate but not “inhumane.” Under this tutelage, our species being is realigned to stop Others at home’s door.
Given the power and pervasiveness of this biosocial plan, it is amazing that a still-rich diversity of species and populations still exists on earth. But such richness can no longer be taken for granted.
http://tsingmushrooms.blogspot.pt
Consider sugar cane, a key participant. No one loves plantation sugar cane. Puerto Rican cane workers go out to “defend themselves” (se defienden) and “do battle” (bregando) with the cane.[xxvii] Yet between the 17th and the 19th centuries, sugar cane plantations produced much of the wealth that fueled European conquest and development. The cane was moved across the warm zones, redefining regions; and so too came owners, managers, and laborers.[xxviii] Slaves were sent from West Africa to the New World. Contracted coolie labor from India and China moved into the Pacific. Peasants were conquered and coerced in the Indies. And in forging a new antagonism to plantation plants, humans changed the very nature of species being. Elites entrenched their sense of autonomy from other species; they were masters not lovers of nonhuman beings, the species Others who came to define human self-making. But for planters this was only possible to the extent that human subspecies were formulated and enforced: Someone had to work the cane. Biology came to signify the difference between free owners and coerced labor. Colored people worked the cane; white people owned and managed it. No racial laws or ideals could stop miscegenation, but they could guarantee that only those of the white race could inherit property. Racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each dowered marriage and inheritance.[xxix]
From the first, fungi were there, ready for niches to fill. Fungi constrained smallholder sugar cane; after it is cut, cane must be processed immediately to avoid fungal fermentation. The huge scale of cane plantations, and their savage labor discipline, are in part a response to fears of fermentation, which inspire on-site, expensive mills—and the desire to keep them running continuously. Yet fungal fermentation turned out to be a gift to the planters. It didn’t take Caribbean planters long to observe that molasses, a byproduct of sugar milling, suited ubiquitous local yeast spores and quickly changed to alcohol. Rum was born, and the deadly but profitable “triangle trades” proffered rum for more African slaves, and thus more sugar production, and thus more distillers and financers in England or New England. Long before sugar became an object and symbol of mass consumption (thus cementing the expectation of species-autonomous publics whose species-unrecognizeable foods mysteriously appeared from afar), fungally fermented rum made plantation sugar profitable—spreading it across the field of European conquest.[xxx]
At the edge of respectability, rum charged sea-faring masculinities in which trade became adventure. Fermentation thus detracted attention from the cruelty of shore-bound domestication, both human and nonhuman.
White women became agents of racial hygiene. By dividing us firmly into races, plantations remade human species being, the practice of being human. Racial separation—depending as it does on marriage and family organization—required additional transformations of gender. In the plantation zones, with their unsettled mixtures of native and foreign, free, bound, and enslaved, wild and tame, disease and plenty, things could so easily go awry. Here white women became responsible for maintaining the boundaries—of homes, families, species, and the white race. Tropical fungi were one small part of their problem; molds and infections could get out of hand. Keeping their homes free of mildew, mosquitoes, and miscegenation, white women in the tropics became models of species and subspecies alienation.[xxxi]
By the late 19th century, discourses of scientific hygiene and eugenics informed white women’s species segregations. Pasteurian germ theory was tested and boosted in the tropics, where white-controlled spaces could be organized as laboratories, with microorganisms stopped at the border of white homes. White women were called to follow their husbands to the tropics to keep things clean.[xxxii] Re-imported to the metropole, such public and private hygiene charged class dichotomies, informing distinctions between those women Ehrenreich and English once contrasted as the “sick” and the “sickening.”[xxxiii] Vulnerable upper class women became the angels of the house; poor women were blamed as the agents of infection. Both received renewed mandates to reproduce. Poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive.[xxxiv] Privileged families were charged with the advancement of the race; women must bear its heirs.
The boundaries of the home became the expected boundaries of love. With the fetishization of the home as a space of purity and interdependence, extra-domestic intimacies, whether within or between species, seemed archaic fantasies (the community, the small farmer) or passing affairs (feminism, animal rights). Outside the home, the domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests reigned. Moreover, this kind of family fetish reappeared in mid-20th century U.S. mass culture—and once again in our times now—as the United States assumed a global leadership that allowed it to draw from older regimes of colonial culture. Here love is just not expected outside family walls. Within the family, other species can be accepted; pets are models for family devotion. But the model of the loving and beloved pet does not spread love; it holds it tight inside the family.
U.S. publics learn to imagine themselves as compassionate, moral people because they love their children and their pets. They learn that this love makes them “good people”—unlike terrorists, who only hate. They imagine that this love equips them to make decisions for the whole world; it creates a moral hierarchy in which American “goodness” is qualification for global leadership. Other peoples, and other species, are judged by their ability to live up to U.S. standards of domestic intimacy. If they are properly engaged with family love, they may deserve to live. Others risk becoming “collateral damage” in U.S. projects to improve the world; to eliminate them may be unfortunate but not “inhumane.” Under this tutelage, our species being is realigned to stop Others at home’s door.
Given the power and pervasiveness of this biosocial plan, it is amazing that a still-rich diversity of species and populations still exists on earth. But such richness can no longer be taken for granted.
http://tsingmushrooms.blogspot.pt
