According to the United Nations’ environmental risk index, a by-country report on the effects of global climate change, the inhabitants, locales, and economies of global south nations will be disproportionally affected as global warming intensifies. Many of these nations are projected to be hit by a triple whammy: rising populations, combined with already-vulnerable economies and spikes in severe weather events will result in massive disruptions to livelihoods and cultural practices, as well as mass migrations as environmental refugees flee to more habitable areas. The plantationocene, defined by Donna Haraway as a way of drawing attention to the planetary effects of extractive practices, monoculture development, and coercive labor structures that have undergirded modernity and climate change since at least the 1600s, can provide a useful rubric for thinking through human-agented ecological change, especially as these changes unevenly affect different populations and regions. Furthermore, the plantationocene calls attention to the indelible ecological and economic legacies of imperialism including patriarchal and race-based hierarchies, and inequities among diverse peoples based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. This special issue of The Global South examines the productive tensions created by the operative phrase “and/in” when thinking, writing, and living through climate change from the perspective of the global south and/in the plantationocene. Possible topics include:
- Theoretical and hermeneutical discussions of the plantation and/or the plantationocene;
- Examinations of the effects and the rise of natural disasters in the global south through the lens of the plantationocene;
- Feminist-, queer-, decolonial-, and critical race studies-based resistances to the legacies, structures, hierarchies, and effects of the plantationocene;
- Afro-, Arab, Asian, and Latinx futurisms in film, literature, and visual art which intersect with or document the (potential) effects of the plantationocene;
- Analyses of the plantationocene, its legacies, its imaginaries, and its contemporary neo-isms (such as border factories, globalized trade, non-government organization assistance programs, privatized detention and incarceration, and plantation tourism) as these relate to the global south;
- Empire-, refugee-, and military-studies discussions of plantationocene construction or deconstruction/resistance;
- The global south plantationocene and/in the global north;
- Interdisciplinary and comparative analyses of the plantationocene;
- Architectural legacies of monoculture crops and their profits;
- Ecological, animal studies, disability, medical studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies approaches to this topic; and
- Investigations of the erasures of indigenous peoples through the plantationocene.
This issue is slated for publication in Spring 2023, so contributors will have a calendar year to draft their complete 7,000-10,000-word essays. Please send abstracts of up to 500 words (in MLA style) and a 100-word biographical statement to guest editors Isadora Wagner and Natalie Aikens, at isadora.wagner@westpoint.edu and nmaikens1@gmail.com, by August 21, 2020.
The Global South is an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization. Particularly of interest is how authors, writers, and critics respond to issues of the environment, poverty, immigration, gender, race, hybridity, cultural formation and transformation, colonialism and postcolonialism, modernity and postmodernity, transatlantic encounters, homes, diasporas, and resistance and counter discourse, among others, under the superordinate umbrella of globalization.