Surplus, Mobility, and Resistance: The Literary Forms of Psychoactive Plants

Abstract: This article revises the existing Marxist accounts of plantation capitalism by exploring how literary forms of nineteenth-century psychoactive plants (i.e., plants that are used to make alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, opium, etc.) could conversely contain agency and resistance. Putting Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2008) in dialogue, I look for moments when plant life acquires agency and transgresses the system of exchange in the exact contexts where mass production and wide circulation of psychoactive products endow their plants with exchangeability and logistical mobility. While ecocritical accounts often observe a parallel between environmental degradation in the Anthropocene and capitalism's suicidal tendency, my reading shows that anti-colonial resistance can also emerge from the vitality—rather than the destruction—of the more-than-human world, which capitalism unexpectedly promotes but is not able to incorporate.