Toward a Poetics of the Plantationocene: British Plantations and Sinophone Rubber Literature

Abstract: This essay explores the poetics of the Plantationocene through the lens of Sinophone rubber literature produced in British Malaya from the late 1920s to early 1930s. The concept of the Plantationocene, a term that extends from the Anthropocene, directs our attention to the transformative impact of plantation systems on ecological and social landscapes, characterized by the rearrangement of species, forced labor, and the financialization of nature. Closely reading a set of Sinophone literary texts on the rubber industry in British Malaya from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, this essay studies the conflicting yet mirroring relationship between migrant laborers and transplanted rubber trees, discussing how these texts challenge the emancipatory narrative of labor transformation and the future-oriented temporality of rubber financialization. It further reads the gendered image of white rubber latex alongside sexual exploitation on plantations, which metaphorically gave birth to a literature rebelling against the very system that censored it as illegitimate. By centering the labor-nature nexus in the colonial capitalist system, I argue that Sinophone rubber literature forms a poetics of resistance against the Plantationocene, while also providing historical insights that resonate with contemporary environmental concerns and labor politics.