Plantation Liberalism

Scholarship on the plantation has been broadly split into two ambits of concern. The first, emerging from the Black Atlantic tradition, has critiqued liberal humanist frameworks and the problematics of personhood in conjunction with histories of plantation slavery. The second, growing out of environmental anthropology and critical agrarian studies largely, but not exclusively, of the Global South, has concentrated on the ecological dynamics of resource control and activism. This essay offers the concept of plantation liberalism to bring these branches into closer political relation using an antichemical campaign on Philippine banana plantations as an ethnographic departure point. Plantation liberalism is the property-oriented vision of personhood introduced by agrarian colonialism that continues to define the contours of environmental activism today. The essay outlines how American planters of the early twentieth century drew on racial ideologies to project limited personhood onto Mindanawon natives and to impose private property as the path toward their “benevolent assimilation.” It then demonstrates how those ideals became the narrative terrain on which activists’ claims for justice are articulated and adjudicated. By illuminating the plantation’s hold on the political imagination, this essay calls for a language of environmental activism beyond the frame of “life, liberty, and property.”