According to Donna Haraway, the Plantationocene is a way of conceptualizing the planetary impacts of the exploitation of natural resources, monoculture expansion, and forcible labor. These practices began in the 1600s and have underpinned modernity, climate change, and ecological destruction. The impacts of these structures have unevenly affected various populations and regions, with the Global South being the area that has suffered from the worst exploitation of extractive practices, environmental damage, and coercive work. This particular -cene calls attention to the devastating history of colonization and imperialism and underscores asymmetrical hierarchies based on gender, racial difference, sexual orientation, class distinctions, and economic privilege. But the Plantationocene is not located only in the annals of colonial history: the plantation, which we often consider to be a long-abandoned system, continues to shape us today.1 This is because it is part of the present landscape of a current world order that has shifted, altered, and impacted the conditions of what is broadly conceptualized as a model inspired by the plantation’s unbound exploitation of land and people. It can thus be seen in the structures of oppression that continue to be defined by racial difference; it can be found in what is often defined as the “natural” system of manufacturing and labor based on industrial capitalism; it can be witnessed in the factory system of exploited labor and in the disciplining of animals and plants in the agricultural and factory farm models of reproduction. 

The Plantationocene productively shifts conceptions of the Anthropocene away from the Eurocentric focus on the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine, and coal as the center of planetary ecological change. The plantation points to the crucial role of capitalism in the hierarchical relations between the Global North and Global South and how the power dynamics related to various forms of exploitation highlight the crucial role of plantations in shaping the present global crises. The Plantationocene is simultaneously connected to, and distinct from, the Capitalocene, for it arises out of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century capitalism of European metropoles like Florence and Bruges but marks a shift in the transcontinental movement of people, plants, and animals. By the sixteenth century, the technologies of travel engendered a triangulation in the movements of commodities and the forced migration of people from the west coast of Africa. Nations in the North Atlantic exploited the natural resources and people in parts of Africa and Asia, developing plantations for sugar, cotton, coffee, tea, and other products on land that was often farmed by the free labor of chattel slavery, indentured servants, or a subaltern workforce. Moreover, the plantation calls attention to the interconnectedness of species and, as such, challenges the distinctions between human and nonhuman while also eroding the binary of human embodiment and nature/society.

Like all -cenes, there are limitations to the Plantationocene. Janae Davis et al. have argued that the definition of this concept currently circulating in environmental humanities risks cementing the notion that the plantation is a space of human control over nature, in the process sidelining critical examination of the plantation as a racist mode of development.2 With these limits in mind, we also recognize that the term Plantationocene has benefits for underscoring the critical dynamics shaping the current socioeconomic crisis: the planetary movements of people and plants, reductions of biodiversity, transnational corporate interests involved in long-distance capital investments, and the processes of coercion and control that define the labor market. “Situated at the intersection of forcibly displaced labor, long-distance financial investment, and intensive cultivation of the soil, the plantation is a systematic practice of relocation that initiates major upheaval in the relations between humans, animals, plants, and other organisms.”3 The term is also useful in that it highlights the “historical relocations of the substances of living and dying around the Earth as a necessary prerequisite to their extraction.”4 Anna Tsing pushes this further by arguing that plantation logics are characterized by scalability and interchangeability. The notion of scalability, she writes, refers to the proficiency through which the plantation was able to expand using an established blueprint, which includes the decimation of local peoples and plants, installation of plantation infrastructure on cleared lands, and importation of foreign people and crops. Her notion of interchangeability refers to the ability to exchange one species for another, evident in the plantation practice of substituting cane stock for enslaved people.5 In the context of massive factory farming, the clear-cutting of ancient forests, the ecological destruction of mining for fossil fuels, and so much more, it is productive to reflect on how gothic and the Plantationocene informs our understanding of the current ecological crisis and how it is rooted in logics of environmental modernization, homogeneity, and control, that were developed on historical plantations.

To date, the Plantationocene has begun to gain theoretical and critical currency. The term is particularly useful because it underscores gothic narratives of the United States and Global South, intersecting with a history of settler gothic and slavery in the Black Atlantic and plantation histories in the Americas and across the Global South. The planetary impacts of the Plantationocene and its cultural productions are located in the intersections of race and colonialism and their material conditions. Significant for us are the ways in which plantation ideologies and structures continue to be woven into our everyday lives, from Amazon warehouses to factory farms to plantation tourism to the practice of hiring workers on no-hours contracts. In this, the Plantationocene calls attention to the planetary effects of extractive practices and monocultural development, as well as coercive, neoliberal labor practices that underscore modernity and climate change from the 1600s to the present and provide a useful way of reflecting on human-agented ecological change.

The essays in this part engage with how the Plantationocene is the basis for monstrous human animal and nonhuman animal forms: agricultural and horticultural practices, factory farming, and colonial and neocolonial exploitations of the land. In Lisa M. Vetere’s chapter “Horrors of the Horticultural: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” the horror is located within the landscape of the garden and Plantationocene through ornamental plants as well as crops. Here the colonial garden is the site of a gothic imagination in which plants are not just aesthetic spectacles but also part of monocultural production that feeds horrific ecological presences that turn plants into monstrous forms: the more a gardener tries to rid the land of unwanted plants, the stronger and more resistant those plants become. Likewise, in Dawn Keetley’s “True Detective’s Folk Gothic,” the reading of the television series moves from the plantation landscapes of Louisiana’s sugar and petro-economies, with their historical exploitations of bodies and natural resources, to a racialized past that connects bodies to plantation landscapes. The bodies found in fields are inextricably linked to the racialized history of an environmental racism unearthed in the presence of a monoculture that links sugar and slavery, as well as a gothic environment that is a significant form of folk gothic.

Bodies and plantations—particularly nonhuman animal bodies on factory farms—are the subjects of Justin D. Edwards’s chapter “Beyond the Slaughterhouse: Anthropocene, Animals, and Gothic,” which explores animal agriculture, mass death, food production, and climate change. Here Edwards examines animals and gothic, not from the perspective of animal revenge horror or animal torture in gothic texts, but in narratives of animal agriculture and the ways in which the structures that support meat consumption and factory farming are destroying ecosystems and generating methane gases that impact climate events. On the plantations of corporate animal agriculture and animal product producers, the greed that fuels consumption engenders the destruction of animal, nonanimal, and animal human life. This indifference to planetary life, Edwards maintains, meshes with the difference toward the life that is consumed within the factories that raise and slaughter nonhuman animals for meat.