This essay traces the evolution of anthropological thinking around plantations through the lens of three conceptual turning points: political economy, more-than-human approaches, and critical race studies. Neither exclusive nor exhaustive, these turning points operate most productively through their mutual reverberations, refractions, resonances, as well as the rebukes and refusals each has faced in light of the omissions and elisions they entail. Taken together, they enrich how anthropologists grapple with plantations in methodological, conceptual, and ethical terms—as an agricultural formation and well beyond as a dominant, race-making institution of capitalist modernity.

U.S.-based social science research in the early-to-mid-twentieth century sought to develop a comparative typology of plantations centered on labor and property regimes, and their relation to lands and bodies put to work and worked upon. Writing in the 1930s, for instance, Edgar Thompson drew on rubber, hemp, and tobacco monocrops of the US South to conceptualize the plantation as an industrial economic institution; a political institution claiming monopoly over violence; a settlement institution arranging peoples in territories; and, a cultural institution dividing owners and workers along racial or ethnic lines. Later adherents including Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf drew out further connections in Latin America and the Caribbean between sugar plantation culture, global capitalist histories, and the political-economic contexts of hierarchical social classification through critical comparisons between the plantation and other landed institutions including the farm, manor, ranch, hacienda, mine, mission, and the state. Today, political-economic analyses remain at the fore of much contemporary theorizing of the plantation, as exemplified by Tanya Li and Pujo Semedi’s research on Indonesian oil palm monocrops, where the corporate plantation as an occupying force invades and reconfigures practices, processes, and relations within and beyond the plantation site, with its colonial-racial logics firmly embedded in contemporary Indonesian law and political discourse.

The perceived human-centrism of classic political economy led to the emergence of studies that center the multispeciated forms and effects of the agro-industrial complex. Much of this scholarship was prompted by the coinage of the “Plantationocene” in 2015 by Donna Haraway and others to refer to “the rapid displacement and reformulation of germ plasm, genomes, cuttings, and all other names and forms of part organisms and of deracinated plants, animals, and people.” The Plantationocene helps disentangle the distributed agencies of plants and people within what Arturo Escobar calls “capitalist natures.” It draws attention to cash crops as lively capital whose biotic vitality matters to the productivity of agro-industrial landscapes. It brings into focus the perduring (il)logic of human mastery and control in and through which plants and people are rendered exploitable or disposable—to what end, to whose benefit, and at what cost? In the process, plantations reveal themselves as products of hegemonic logics of discipline that are nonetheless embedded within, and generated by, specific temporal, spatial, multispecies, and material contexts—in a word, plantations are “patchy.” Patchiness draws attention to the modular simplifications and feral proliferations animating capitalist landscapes, the challenge and necessity of reckoning with plantation violence while also attending to its emergences and possibilities, and the imperative to rethink intersectional injustices in the agribusiness nexus both within and beyond the human.

Multispecies studies of the plantation have been critiqued for both eliding the human violences and vulnerabilities generated by agro-industrialism and the long-standing genealogies of thinking in critical race studies that attend to the complex relationships between race, culture, ecology, and species. Janae Davis, Alex A Moulton, Levi Van Sant, and Brian Williams for instance, center Black ecologies as innovative practices of multispecies kinship, wherein the plot—where plantation slaves cultivated their own foods—constituted a vital site for nurturing oppositional modes of Black life and resistance to the market system. Plot ethics, they note, were grounded in racial–political struggles at the same time as they guided human interaction with the nonhuman world toward multispecies well‐being, with land acting as the unifying medium that brought humans and nonhumans together in socioecological assemblages of reciprocity, resistance, and refusal. Rather than setting human and non-human harms in opposition to one another, scholars in critical race studies have taken further the invitation to think about plantations through the lens of shared racial and ecological vulnerability. Joshua Bennett, for example, theorizes bodies in the plantation as a “site of possibility” through which other kinds of communal potentialities might be forged and enfleshed, as humans and non-humans carve out modes of solidarity and sociality borne from entangled forms of oppression.

What these conceptual approaches uncover is that there is no such thing as “the” plantation. While bearing certain recurring motifs across time and space, plantations are as situated and diverse as the intellectual genealogies that have sought to elucidate and analyze them. It is both specificity and their recursivity that renders them good—or productive—to think with. Plantations bring us to ask: what are the potentials and limits of comparison in grappling with plantation lives and afterlives, as sites of human and more-than-human extraction, extinction, and emergence? What forms of ecological hope, reckoning, and repair are envisageable in the midst and in the wake of the plantation? What place is there for desire, love, care, and pleasure alongside violence, injustice, refusal, and resistance in the plantation milieu? How we come to know the plantation as ideological structure, bodily effect, and affective infrastructures? What forms of enchantment are possible within plantations as possible exemplars of “supernatureculture,” animated by human and non-human agents, but also spirits, ghosts, monsters, the dead, and the ancestors?

Beyond the intellectual genealogies and questions outlined above, it is crucial to remember that thinking around plantations and plantation alternatives “sits on the shoulders of thousands of activists across time and around the world who have fought—and who continue to fight—for access to land and freedom, including the right to inhabit, own, manage, cultivate, work, and dream about such lands according to the principles of sovereignty and self-determination.” It is perhaps in conversation with these grassroots actors that we can best answer the vital question posed by Katherine McKittrick: “what kind of future can the plantation give us?”