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  • Department of Global Development
  • Global Development

Seminar in Critical Development Studies and Gatty Lecture co-organized by Cornell Global Development, the Cornell Southeast Asia Program, Department of Anthropology and the Graduate Field of Development Studies

Abstract:

On the banana plantations of Mindanao, the Philippines’ southernmost region, activists involved in an anti-chemical campaign decry their exposure to pesticide drift as an infringement on both their person and their personhood. Such forms of plantation-driven dehumanization draw the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds into a tight embrace. This paper offers the notion of plantation liberalism as a means of overcoming some of the “regional closets” (Jegathesan 2021) that persist in studies of Southeast Asia. Plantation liberalism is the property-oriented vision of personhood introduced by agrarian colonialism that continues to define the contours of environmental activism today. To trace its genealogy in the Philippines, this paper outlines how American planters of the early 20th century drew on racial ideologies, inherited from the Antebellum South, to project limited personhood onto Mindanawon natives and to impose private property as the path towards their “benevolent assimilation.” It then demonstrates how those ideals became the narrative terrain on which activists continue to articulate environmental campaigns, and on which their claims for justice continue to be adjudicated. By illuminating the transfer of these ideas between Philippine Mindanao and the Black Atlantic, this paper seeks modes of transregional scholarship attentive to connection and comparison, but sensitive to the contingencies of historical context.

About the speaker: 

Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist researching plantation agriculture, scientific convention, transnational trade, and environmental activism between the Philippines and Japan. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Bananapocalypse: Plantation Economies and Ecologies in a Global Mindanao, draws on transnational fieldwork to identify the crop science, agrochemical regulation, market segmentation techniques, and food standards as arenas where actors contend over the commodity chain’s various externalities. Her work appears in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology and the Journal of Political Ecology, as well as in edited collections like The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) and Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2020). She holds a PhD with distinction from Yale University. Before joining as assistant professor, she was LSA Collegiate Fellow 2020-2022 at the University of Michigan.

Date & Time

March 3, 2023
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Alyssa Paredes headshot

More information about this event.

Contact Information

Jenna LaMendola

  • JLaMendola [at] cornell.edu

Speaker

Alyssa Paredes, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Departments

Department of Global Development

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