‘A Sea of Dark Green Plants’

Rereading Joseph Conrad’s The Planter of Malata in the Plantationocene

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21982900
AutoresAsia Battiloro (0000-0003-3657-2716, Sapienza University of Rome, autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen45
Número2
Páginas51-64
Fecha de publicación2024-01-09
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPerspektywy Kultury (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2081-1446 • E-ISSN: 2719-8014
EditorialJesuit University Ignatianum - Ignatianum University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.35765/pk.2024.4502.05
OpenAlexW4400973145
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas8

In this paper I use the systemic concept of ‘Plantationocene’ to map out my reading of Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘The Planter of Malata’ (TPM) (1914), reframing Conrad as a writer of the current geological age, where human activity has induced devastating alterations to the Earth. In my ecoreading of TPM, time acquires a double analytical meaning. While I focus on the historical entanglements between capital investment and imperial goals of colonial scientific management mirrored in TPM, I also look at this short story from a biocolonial perspective, foregrounding the role of displaced plant life as extremely relevant for an ontologically plural contextual understanding of TPM as a narrative of the Plantationocene. Ultimately, I argue that TPM gives access to what could be termed the Plantationocene ‘unconscious’, in Mark Bould’s sense of the term, as it portrays for a contemporary readership the realities of human and nonhuman dislocation, relocation and exploitation unfolding in the context of the imperial plantation at the beginning of the twentieth century

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Cognitive reframing · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Foregrounding · Literature · Narrative · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Philosophy · Psychology

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