The persistence of the plantation as a race-making machine: notes from post-abolition sugar societies. Cristiana Bastos

Thursday 25th of June at 12:00pm CET..Sala de Juntes (ground floor, Faculty of Geography and History, University of Barcelona)

Cristiana Bastos (PhD Anthropology, CUNY 1996) is a research professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. Her work bridges anthropology, social history, history of sciences and public health, covering different social and historical contexts – from Southern Iberia, urban Brazil and colonial Goa to the plantation societies of Guyana and Hawaii. Her project “The Colour of Labour” focused on the ways plantation labor produced racialized existences that persisted through racialism and racism. As a spin-off of that project, she is currently interested in the collective co-production of plants and peoples.

Her work is available at https://colour.ics.ulisboa.pt/ and https://cristianabastos.org/
 
In the paper Cristiana Bastos will present the research challenges, empirical findings and conceptual developments resulting from the project “The Colour of Labour- the racialized lives of migrants.” The assumption is that “race” as we know it, along with racialism and racism, rather than classificatory systems with social consequences that can be overcome with social justice interventions and education -- as post WW2 humanistic authors believed -- are deeply intertwined with capitalism and, more precisely, they grew out of the plantation economy. Via enslavement, the plantation economy created and hierarchized the “black” as labor and the “white” as privilege, which was later thematized in the pseudo-science of racialism and survived as ordinary racism much beyond the plantation ecosphere. The Colour of Labour investigated how the plantation system kept producing racialized hierarchies in the aftermath of abolition. Empirical research included the sugar economies of colonial British Guiana, Mauritius, Hawai‘i and others, in which indentured and contract labor created further subsystems of racialized hierarchies.