‘A Sea of Dark Green Plants’
Rereading Joseph Conrad’s The Planter of Malata in the Plantationocene
Abstract
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.
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