PLANTATION LOGICS UNDERWRITE THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
This essay originally appeared in the Abolish The UC’s 2020 Disorientation Guide — https://disorientation.guide/
A number of scholars have done excellent work documenting how universities in the U.S. emerged as a function of settler-colonialism. The 1862 Morrill Act converted 11 million acres of violently expropriated unceded indigenous lands into the seed money and territory for a new stage in U.S. higher education and kickstarting the University of California system. There is a certain monstrous intimacy in the timing of this act — 1862, in the midst of a Civil War born of the contradictions of racial slavery. The work of Tiffany Lethabo King, working at the intersection of black and native studies, demonstrates how racial slavery and settler colonialism functioned together in a brutal dance in order to map space, place, and subjectivity in the New World. While I have seen plenty of analyses orienting our thinking towards the university as a site of settler-colonialism, I have not seen many asking us to frame the university as a function of plantation logics. What work can such an approach do to our analysis?
Racial slavery was not essentially about labor. It was about creating a division between various gradations of the ideal human on one side, and sentient flesh that could be transformed into the property for accumulation and exchange on the other side. This production of “what it means to be human” was created through naked, transparent, direct relations of force from the commercial hunting of black skins in Africa to the plantations they would suffer on. As Tiffany Lethabo King writes, “labor as a governing frame obscures other processes, relations, locations, and symbolic economies that Black bodies and representations of Black embodiment produce and sustain within New World spatial expansion and geography’s attendant project of human-making.” The plantation is a worldmaking tool before it is a money-making tool. In the global post-emancipation era (if such a term can be used without a sense of irony) the university plays an integral role in policing the boundaries of knowledge. It works to contain its myriad contradictions because, as la paperson shows in A Third University is Possible, colonial institutions always end up producing some of their most fervent resistors. The history of abolitionist and decolonial struggle is evidence of this. While regents and trustee boards act as masters, and faculty in collusion with administration acts as overseers, struggle is ever-present and has had its high points in moments like the ’68 SF State student strikes that led to the formation of black studies and other insurgent intellectual fields.
The US plantations still ran (or attempted to) during the Civil War. That’s how its logics function: war, turmoil, pandemics — these are simply events to be pushed through regardless of the toll when they could be turned into opportunities for transformation. The plantations only ceased to function once they became ungovernable. DuBois revolutionized understandings of the “general strike” as not simply labor stoppage. Labor slowdowns, sabotage, and flight from the plantation were all instrumental acts in the general strike of those trapped in the plantation. Scholars such as Donna Haraway — riffing on the concept of the designations for modernity as “anthropocene” or “capitalocene” — have posited the idea of the “plantationocene” as the central conceit of modernity. This makes sense to me, as the plantation preceded the factory as the first laboratory for turning living human productivity into dead mechanical labor. It also structured domestic relations and a produced a deformed, violent sociality. For Hortense Spillers, it is not that love absolutely cannot exist on the plantation, but “what does it mean” under such conditions? The university also works to inculcate a specific type of deformed sociality, in addition to circumscribing acceptable orientations towards the political as disciplined subjects. Good work can be done in the university, but what does it mean under such conditions of brutal discipline, regulation, and co-optation?
The university is tasked with making structural violence palatable. This is not new, as plantations would often craft scenes and present narratives that made the violence of chattel slavery — its material but also psychic and ontological ruptures — seem palatable to visitors and guests. In our current era, the era of late capital, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, etc. the university is tasked with finding ways to further entrench violence while disavowing it at the same time. The insurgent movements of the 60s rocked the university, and in response it has domesticated that revolutionary energy into projects of “diversity.” Always be wary when you see that word. The plantation played the diversity game too, giving nice jobs to black overseers and slave catchers in order to quell revolt. The UCs are dripping with blood. A common phrase you will hear in reference to life in the university is the “college bubble.” This is the idea that the university represents a space outside of the real world. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only is all the violence of the plantationocene present in this bubble, the university functions as the testing ground for new modes of exploitation, warped sociality, and carceral intellectuality. Like Moten and Harney write in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, the only ethical relationship to the university is one of thievery.
“The struggle against the plantation is a struggle against a certain idea of earth, that it can be owned.” — Saidiya Hartman
“Black study is about saving the earth.” — Fred Moten
What would it mean for students in all disciplines, or students who could give a fuck about disciplinary designations, or workers in all the various facets of the university, to stand in solidarity with the project of black study? Which is to say the project of unmaking the subject, invoking the swarm, abolishing the world that makes it possible for the plantation to order our experience and being. Remember, you don’t reform a plantation. You burn that shit down.
