Please join us when Shuhei Tashiro shares about his exciting disseration work. Shuhei is a PhD-student affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and CEH.

As always, the event is free of charge, and everyone is welcome! Coffee and tea is provided.

Abstract

The current planetary condition is sometimes referred to as the Plantationocene, that is, an age of plantations that have, through colonial-capitalist forces, reconfigured Earth systems on a geologic scale. But the idea of the Plantationocene is still largely a Eurocentric one that sees the European invasion of the New World as a singular detonator of the epoch. What would this history of the present look like if viewed from East Asia? In this talk, Shuhei reconstructs an episodic history of sugarcane plantations on Kikai Island and the Amami archipelago from 1609 to the present. Just as the vast wealth that powered European imperial expansions in the nineteenth century came from plantations and slavery, it was the feudal Satsuma domain’s exploitation of sugar workers in Amami that financed the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Yet, the Japanese taste for sweetness did not only transform labor conditions and island-mainland relations; it altered island landscapes, too, namely, by converting subsistence water paddies into dry fields for the cash crop. Focusing on such water grabs, Shuhei examines how Satsuma’s exploitation (1609-1868) and later the postwar “sugarcanization” by mainland Japan (1945-present) have come to shape the water-scarce, cane-filled terrain of Kikai Island. Yet, even in the ruins of this Plantationocene, Kikaians have continued to protect the few remaining paddies and grow the traditionally subsistence taimo potatoes to gift to one another. Shuhei closes the talk with an elderly taimo grower and his love for the humble potatoes as a matter of care on a dehydrated island.