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Contribution type: New Concept
Concept: Plantalogical Politics
Name of the contributor: Taitu A Heron
E-mail of the contributor: taheron@gmail.com
PLANTALOGICAL POLITICS Category: Companion Concept · Origin: Jamaica, 2001 · English, with Jamaican Patwa Plantalogical politics names the political condition of societies built by the slave plantation, in which the plantation's organising logic outlives the plantation itself. Formed from plantation and -logical, the term points not to a period or a place but to a logic: a way of ordering human life that distributes space by race and class and withholds personhood from the majority.
The Caribbean plantation was engineered for capitalist gain. It financed European development and served as the springboard of European modernity, which places it at the origin of the crisis this dictionary addresses. It was never only a unit of production but a total institution of social control, governing labour, movement, worship, sexuality, kinship and speech. Its central operation was the denial of what Rex Nettleford called space: the physical and existential room each person requires to exist as human in a common world. Charles Mills named the counter-movement smadditization, the long struggle of African diaspora peoples to be recognised as smaddy, somebody, a full member of the human family. Where enslavement ends but its logic does not, politics remains a contest over space: who occupies it, who is deprived of it, who is authorised to allocate it. As the Jamaican proverb has it, two bull cyan rule tha one pen. What distinguishes plantalogical politics from the wider vocabulary of colonial legacy is where it locates the inheritance: in law, and above all in the constitution. Constitutions written to secure planter and imperial interests were carried across the threshold of independence largely unaltered, preserving colonial statutes, shielding elite property and retaining the former monarch as head of state. Independence in such cases transferred administration to a local elite without dismantling the spatial order it inherited. Later deference to structural adjustment, and the abandonment of constitutional reform under conditions set by external creditors, are continuous with that history rather than departures from it. This is why neocolonial is preferred here to post-colonial: the prefix post implies a completed passage and permits the former coloniser to wash its hands.
Reform, when it comes, tends to confirm the diagnosis. Jamaica's Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, enacted in 2011 after two decades of deliberation, widened the catalogue of rights while preserving the saving of colonial-era law and leaving the protectionist bias toward economic and political elites intact. Republican reform has since proceeded in phases, with the most contested inheritances, among them the retention of a British court as the final court of appeal, deferred to a later stage. The instrument is amended; the logic that shaped it was not put in question. The concept is two-sided. It names domination and the refusal of domination together. Denied outer space, people stretch inward, into thought, memory, ancestral knowledge, the bush and the hills, and then reach outward again through whatever opening survival allows. Maroon settlements, provision grounds, free villages, higglering, revival, reggae, dancehall, street protest and the yawd itself are products of this movement. What appears to authority as criminality or disorder is frequently a claim to space never legitimately granted. Its radical proposition is that reform is insufficient. What is required is constitutional transformation grounded in a revisionist history and culture of the nation, defining who the people are and what they hold in common, so that smadditization may be completed at both individual and national levels. Without this, the flag and the anthem are ornaments on an unchanged arrangement. Plantalogical politics travels and it offers a lens for any society where the institutional afterlife of racial slavery, indenture or settler colonialism continues to govern who counts, and it insists that the crisis of development is inseparable from an unfinished struggle for freedom over human space.
Source: Heron, Taitu A. (2003) "Plantalogical Politics: Battling for Space and the Jamaican Constitution," in C. Barrow-Giles and D. D. Marshall (eds.), Living at the Borderlines: Issues in Caribbean Sovereignty and Development. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, pp. 493–516.