Neighborhoods of the Plantation: War, Politics and Education

The plantation is a slave society, a means and a system of usurpation of life energies and bodily productive capacities in the service of endless bankruptcy on the one hand and elite persuasions on the other. The book argues, in part, that war or State organized violence is one of the most efficient means of the elite transfer; the wreckage through war and destruction of ordinary livability opens up the human as organic compounds in the turning of human life into global plantation assets. More importantly, the book argues that this is possible only by means of certain ontological and epistemological deployments that make war on the human-ecological inevitable and even acceptable. This is where pedagogy comes in. The temporal being, the spatial being, and the linguistic being of the human-ecological are explored as three dimensions of captivity as well as the means of escape. The book rejects the politics of power as inimical to the very becoming of the human and posits the politics of strength as a new possibility that breaks with the plantation system of organized violence and vampiric wealth production.About the authorKaustuv Roy teaches social and political theory in the College of Education at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. His earlier book was Teachers in Nomadic Spaces: Deleuze and Curriculum. He is currently working on the concept of leaderless and non-representational politics.