Bananapocalypse: Externalities in the Un/Making of Plantation Capitalism

Plantation regimes confront a serious challenge in the 21st century. For every commodity, there are multiple externalities that are hidden and unaccounted for. Drawing on fieldwork between the Philippines and Japan, this lecture will argue that industry members depend not only on the externalities themselves, but also on the conceit that externalities remain external. Focusing on pesticide drift, food waste, and soil pathogens, this lecture will discuss how, when, and why the doubling back of externalities happens in the context of a powerful, but also desperate plantation economy operating within the increasingly constrained environmental conditions of this century.

Bio: Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her work appears in Ethnos, the Journal of Political Ecology, and Food, Culture & Society, as well as in the edited collections The Promise of Multispecies Justice and Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene. She is also co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food, under contract with the University of Hawaii Press. She holds a PhD from Yale University.