Tales of the Post-Plantation: Unlikely Protagonists of Modern Philippine Banana History by Robin Thiers is a groundbreaking study into the commercial production and export of Cavendish bananas in the Philippines.

Since the late 1960s, the hinterland of the southern Philippine city of Davao has been the epicenter of production and trade of Cavendish bananas in Asia. Against a backdrop of elite interests pushing a paradigm of banana-plantation modernity, Robin Thiers opts to tell this story through the tales of more unlikely protagonists: small-scale farmers, a fungus, and the banana itself.

Drawing on original fieldwork and transdisciplinary empirical and theoretical literature, he pushes us to imagine plantations as more-than-human assemblages, both underpinning and subverting the imaginaries of capitalist discipline and anthropocentric control. Destabilizing the epistemic and ontological foundations of the modern plantation, this book is first and foremost an invitation: could we imagine a post-plantation?

Publisher:
Ateneo de Manila University Press, Philippines

Publication Date:
2023

Format:
Softcover / 9 x 6 inches / 418 pages / BW

Language:
English

ISBN: 978-6-21-448223-8