Tales of the Post-Plantation: Unlikely Protagonists of Modern Philippine Banana History

For Ateneo de Manila University Press

Robin Thiers

Since the late 1960s, the hinterland of the southern Philippine city of Davao has been the epicenter of commercial production and export 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?

Robin Thiers holds a PhD in Political Sciences from the University of Ghent (Belgium), where he worked at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies.