Plantation Liberalism: A Genealogy of Personhood, Property, and Activism between Philippine Mindanao and the Black Atlantic

On the banana plantations of the Southern Philippines, activists involved in an anti-chemical campaign decry their exposure to pesticide drift as an infringement on both their person and their personhood. Such forms of dehumanization draw the plantation worlds of Southeast Asia and the Black Atlantic into a tight embrace. This paper offers the notion of “plantation liberalism” as a provocation for overcoming some of the “regional closets” that persist in Asian Studies, and argues that such a conceptual, methodological, and political commitment will be critical for an era many have called the Plantationocene. Plantation liberalism is the property-oriented vision of personhood introduced by agrarian colonialism that continues to define the contours of environmental activism today. To trace its genealogy in the Philippines, this paper outlines how American planters of the early 20th century drew on racial ideologies, inherited from the Antebellum South, to project limited personhood onto Mindanao’s Indigenous Peoples and to impose private property as the path towards their “benevolent assimilation” into the American empire. It then demonstrates how those ideals became the narrative terrain on which activists continue to articulate environmental campaigns, and on which their claims for justice continue to be adjudicated. By illuminating the transfer of these ideas between Philippine Mindanao and the Black Atlantic, this paper seeks modes of transregional scholarship attentive to connection and comparison, but sensitive to the contingencies of historical context.

About Professor Paredes:

Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is an environmental and economic anthropologist researching plantation agriculture, transnational trade, and social justice activism between the Philippines and Japan. Her work appears in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, the Journal of Political Ecology, Gastronomica, and Food, Culture & Society, as well as in the edited collections The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) and Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2020). She is also co-editor of the forthcoming volume Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food (University of Hawaii Press, 2025). She holds a PhD with distinction from Yale University.

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