Preservationism in the Plantationocene: protection as exploitation in Brazil’s Cerrado

Abstract This article proposes a relational approach to the notion of the plantation in order to identify continuities between the exploitation and the protection of forms of life in modernity. We mobilise the concept of plantation in an operational sense, rather than as a substantive category or a merely metaphorical figure. This approach allows us to foreground mechanisms of ecosystem homogenisation, forms of colonial violence, and the disciplining of bodies that continue to operate in the expansion of colonial modes of inhabitation of the earth. Drawing on the history of establishing a natural park overlapping a traditional Quilombola territory in Brazil’s Cerrado, we show how necropolitical violence, wildfires, and racialized labour emerge as effects of preservationist governance on the land. The aim of the article is to broaden analyses of the plantation phenomenon to encompass not only seventeenth-century agricultural enterprises and their continuation in contemporary agribusiness, but also what might be considered their antithesis: natural areas conserved under full protection regimes.