Exploring the Plantationocene Through Works by Otobong Nkanga

This paper engages Otobong Nkanga’s work In Pursuit of Bling, The Weight of Scars, as well as Anamnesis through the Lens of the Plantationocene. Coined by cultural theorist Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, the theory of the Plantationocene positions the emergence of extractive agricultural and natural resource withdrawal systems that are dependent on precarious racialised labour developed during the colonisation of the new world, as a defining point in our relationship with land and landscape. Nkanga’s work examines the relationship between land, body, and labour through the colonial history of mineral mining in Namibia and Nigeria, the displacement and transportation of plants and people as commodities in racial capitalism, and the act of reconstructing a fractured landscape. Through the use of haptic means, such as bringing material from the landscape into the gallery, Nkanga explores alternative ways of knowing and thinking about ecological and colonial histories but also how ideas of blackness emerged intertwined with the materials of the plantation through forced racialised labour. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s exploration of Plantation Futures, Krista Thompson’s analysis of the ʻpolitics of Bling’, and Kathryn Yusoff’s scholarship on the colonial history of geology, I consider how Nkanga’s work disrupts the traditional narrative around the Anthropocene to show historical environmental inequalities and the scars of colonialism in the present-day landscape.