Racial Capitalism and Agricultural Modernization in West Africa

• In Event: 41006 - Racial Capitalism and the Environment

Abstract

This presentation narrows in on the theoretical framing I have forwarded in my forthcoming book, The Upright Farmer: Racial Capitalism and Agricultural Modernization in Burkina Faso. I explore how the framework of racial capitalism - and its fellow travelers - offers a useful set of tools for making sense of the many social, ecological, and economic contradictions and ruptures that have accompanied agricultural modernization in West Africa. The Upright Farmer interrogates the process and consequences of agricultural modernization in the cotton sector of southwestern Burkina Faso, where farmers have expanded their use of agricultural technologies such as pesticides and genetically modified seeds while exporting cotton to the global market. Through ethnographic data, I show how this process reproduces both global and local inequalities and unravels ecological and social webs of interconnection. At the same time, rural people play key roles in these changes, defying a simple characterization of global capitalism bearing down on rural Africa or of rural peasants rising up in resistance. Why are farmers taking part in the expansion of capitalist agriculture, despite these many harms? This book situates agricultural modernization in Burkina Faso within the economic and ideological history of racial capitalism, arguing that racial hierarchies and imaginaries ¬– and the myriad ways that differently situated people navigate them ¬¬– play an under-examined role in shaping agricultural modernization in contemporary Africa.

Author

• Jessie Kilcher Luna, Colorado State University