Reading Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Planter of Malata’ in the Plantationocene

During the twentieth century, criticism of Joseph Conrad’s oeuvre has undergone remarkable transformations. Until the end of the past century, cultural approaches dominated the field with their interest in issues of imperial expansion, colonial exploitation, and racism, among others. Only in the last two decades, however, Conrad has finally joined the Anthropocene, facing the scrutiny of ecocritics who have engaged with Conrad’s treatment of nature. Notably, Nidesh Lawtoo has promoted a ‘mimetic turn’ (2016) in Conrad’s criticism, encouraging a transition from the anthropocentric bias of previous mimetic approaches to the foregrounding of Conrad’s insights into the mimetic dialectic of human and other-than-human forces. This paper reads Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘The Planter of Malata’ (1914) in the Plantationocene, thus responding to a new widespread concern in the humanities to start thinking about plantation logics, past and present, and the way in which they operate disruptive changes on both human and other-than-human ecologies. To this end, while projections of contemporary preoccupations are avoided, attention is placed on the aesthetic form of the text in relation to the historical drivers of scientific imperialism, biocolonialism, capitalism, and nature, which shape the context of High Imperialism, thus in-forming Conrad’s fictional world.