My monograph expands my doctoral research to examine the ways in which plantation-making alters the ecology of more-than-human kinship in peninsular Malaysia. If my doctoral research examines the shifting socio-spatial articulations of the rubber-timber ecologies of plantation to rethink the idea that colonial extraction is a unilateral practice of dispossession, my monograph expands these insights into the politics of wildlife conservation, environmental sustainability, and more-than-human kinship to argue that extraction is a generative intervention. As a prime target for Cold War development due to the alleged threat of communist insurgency, agrarian change in Malaysia had a threefold focus: (1) the consolidation of liberal imperialism through resource extraction; (2) the expansion of monocrop plantations and timber production for Bumiputra empowerment; and (3) the optimization of these two goals through programs of wildlife conservation and sustainable forestry, which removed ‘plantation pests’ and accelerated timber extraction. Nowadays, these interventions manifest altered relationalities beyond their purview. I examine these more-than-human reconfigurations engendered by the percolating logics of plantation-making through the concept of extractive formation, namely a shifting articulation of politics, ecology, epistemology, and temporality that emerges from extractive spaces to facilitate differential practices of dispossession and empowerment. Drawing on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and oral history in Malaysia and beyond, my monograph examines the extractive formations emerging from within plantation spaces, such as rogue elephants, angry spirits, and analogic kinship, capturing more-than-human kinship as adaptive and articulating indigeneity as a fraught notion. By reflecting on the astute and vital negotiations across seen and unseen realms that communities engage in through resource extraction, I ultimately argue that extraction is not merely an indeterminate intervention but rather a generative one. Overall, my monograph will foreground a contextually specific horizon of agrarian practice that manifests more equitable futures in the Anthropocene.
My monograph expands my doctoral research to examine the ways in which plantation-making alters the ecology of more-than-human kinship in peninsular Malaysia. If my doctoral research examines the shifting socio-spatial articulations of the rubber-timber ecologies of plantation to rethink the idea that colonial extraction is a unilateral practice of dispossession, my monograph expands these insights into the politics of wildlife conservation, environmental sustainability, and more-than-human kinship to argue that extraction is a generative intervention. As a prime target for Cold War development due to the alleged threat of communist insurgency, agrarian change in Malaysia had a threefold focus: (1) the consolidation of liberal imperialism through resource extraction; (2) the expansion of monocrop plantations and timber production for Bumiputra empowerment; and (3) the optimization of these two goals through programs of wildlife conservation and sustainable forestry, which removed ‘plantation pests’ and accelerated timber extraction. Nowadays, these interventions manifest altered relationalities beyond their purview. I examine these more-than-human reconfigurations engendered by the percolating logics of plantation-making through the concept of extractive formation, namely a shifting articulation of politics, ecology, epistemology, and temporality that emerges from extractive spaces to facilitate differential practices of dispossession and empowerment. Drawing on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and oral history in Malaysia and beyond, my monograph examines the extractive formations emerging from within plantation spaces, such as rogue elephants, angry spirits, and analogic kinship, capturing more-than-human kinship as adaptive and articulating indigeneity as a fraught notion. By reflecting on the astute and vital negotiations across seen and unseen realms that communities engage in through resource extraction, I ultimately argue that extraction is not merely an indeterminate intervention but rather a generative one. Overall, my monograph will foreground a contextually specific horizon of agrarian practice that manifests more equitable futures in the Anthropocene.