‘Born fi dead’: precarious becoming and the Plantationocene in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women

Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women imagines plantation slavery as a system organised around the management of labour, reproduction, ecology, and death. Centring on the recurring phrase ‘born fi dead’ and using Plantationocene as an analytical framework, this paper reads the Montpelier estate as a world in which Black life is rendered perpetually expendable within the violent economies of colonial extraction. The novel demonstrates how plantation power extends beyond physical punishment into the regulation of kinship, subjectivity, and futurity, confining the enslaved to a condition suspended between survival and social death. Particular attention is given to the experiences of enslaved women, whose bodies are subjected simultaneously to labour exploitation, sexual violence, and reproductive control within the structures of plantation patriarchy. At the same time, the paper demonstrates how James locates resistance within storytelling and alternative ontologies that preserve forms of relation and knowledge exceeding colonial authority. The paper ultimately contends that the novel conceptualises ‘precarious becoming’ as one of the central governing condition of plantation modernity while also tracing the continuing afterlives of plantation logic in the contemporary Capitalocene, where disposability, extraction, and managed precarity continue to organise the global order.