Rotten times on the plantation: Fungal life as archetype 1880–1940

The archetype of rot was conspicuous in the scientific, governmental, and popular imagination of the 1880–1940 period. On plantations, efforts to eradicate the continuous emergence of fungal rot were confounded by the metabolizing capacity of mycelial webs to transform the plantation into the longer continuities of life's intelligence. In this essay, we understand plantations as spaces of multi-species “thinking,” and we present the drive for fungicidal toxification not as a fix or cure, but as the articulation of an “unthought known,” in Christopher Bollas's sense, of ecological ungovernability – a shadow of tacit, and not explicit knowledge – that arose out of the global plantation system. By examining fungal rots across the Caribbean and Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the efforts to both understand and eradicate fungal proliferation through chemical governance, this essay is interested in forms of intelligence and resistance beyond the scope of human actors alone, and in the anxieties and strategies of colonialist rule that developed as continuous counterinsurgency. We propose that fungi, as a major cause of plantation rots, can be studied as thinking historical actors, and as a haunt of the colonial imagination.