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{
    "pk": 43119,
    "title": "Consider the Coconut: Scientific Agriculture and the Racialization of Risk in the American Colonial Philippines",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "This article invokes the “molecular intimacies of empire” to illuminate the links between the superfood status of coconut oil and plantation labor in the American colonial Philippines. Prior to the American occupation in 1898, coconuts were a local crop that offered small growers a degree of protection from capitalist agriculture. A mere two decades later, coconut plantations occupied more than two million acres of land; copra – the dried kernels from which oil is pressed – was the archipelago’s third major export industry; and the industry employed at least four million people along a commodity chain that included prisoners, landed planters, and oil refiners. Transimperial tropical research stations, economic botany, and penal farms propelled this change. US-run prison plantations in the southern Philippines served as living laboratories for the racial management of labor and the bioengineering of trees bearing fruit all year. Though the copra trade comprised production of modern extractive capitalism, American dairy farmers and vegetable oil producers racialized copra imports as a tropical threat to the white body politic during the global Great Depression. Yet this conflation of coconut oil and the imagined tropical primitive positioned coconut oil for its rerendering as an unrefined natural health food. By connecting the colonial planation to the coconut’s superfood status, the article shows how discourses of risk are racialized and consumed. Indeed, is not the body of the laborer who risks exposure to fertilizers and pesticides nor the loss of biodiversity that North American consumers consider when asked if coconuts are a health food.",
    "language": "en",
    "license": {
        "name": "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives  4.0",
        "short_name": "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0",
        "text": "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.",
        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0"
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Philippines and colonial agriculture"
        },
        {
            "word": "coconut plantation"
        },
        {
            "word": "plantation labor"
        },
        {
            "word": "Transnational American Studies"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Special Forum on The Molecular Intimacies of Empire",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x8054pt",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Theresa",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Ventura",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Concordia University",
            "department": "None"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2022-07-23T13:19:41+03:00",
    "date_accepted": "2022-07-23T13:19:41+03:00",
    "date_published": "2022-08-07T06:02:58+03:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/43119/galley/32123/download/"
        }
    ]
}