Un-happy Objects: Coffee and (neo)Colonialism in the Patchy Anthropocene
BY JESSICA JOHNSTON
September 2022
Surry Hills
I walk into Dan’s café, warmed by his smiling face. The brass edges of the American oak bar glimmer in the sunlight while kids with milk moustaches trace their fingers along the white lettering on the windows. I hear the whirring sound of milk steaming, the light pop of the barista tamping the espresso, transforming fine granules into a syrupy elixir that seems to produce a momentary suspension of time and space in which everything is completely alright in the world.
“Black or white?” Dan asks, breaking my reverie. What he’s referring to is the absence or presence of milk in the cup that does the shape-shifting work of transmuting a long black into a flat white. Sitting here days before bodies hit the streets in protest of a national public holiday to mark the mourning of a figurehead who was for some a much-beloved monarch and for others the symbol of ongoing imperial violence, it’s hard not to be struck differently by the question. I dwell on it momentarily. Black coffee transformed by white milk. Black and brown bodies whose often invisibilized labor transforms the coffee cherries that are sold in a single cup for the price that most coffee labourers make in an entire day to other (mostly White) bodies in cafes across the world. Today I am one of those bodies. “Black”, I say. It’s my coffee order, but it’s also a wishful vote of sorts: away from whiteness, away from extractive colonial-capitalist logics and toward a better world.
Following Gabrielle Hecht, I use this cup of coffee as my interscalar vehicle – as an object of analysis and a means of connecting stories and scales usually kept apart (2018: 115) – to trace it from seed to cup and to foreground some of its ‘forgotten’ histories. Thinking with the Plantationocene and coffee as a ‘happy object’ (Ahmed 2010), I analyze the role of coffee in the plantation economy/ecology which I argue is partly enabled by the affective discourses of ‘happiness’ and ‘partnership’. Viewing coffee as a tool of well-intentioned capacity-building thus obscures the ways in which it continues to function within or alongside the violent legacies and logics of colonialism, racial capitalism and extraction.
Our first scalar adjustment shifts from thinking with the Anthropocene as a planetary analytic, whose language of species life runs the risk of concealing the inequitable contributions to (and sufferings from) environmental destructions and “neatly erases histories of racism” (Yusoff 2018: 12), to the Plantationocene. The Plantationocene points instead to “a historical, situated set of conjunctures” (Haraway in Mitman 2019) that force attention to the plantation as an agro-industrial system that “radically simplifies the number of players and sets up situations for the vast proliferation of some and the removal of others” (ibid). Coffee growing viewed through the scale of plantation worlds is an invitation to see the Anthropocene as a racial process (Pulido 2018: 117).
This particular interscalar journey takes us from Sydney to the fertile slopes of Antigua where we meet leaf rust and direct trade as a discourse of colonization; then to Mataquescuintla where coffee intersects with one of the world’s largest silver mines before landing in Vancouver. Follow me.
Antigua, Guatemala
2012
The coffee I’m drinking was grown on Hacienda Carmona, a family farm run by María Zelaya Aguirre and her nephews whose shade-growing methods cultivate a diverse plantation ecology. But ten years ago, the farm was decimated by leaf rust, a disease caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix that became ‘feral’ in 2012 (Perfecto et al. 236). By 2014, the outbreak was declared a national emergency with 70 percent of coffee farms in Central America affected and 1.7 million workers who live on USD$3.75 per day unemployed and facing food insecurity (Koehler 2018; “Coffee Rust”).
Some suggest this parasitic action can be understood as a kind of justice in which ‘feral’ non-human organisms ‘fight back’ (Chao 2021: 481). Outbreaks like leaf rust proliferate in the technified coffee landscapes where “the monocultural plantation form has come to dominate, reshaping human and non-human life in very dramatic ways” (Perfecto et al. 2019: 236). Unlike small-scale farms such as Hacienda Carmona, the majority of coffee landscapes in the Global South – once complex agroecological landscapes – have undergone “forced simplification” and intensification, leading to loss of biodiversity and proliferation of diseases that are “reshaping the patchy Anthropocene” (ibid). Thinking with the Plantationocene, the development of coffee farms or fincas are revealed as exploitative modes of relating to land, labor and life that intersect with colonial European expansion and ongoing forced labour (Lyons 2005: 18; DanWatch). Let’s time travel, cup in hand, to when coffee was first introduced.
Guatemala
1876
Coffee plants were first cultivated in Guatemala in the 1800s after having been introduced by Jesuit priests (Leutert 2018). As large-scale coffee developed, it did so “figuratively and literally on the backs of the Indians” (McCreery 2003: 194). In the early days of ‘cash crop’ coffee production, wealthy Europeans needed access to the majority Indigenous-occupied fertile highlands that were ideal for growing coffee. The state subsequently declared enormous sections of Indigenous land to be baldíos (unregistered property of the nation), displacing Indigenous groups in favour of privately owned fincas (ibid). Through a government program of forced labor drafts in 1876 called mandamientos, many Indigenous workers were forced out of their communities and onto fincas where they were often overworked and sometimes abused (2003: 197). While some found ways to resist, large-scale coffee production was ultimately made possible due to the structural exploitation of thousands of Indigenous workers, coerced into coffee labor by state power (2003: 208).
Surry Hills
2022
The near-black liquid in my cup offers notes of almond and subtle honey sweetness, with the malic acidity of red apple and melon playing brightly on my tongue. For me, drinking coffee is a joyful full-body sensory experience in which touch, smell, taste and memory are intertwined. This “blooming” of warm, fuzzy affect is “central to the way in which coffee is produced, represented and consumed in Western mass culture” (Sunderland 2012: np). I spent ten years working in specialty coffee, learning how to taste in elevated ways. Coffee has brought me some of the foremost relationships in my life, but it has also been a political awakening: this much-loved shape-shifting material also facilitates and obscures histories of slavery, colonization, land theft and environmental damage.
Finca Carmona’s coffee arrived in my hands by way of direct-trade, a practice in which specialty buyers in the Global North bypass the ‘middleman’ to source high quality green coffee directly from growers in the Global South with whom they form what they call ‘partnerships’. As Sunderland argues, “this focus on interpersonal relationships and friendships cannot be disarticulated from the broader cross-cultural context at stake” (2012). Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s claim that the politics of good feeling is tied to colonial nostalgia – where the ‘civilizing’ mission is a happiness mission in which colonial knowledges constitute the other as lacking the qualities required for happier states of existence (2010:125) – Sunderland suggests that direct trade is “haunted by discourses of colonization” (2012).
By associating coffee with the type of ‘good feeling’ in my opening scene, consumers in the Global North are invited “to join a neo-colonial saga through partaking in imagined communities of global coffee friends” (2012). A quick glance at the website of many specialty coffee roasters confirms this representation of the grower/roaster relationship as one of friendship and empowerment. If, following Ahmed, the civilizing mission is one in which Imperial powers impart ‘happier states of existence’ on colonized Others, can direct-trade relationships be understood as a new White saviourism in which well-meaning specialty coffee buyers travel to the Global South to build relationships with ‘producing partners’ and “find creative and meaningful ways to support them” (“About Us”)?
Mataquescuintla, Guatemala
2012 – 2014
Alex Reynoso. Image used with permission from Bows Coffee Roasters.
East of Hacienda Carmona lies Palo de Quina, a finca run by Alex Reynoso who belongs to a group of Indigenous Xinca coffee producers using coffee growing as a form of resistance. In 2012, despite overwhelming opposition and without Xinca approval, the Canadian-owned Escobal silver mine began construction 5km from their homes and farms. Reynoso’s teenage daughter Topacio joined the resistance, forming her own anti-mining youth group. On April 13 2014, after performing her protest songs at a festival, Topacio was killed by gunfire as she walked with her father. A year later, Alex was attacked after leaving an anti-mine referendum event (Linthicum 2017).
Vancouver, Canada
2019
In 2017, Escobal’s operations were suspended due to lack of adequate consultations with Xinca communities (Ruiz Leotaud 2021). In 2019, Vancouver-based Pan American Silver acquired the mine for $1.1 billion (Friedman 2022) and launched a new consultation phase that is expected to run into 2023. But land defenders like Reynoso continue to engage in their own politics of scale (Hecht 2018: 129), reaching beyond national borders to find solidarity with Canadian academics, social justice organizations and specialty coffee roasters. In 2019, a Canadian roaster heard Reynoso’s story and traveled to Mataquescuintla to meet him. Together with other roasters, they formed a buying group and purchased over 40 thousand kilos of coffee that first year, which ended up in the cups of coffee drinkers like me.
Bondi
October 2022
Sitting in my kitchen weeks later, having brewed another cup of the Zelayas’s coffee, I experience the aromatic dark liquid differently to that morning in the café: everything is not completely alright in the world. Whether the cup of coffee we sip each day is our morning or mourning coffee (Sunderland 2012) depends on our willingness to let it transport us beyond the realm of good feeling and toward something arguably more important: justice and care.
Works Cited
“About Us” (2022) Melbourne Coffee Merchants. https://melbournecoffeemerchants.com.au/about-us/
Ahmed, S. (2010) “Happy Objects” in Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. The affect theory reader. Duke University Press.
Chao, S. (2021). The Beetle or the Bug? Multispecies Politics in a West Papuan Oil Palm Plantation. American Anthropologist, 123(3), 476–489. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13592
“Coffee Rust Affects Food Access For Families” (12 April 2013). World Food Programme via Relief Web [press release]. https://reliefweb.int/report/guatemala/coffee-rust-affects-hits-food-access-families
Friedman, G. (May 13 2022). “Pan American Silver's dance with non-profits shows why ESG is now the main risk for miners”. Financial Post. https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/pan-american-silvers-dance-with- non-profits-shows-why-esg-now-the-main-risk-for-miners
Hecht, G (2018). Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence. Cultural Anthropology, 33(1), 109–141. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.1.05
Koehler, J. “Coffee Rust Threatens Latin American Crop; 150 Years Ago, It Wiped Out An Empire”. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/10/16/649155664/coffee-rust-threatens- latin-american-crop-150-years-ago-it-wiped-out-an-empire
Leutert, S. (July 27 2018) “Why Are So Many Migrants Leaving Guatemala? A Crisis in the Coffee Industry Is One Reason”. Time. https://time.com/5346110/guatemala- coffee-escape-migration/
Linthicum, K. (Dec 27 2017) “‘If we’re attacked, we’ll die together,’” Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-environmental-activists-guatemala- 20171227-htmlstory.html
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Mitman, G. (June 18 2019) “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing”. Edge Effects. https://edgeeffects.net/haraway- tsing-plantationocene/
Perfecto, I., Jiménez-Soto, M. E., & Vandermeer, J. (2019). Coffee Landscapes Shaping the Anthropocene: Forced Simplification on a Complex Agroecological Landscape. Current Anthropology, 60(S20), S236–S250. https://doi.org/10.1086/703413
Pulido, L. (2020). Racism and the Anthropocene. In Future Remains (pp. 116–128). University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226508825-014
Ruiz Leotaud, V. (May 23 2021). “Four agreements signed at first pre-consultation for Pan American Silver’s Escobal mine”. Mining Dot Com. https://www.mining.com/four-agreements-signed-at-first-pre-consultation-for- pan-american-silvers-escobal-mine/
Sunderland, S. (2012). Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling. M/C Journal, 15(2). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.473
“Widespread indicators of forced labour on Guatemala’s coffee plantations”. (ND) Danwatch. https://old.danwatch.dk/en/undersogelseskapitel/widespread- indicators-of-forced-labour-on-guatemalas-coffee-plantations/
Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.
Jessica Johnston is a recent graduate of the University of Sydney’s Master of Peace & Conflict Studies. Her dissertation looked at land-based resistance acts as expressions of decolonial peace. Jessica now lives on the traditional lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people where she is a mother, a feminist and an avid coffee drinker.
