Cornell University

Free Event

Talk by Townsend Middleton (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

 

What happens after colonial industries have run their course?  When the factory closes and the fields go fallow, how do laboring communities continue to live and fight amid all that remains? In this talk, anthropologist (and Cornell SAP alum), Towns Middleton takes on these questions through a discussion of his new book Quinine’s Remains. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy throughout the colonial period. As such, the alkaloid was vital to the British Empire. British botanists appropriated cinchona from indigenous South America, bringing the ‘fever tree’ to India in the 19th century and establishing massive plantations to produce the medicine the empire needed. Today, the cinchona plantations of the Darjeeling Hills remain—as do the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. To engage quinine’s remarkable history and its often-confounding aftermaths, then, is to explore what it means to forge life after empire.

 

Townsend Middleton is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He received his PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University in 2010.  He is the author of The Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling (Stanford 2015) and co-editor of Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments (OUP-India 2018).  He publishes broadly on political culture and the conditions of postcoloniality in the Indian Himalayas.  He is currently co-editor of the scholarly magazine Limn.

 

Quinine’s Remains is published by the University of California Press (2024) and is available in digital Open Access format for free globally.

4 people are interested in this event

User Activity

No recent activity