Journal of Latin American Geography

It is a pleasure to introduce this book review forum for Case Watkins's award-winning monograph, Palm Oil Diaspora. For full disclosure, I was an enthusiastic supporter of the book when I reviewed the manuscript for Cambridge University Press. I was going to participate in a CLAG Book Salon organized by Adrienne Johnson and Zoe Pearson at the postponed Tucson, Arizona, 2022 CLAG meeting. The discussion of the book only happened at the CLAG meeting in January 2023 when I took the lead in organizing the salon. We were a small group that consisted of Martha Bell, Nia Cambridge, and myself. Both Nia and Martha have again contributed here, and they are joined by Samira Moretto, Vanessa Casteneda, and the author in giving a response.

In the book's epilogue, "Decolonizing Dendê," Watkins writes:

The economic and political tensions that characterize Brazil's contemporary palm oil sector and the ongoing struggle for its development derive from a colonized, modernist politics of knowledge, one that privileges certain strands of state-sponsored science and development at the expense of ancestral, place-based knowledges and practices. Colonial epistemes favor authoritarian monocultures geared for state profit while suppressing Afrodescendant knowledges and socioecological traditions as relics of an utterly undeveloped past. Modern agriculture and its state-led development orthodoxies in Bahia therefore continue to frame traditional dendê agroecosystems as crude and embarrassing consequences of the African diaspora, rather than resilient multispecies collectives thriving in spite of colonial oppression and prejudicial interventions.

(p. 267)

These clear-eyed condemnations might sound like bluster if they had come at the beginning of the book, but when they appear after 267 pages they read like a tempered finding and a spirited appreciation. Such insight took more than a decade of research and relied on a multi-method approach that was [End Page 183] deeply engaged with theoretical insights, and grounded in archival research, knowledge of ecological processes, lengthy field work, and application of GIS. Watkins's methodological approaches worked synergistically, each contributing to insights gleaned from the other—the field being mutually entangled with the archive, the maps speaking to and illustrating the ethnographic, and so on. To reconstruct the lifeworlds and environmental practices of those who left little or no written record and appear only fleetingly in the colonial archive, and over such a long period, requires a multi-method approach, and Watkins's study does this superbly.

Watkins examines the slave trade–dependent movement of a palm from its home in West Africa to Bahia, Brazil, and its reintegration into the lives of Africans and Afro-descendants over the longue durée and into the Brazilian economy up to the present. In doing so, the study exposes and powerfully redresses the erasure of African knowledges and Afro-descendant contributions to productive, multispecies agroecosystems that modernist systems continually seek to displace. I can say that the book is a fine exemplar of historical political ecology in the broadest sense.

To my mind this is an important contribution to the geography of Latin America and the Caribbean because it uses the full repertoire of our discipline to chronicle Black geographies and the deeply cultural and transatlantic dimension of landscape change. The book does this while being respectful of its subjects, attributing profound knowledge and intentional agency to generations of people whose histories and geographies have been made illegible by colonial processes of exclusion that continue to this day.

"Eu tenho dendê nas veias" (I have palm oil in my veins). I...