Description:
Ingeniously connects the history of citrus cultivation to the production and maintenance of whiteness in sites around the world.
In The Orchard in the Ruins, acclaimed historian Tiago Saraiva illuminates the global impact of cloning Californian oranges, a practice that emerged in the aftermath of the great depression of the 1890s. Cloning promised control, uniformity, and resistance to an array of environmental and economic threats. But Californian orchards--white-owned but tended by workers of Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, or Indigenous origin--were also places where plantations and race intertwined. Agricultural anxieties about strains of oranges and their value, Saraiva shows, formed a continuum with anxieties about vanishing whiteness.
The Orchard in the Ruins connects Californian history to other sites of citrus cultivation: South Africa, where concerns about white poverty grew during the early twentieth century; Mandatory Palestine, where orchards were key to Zionist undertakings; colonial Algeria, where French settlers transformed the landscape with European farming techniques; and Brazil, where orchards were cultivated post-abolition. Drawing on local histories as well as the works of John Dewey, J. M. Coetzee, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and artist Tarsila do Amaral, Saraiva shows that in each place, orchards grew in the wake of specific historical crises. Orange cultivation was a transnational project in cultivating whiteness, one in which studies of fruits, buds, rootstocks, fungi, and viruses became race-making experiments.
A must-read for anyone interested in the history of science, technology, agriculture, and race, The Orchard in the Ruins reveals a troubled account of science-led attempts to remedy crumbling worlds.
Brief description: Tiago Saraiva is professor of history at Drexel University. He is the author of Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism; the coauthor of Moving Crops and the Scales of History; and the coeditor of Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Review Quotes:
"From its evocative title and elegiac prose to its thoughtful analysis, The Orchard in the Ruins offers a measured yet hopeful study of how humans might live amidst political and environmental wreckage. Taking oranges as the subject of historical attention and ranging from the Global South to Southern California, Saraiva explores how these citrus fruits were cloned, cultivated, and commodified. Along the way, we see how these fragrant orchards were rooted--often on the grounds of previous plantations--amidst violent histories of race, imperialism, and capitalism and yet convey lessons for present-day social and ecological resilience."
--W. Patrick McCray, author of "README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines"