Monocultural farming practices are indissociable from the transformations that characterize life in the 21^st century: climate change, urbanization and the dematerialization of labor are but a few phenomena with links to this particular form of land use. Defined as a mode of agriculture in which a single crop is farmed intensively to be sold as a commodity, monoculture has a modern history that intertwines the rise of racialized capitalism in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, of western empires in the 19^th, and of forms of petrochemical neocolonialism invented in the 20^th. Despite this importance, much remains unseen and unsaid about monoculture’s influence on cultural expression. This panel will explore multiple valences of the term “monoculture” to invite reflections upon how agriculture under capitalism has intersected with cultural production in the past and present. Placing intensive agricultural processes in dialogue with monoculture’s second meaning—a collective desire for totalizing narrative (Michaels 2011)—we are especially interested in contributions that complicate the often oversimplified schema through which monocultures are presented in both academia and the media.

“Wheat! Wheat! Wheat!” So goes the refrain of Frank Norris’s The Pit, aesthetically registering the monocultural cash crop as the object of sociocultural obsession. Approaching monoculture from their unique historical standpoints, authors as disparate as Patrice Nganang (La Terre du café, coffee), Mongo Beti (Ville Cruelle, cocoa), William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, banana) and Narayan Surve (In That Mill, cotton) have had recourse to formal innovation to capture monoculture’s transformation of landscapes, its effects on communities and its reorganization of global power. This panel invites papers treating a corpus of similar literature, film and performance art (as well as objects of everyday life) that have their source in monoculture.

Be they the plantations of the Americas’ slave economies or the chemicalized farmlands of the modern countryside, the matrices of monoculture have often been difficult to access for outside observers. That monoculture’s long-term effects are diffuse in both space and time only aggravates these challenges to representation. Even the term “monoculture” when invoked as a epistemic category risks obscuring a vast array of practices: from the large-scale sugar cane plantation to smallholding banana farms, the collectivized wheat field to the peanuts cultivated on untenured land, “monoculture" encompasses a broad spectrum of spaces and practices emerging within differing forms of agricultural development, geographic regions and societies. This panel will seek to comprehend this diversity, drawing scholars of different disciplines and historical periods into a comparative conversation of the many cultures of monoculture.