What can the limits of postcolonial land restitution tell us about our planetary crisis today? Scholarship in architectural, urban, and environmental history has become increasingly planetary in scope, yet it has rarely engaged issues of land and sovereignty that postcolonial and African historians have long studied.

This talk develops earthmaking as a framework – attending to the slow and sticky infrastructural reorganization of land, labor, and ecology in the postcolony. Drawing on collaborative fieldwork with original performers of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii’s “I Will Marry When I Want” (1977) and archival research on the forced resettlement village of Kamĩrĩĩthũ in Kenya’s former White Highlands, it traces how the plot, the plantation, the theatre, and the play became paradoxical instruments of postcolonial sovereignty.

The intervention is twofold: if the plantation rather than the city is the world-making spatial form in much of the global South, our analytical focus must reorient accordingly. And if the most precise theory of plantation afterlives was produced on an open-air stage before the bulldozers arrived, we must reckon with whose knowledge counts as analysis of our planetary crisis – and from what ground.