The Multiplying Worlds of Ma Joie

Authors

  • Hélène Frichot University of Melbourne

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59490/footprint.20.1.8703

Abstract

This essay explores the environmental and spatial afterlives of plantation colonialism in the Seychelles through an ecofeminist auto-theoretical approach. Drawing on family archives and field philosophical research, the author reflects on her position as the granddaughter of a former plantation owner while tracing the material and spatial legacies of the Plantationocene. Rather than reconstructing a linear historical narrative, the essay unfolds as a series of temporal and spatial folds through which plantation infrastructures, creole domestic architectures, and provision gardens emerge as sites of both domination and creative resistance. Attention to minor architectures and everyday spatial practices reveals the entangled histories of plantocracy, enslaved and indentured labour, and creole cultural formation. Through a process of “re-membering” informed by critical fabulation, the essay examines how plantation landscapes persist in contemporary environmental and social relations, from migrant domestic spaces to postcolonial land redistribution and blue-economy development. The multiplying environmental worlds of Ma Joie demonstrate how plantation histories continue to shape ecological practices and spatial imaginaries while opening possibilities for reparative engagement with creole material knowledge.

Author Biography

Hélène Frichot, University of Melbourne

Architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, Hélène
Frichot was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and
Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden
until 2019, and also holds an honorary professorship at the Bartlett
School of Architecture. She joined the University of Melbourne,
Australia, as professor of architecture and philosophy in 2020.
Her recent publications include Dirty Theory (AADR, 2019/2025)
and Creative Ecologies (Bloomsbury, 2018). She has co-edited
many anthologies, including: Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our
Architectural Support Systems (Birkhauser, 2022); Architectural
Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge 2021); Ficto-Critical
Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2020) and special issues of the Journal
of Architecture, Jennifer Bloomer: A Revisitation (2024) and Deleuze
and Guattari Studies Journal, A Deleuzian Life – A People to Come
(2025), celebrating 100 years since Gilles Deleuze’s birth.

References

Britz, Claude. Demeures des Seychelles: 9 exemples. Paris: UNESCO, 1987.

Carney, Judith A. “Subsistence in the Plantationocene: Dooryard Gardens, Agrobiodiversity, and the Subaltern Economies of Slavery.” Journal of Peasant Studies 48, no. 5 (2021): 1075–99.

Chao, Sophie. “Plantation.” Environmental Humanities 14, no. 2 (2022): 361–66.

Chattopadhyay, Swati. “Field Note: Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 81, no. 1 (2022): 5–20.

Chattopadhyay, Swati. “The Small Spaces of Empire: Long-Distance Trade, Anglo-Indian Foodways and the Bottlekhana.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 52, no. 1 (2024): 1–44.

Choppy, Penda. The Creole Garden and Kitchen Pharmacy. Republic of Seychelles: University of Seychelles, 2021.

Choppy, Penda. “Monsters, Mythical Creatures, and Island Hopping in Seychellois Folktales.” Seychelles Research Journal 5, no. 2 (2023): 3–21.

Choppy, Penda. “Selo! Oral Accounts of Seychelles’ Maritime Culture.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Blue Heritage, edited by Rosabelle Boswell, David O’Kane, and Jeremy Hills, 203–24. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Yams, Roots, and Rot.” Small Axe 34 (2011): 58–75.

Despret, Vinciane. Living as a Bird. Translated by Helen Morrison. Cambridge: Polity, 2022.

Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. “Thinking/Creating Africa.” ARCH+, no. 262 (2025): 12.

Dubois, Laurent. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Critique of Black Reason, by Achille Mbembe, ix–xv. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021.

Franda, Marcus. The Seychelles: Unquiet Islands. Hampshire: Gower, 1982.

Frichot, Hélène. “Minor Architectures of the Plantationocene: A Colonial Family Romance.” Architectural Theory Review 28, no. 3 (2024): 473–88.

Frichot, Hélène, Mairi O’Gorman, and Najea Barbe. “An Island Infrastructure of Gardens, Gossip and ‘Grigri’.” FKW: Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, no. 74 (2024): 17–40.

Gardiner, J. Stanley. “The Seychelles Archipelago.” Geographical Journal 29, no. 2 (1907): 148–68.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 159–65.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Revised and updated ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947–63.

Nwulia, Moses D. E. The History of Slavery in Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1810–1875. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981.

Payet, Rolph. Physical Alteration and Destruction of Habitats: Seychelles Report. Nairobi: Nairobi Convention, 2002.

Pointe, Elsie. “‘Every Home a Garden’ Initiative.” Seychelles Nation, October 16, 2020.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Sheriff, Abdul, and Vijaya Teelock. “Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean.” In Transition from Slavery in Zanzibar and Mauritius, edited by Abdul Sheriff, Vijayalakshmi Teelock, Saada Omar Wahab, and Satyendra Peerthum, 25–43. Dakar: CODESRIA, 2016.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

Upton, Dell. “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.” Places 2, no. 2 (1984): 59–72.

Vergès, Françoise. Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” Savacou, no. 5 (1971): 95–102.

Downloads

Published

2026-09-30

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 1 (2026): Issue # 38 | African Dreams: Re-Enchantment Through Relational Ontologies

Section

Article

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Hélène Frichot

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.