Black clubs facing the Plantationocene: climate change and cosmotechnic in the Black Atlantic

Abstract

This article examines the actions of Black clubs in Rio Grande do Sul (RS), in southern Brazil, in the face of climate change. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025 in Porto Alegre–RS, I address the floods that covered RS in May 2024 as an intrusion into the historicity of Black clubs — an intrusion that demands an ontological and epistemological repositioning on the part of these associations. Accordingly, I ask: how do Black clubs position themselves in relation to climate change? How do these associations elaborate their histories and memories in light of the “new climatic regime”? To answer these questions, I employ a descriptive and prescriptive exercise based on the observation of the clubs’ temporal performances — that is, their regimes of historicity. Finally, I argue that, at present, Black clubs can be understood as technologies of Black memory (analogous to the concept of cosmotechnics). However, in order to respond to climate change, these clubs must incorporate into the composition of their counter-historicities, rooted in the Black Atlantic, the fundamental intersection between racism and environmental extractivism of the Plantationocene — an alternative and complementary concept to that of the Anthropocene.