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New arrangements of power are emerging in response to the turbulence generated by the quest to improve life and render it productive. This paper specifies such arrangements by developing the concept of metabolic politics: an apparatus that shifts from discipline to power regulating material, bodily, and environmental transformations. The dominant function of metabolic politics is to render the transformative capacities of living bodies and the circulatory dynamics of materials into object‐targets of governance. Through a comparative analysis of regulating pollution from industrial poultry units in Britain and India, the paper identifies logics of a metabolic politics and distinguishes these from the biopolitics of populations. Metabolic politics entails interventions targeting a milieu rather than deviant populations; its actions are directed at transformative capacities of bodies in addition to improving their productivity; its modes of governance operates via regulation and not just discipline; and its techniques of operation proceed through modulation instead of enclosure. Metabolic politics is a transversal form of power. It is situated and historically contingent, rather than uniform and universal. As a response to crises generated by the industrialisation and cheapening of life, metabolic politics furnishes vital insights into the administration and governance of the contemporary living and material world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic implications of biopolitics – or the administration, regulation, and control of life – have received significant attention in recent geographical and cognate scholarship. An emerging theme of inquiry, largely focused on the Global North, makes contributions to specifying 'lively capital', defined here as bodily value in motion – predicated on accumulation from other‐than‐human life. In this paper, we argue that the biopolitical process of bringing life into the ambit of capital works in cultural, political, and economic registers and not just through singular logics of the economic, as extant accounts have implied. The rendition of life into capital through modes of biopower is not a universal process. It has diverging trajectories that, in postcolonial contexts, involve hybrids between biopolitical and vernacular practices. This argument is made through an account of bovine biopolitics in urban Delhi with specific reference to the city's 'cattle problem' involving 'surplus' animals. It unfolds in four distinct parts. First, drawing on archival work, we trace colonial histories of cattle improvement to reveal how the category of 'surplus' was invented. Second, we deploy more‐than‐human ethnographies of free‐ranging animals in Delhi to foreground how 'surplus' cattle – which we conceptualise as 'living waste' – are driven to feed on waste as a result of gentrification and the enclosure of erstwhile grazing grounds. Third, we turn to gaushalas (cow shelters) in Delhi to show how 'surplus' cattle from the city's streets are rehomed and managed. Fourth, we examine the uneven practices of care afforded to different bovines based on logics associated with right‐wing Hindutva nationalism. Our account provincialises lively capital by opening up more nuanced and situated understandings of the relations between biopolitics and capitalism, attentive to divergences from models situated in Western modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Plantationocene is a threshold for understanding planetary change. Rather than attributing environmental transformations to the universal agency of humankind, a Plantationocene grounds the alteration of landscape in histories of colonialism and race, and takes the plantation to be a pivotal engine for producing novel but fraught natures. This article develops a vegetal geography of a Plantationocene, engaging relations between plants and people as well as the role plants play as mediators of habitability in a landscape. It argues that such geographies influence and are underscored by the exploitation of labor, violent enclosures of land, and the quest to profit from both human and other-than-human life. Vegetal geographies are tracked in three conceptual registers: the vegetal agency of plants put into circulation by plantations, vegetal economies centered on labor power and the work plants do, as well as the vegetal politics of landscape change proceeding though an ecology of relations and the asymmetric exercise of power. This reading of a Plantationocene and its vegetal geographies brings scholarship on planetary transformations into closer dialogue with colonial history and postcolonial political economy. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of the Adivasi community, elephants, and tea plantations in Assam, northeast India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]