The alteration of materials and their consequent effects is a defining feature of our transformed planet. Attending to the uncanny and unexpected ways in which alcohol mediates relations between people and elephants, this chapter develops a material politics of a Plantationocene. Going beyond neovitalist and new materialist accounts of the politics of matter, it argues that the political agency of materials is the outcome of historically situated processes and conditions under which materials are produced. Alcohol is a generative substance for grounding material politics, for its histories and conditions of production are closely shaped by plantation logics and a necro-economy of profiting from the expenditure of Adivasi lives. Alcohol’s effects, however, exceed human arrangements: it affects how elephants sense, inhabit, and dwell in landscapes. Relations between materials, people, and animals furnish an affective ecology of a Plantationocene, where there is a generation of new vulnerabilities and an uneven distribution of harms.
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