The Upright Farmer

Debates over African agricultural development have been deeply polarized between those who see capitalism and technology as either saving or destroying African farmers. Digging into and past these debates, The Upright Farmer interrogates the contradictions of agricultural modernization in the cotton sector of southwestern Burkina Faso, a country where farmers have rapidly adopted agricultural technologies like pesticides and genetically modified seeds while exporting cotton to the global market. Through ethnographic data, the book examines how agricultural modernization has produced global and local inequalities while unraveling ecological and social webs of interconnection. And yet, rural people have played key roles in these changes, defying a simple characterization of victimization or resistance. The book examines why farmers are taking part in the expansion of capitalist agriculture, despite these many harms.

 

To untangle these contradictions, The Upright Farmer argues that the material and ideological dynamics of capitalist expansion have been interwoven with racialized hierarchies, from the colonial era to the present. The broad framework of racial capitalism helps explain structural inequalities and coercions, as well as differently situated rural peoples’ aspirations for new technologies that can bring status and dignity. Just as Thomas Sankara enacted anti-colonial resistance in the 1980s by renaming his country Burkina Faso – “the land of upright people” – the book examines how rural farmers today actively seek the ability to stand, upright, as modern members of the world rather than as bent over labor for global capitalism. Nonetheless, agricultural modernization produces a compounding process of ecological and social splintering that deepens capitalist relations and inequalities.

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The book will also be published Open Access. Release date: October of 2026!

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Available through Duke University Press

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"An exceptional book of paramount importance. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, Luna draws on insightful and engaging ethnography to offer a brilliant analysis and rigorous critique of agricultural modernization in cotton production using the lens of racial capitalism. A desperately needed original empirical contribution to build and refine existing theory and to shift the terms of the problematic itself." - Jordanna Matlon, author of A Man Among Other Men (winner of the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award in 2024)

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"An outstanding piece of scholarship: a future classic for those who study agrarian change. Luna has achieved the rare feat of producing an accessible and engaging text that is also theoretically rich, yet deeply grounded in the ecologies, rural sensibilities and linguistic nuances of Burkina Faso. A rural sociology tour de force!” – William Moseley, author of Decolonizing African Agriculture: Food Security, Agroecology and the Need for Radical Transformation, 2026 President of the American Association of Geographers

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