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, so look for it in fall of 2026!

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Chapter Overview:

• Chapter 1: White Gold

• Chapter 2: Debt

• Chapter 3: Out of the Dirt

• Chapter 4: Labor Refusals

• Chapter 5: The Wages of Modernity

• Chapter 6: Seeing Like an Agronomist

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