Debates over African agricultural development have been deeply polarized between those who see capitalism and modern technology as saving African farmers and those who see those forces as destroying them. The Upright Farmer reframes this debate through a flagship case of agricultural modernization: the cotton sector of Burkina Faso, where farmers have rapidly adopted pesticides and genetically modified seeds. This process has produced inequality, debt, and social and ecological harm, yet many farmers embrace these technologies. Through rich, multi-sited ethnographic data, Jessie K. Luna untangles this puzzle by arguing that the material and ideological dynamics of colonial capitalist expansion have been interwoven with racialized hierarchies. The lens of racial capitalism reveals how agricultural modernization creates and justifies structural inequalities. At the same time, people throughout this system, from farmers to extension agents to scientists, actively navigate what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the global color line,” using agricultural technologies as pathways for status and tools of resistance. Invoking Thomas Sankara’s anticolonial vision of Burkina Faso as “the land of upright people,” Luna reveals how Burkinabè strive to stand upright as modern subjects, even as they participate in a process that compounds ecological and social splintering.

Jessie K. Luna is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University.

“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

Preface  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. White Gold  28
2. Debt  59
3. Out of the Dirt  90
4. Labor Refusals  117
5. The Wages of Modernity  145
6. Seeing Like an Agronomist  171
Conclusion  198
Appendix: Cotton Costs and Profits  219
Notes  227
Bibliography  261
Index  287