Weedy Life: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Tropicality

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2014

The lower status of plants relative to animals, one of the defining characteristics of Western thought, is under challenge from diverse research in botany, philosophy and the more‐than‐human social sciences including geography. Although the agency of plants is increasingly demonstrated, scholars have yet to fully respond, for plants, to Lulka's call to attend more carefully to the details of nonhuman difference (Lulka D 2009 The residual humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 34 378–93). This paper advances the concept of the shared capacities of plants, in order to take them seriously in their own terms, and to consider what that means for human–plant relations more generally. We identify four capacities illustrated through plant lives: distinctive materialities; moving independent of humans; sensing and communicating; and taking shape as flexible bodies. Together these provide a sense of plant worlds in whi...

ariel: a review of international english literature, 2013

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/545829/summary This article proposes a rethinking of biological invasion in contemporary South African and Australian literature. It argues that the literary representation of pest proliferation can offer a privileged insight into the intersection between the legacy of settler colonialism and current ecological concerns. Indeed, the question of invasive species can be connected to both unreconciled histories of colonial expansion and pressing biodiversity and conservation issues. This essay adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialisation in order to explore the description of invasive species in Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Nineveh and The Rabbits, a visual narrative by John Mardsen and Shaun Tan. A reading inspired by the anti-metaphorical value of the concept of deterritorialisation overcomes an anthropocentric view that would reduce animals to mere metaphorical stand-ins for humans. The intimate link between nature and culture posited by Deleuze and Guattari’s generalised ecology is conceptualised as a shifting interface between postcolonial and ecocritical agendas in the reading of postcolonial literature from South Africa and Australia.

Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol.36, No.3 (September), pp.599–618., 2010

""In the early twentieth century, botanists in South Africa’s Western Cape sought urgently to popularise and protect the region’s unique indigenous Fynbos flora. Plants imported from the 1840s, some of which proved invasive, became a physical and symbolic focus for their advocacy. The botanists’ efforts resonated with political attempts to forge a common white South African national identity that drew on notions of landscape and the indigenous flora for symbolism and that consciously exploited the politically integrative potential of the new science of ecology. Introduced by overseas-trained experts, ecological theory was, however, inappropriate for the local flora, and had unfortunate consequences for the scientificallyinformed research and management particularly of the fire-maintained Fynbos. While botanists and conservationists were united in defending the local flora against invasive introduced plants, they drew distinctions between what was ‘indigenous’ and what was ‘natural’ that further complicated their attitudes to the local flora. These historical debates illuminate agendas and policies on introduced (‘alien’) and indigenous flora in the region today.""

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics

The papers collected together in this special issue on the theme ‘decoloniality and tropicality’ discuss and demonstrate how we can move towards disentangling ourselves from persistent colonial epistemologies and ontologies. Engaging theories of decoloniality and postcolonialism with tropicality, the articles explore the material poetics of philosophical reverie; the 'tropical natureculture' imaginaries of sex tourism, ecotourism, and militourism; deep readings of an anthropophagic movement, ecocritical literature, and the ecoGothic; the spaces of a tropical flâneuse and diasporic vernacular architecture; and in the decoloniality of education, a historical analysis of colonial female education and a film analysis for contemporary educational praxis.

Studia Sociologia LXIII/1. Special Issue. Assessing Nature: Between zones of exploitation and protection, 2018

Part of the raw material accumulation for the medicinal plant industry in Romania is reliant on gathering plants from the so-called spontaneous flora. The imagery of medicinal plants played upon by medicinal plant product manufacturers is often abundant in visions of either wilderness or traditional peasant landscapes such as pastures. This article aims to present instead two different spaces where medicinal plants come from: wild pansy from within an oil seed rape cultivation, and elderflowers and nettles from the ruins of a former socialist orchard. These spaces of spontaneous flora highlight the process of capital's appropriation or salvage of the 'free' reproductive labour (spontaneous growth) of weeds often at odds and against other capitalist processes. Moreover, salvaging or scrounging is done through the cheap labour of a family whose livelihood depends on work both inside and outside of this capitalist process. These places, therefore, highlight the tension between the spontaneous flora and scroungers on the ground and Nature with its ancestral peasants on the supermarket and nature shop shelves. Nature and the spontaneous flora What do people see when walking down the medicinal plant isle of a supermarket or browse their way through the many nature shops that have in the past decade multiplied in cities across Romania? What is there on show on the websites and the many promotional materials and magazines of the Romanian medicinal plant product making companies? Some products and companies are advertised through clean lines and minimalist design, closely resembling pharmaceuticals and conjuring visions of white hygienic laboratories and

The centrality of the politics of display in botany and natural history are perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, London. Artists have played a key role in botanising, and in the transfer of botanical knowledge, not only as illustrators of the physical characteristics of botanical subjects, but also in advancing the ways that scientists (in this case study, those that study plant sciences at Kew) have understood, named, represented, categorised and related to plants.Highly sensitive, plants produce chemicals in response to touch, and to those in their immediate environment. For instance, orchids store their scents in pouches until they have need of them. Their colours entice the males into the ‘pleasures of pseudocopulation’ (Natasha Myers). This article is part of a series of investigations, see also my Botanical Drift book and recent lecture at HKW 'Orchidisms'.

Table of Contents, Preface and Introduction to Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow, eds., Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018) Book description: Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation that looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison. This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies. Design by In the shade of a tree (Samuel Bonnet, Sophie Demay, and Maël Fournier-Comte) June 2018, English 21.5 x 29 cm, 368 pages, color ill., softcover ISBN 978-3-95679-415-5 http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1835&l=en&bookId=729&sort=year%20DESC,month%20DESC

Sternberg Press, 2017

Botanical Drift explores the hermeneutics, historicization, semiotics, and symbiosis of plant diversification, species cultivation, and destruction—past and present, extant and extinct—around the globe. Plant histories are explored as commodities and colonial as well as decolonial devices by significant and diverse feminist, art-historical, and anthropological voices—from Germaine Greer to herman de vries—bringing new perspectives through photo-essays, fiction, performance, and interventions in ecological, film, and translation archives. Reflecting on experimental ecology—the undiscovered, underestimated, and undesired non-European flora and fauna—it challenges perception and inspires potentialities to bring new understandings of the undergrowth of the Kew Gardens botany collection. Design by A Practice for Everyday Life December 2017, English 16.7 x 23 cm, 240 pages, color and b/w ill., softcover ISBN 978-3-95679-353-0 €22.00

Progress in Human Geography, 2021

Attention to plant life is currently flourishing across the social sciences and humanities. This paper introduces recent work in the informal sub-discipline of 'vegetal geography', placing it into conversation with the transdisciplinary field of 'critical plant studies' [CPS], a broad framework for re-evaluating plants and humanplant interactions informed by principles of agency, ethics, cognition and language. I explore three key themes of interest to multispecies scholars looking to attend more closely to vegetal life, namely: (1) plant otherness; (2) plant ethics; (3) plant-human attunements, in the hope of encouraging greater cross-pollination between more-than-human geography and critical plant studies.

The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions, 2018

The Wretched Earth Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions Guest Editors: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018) This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons. Full issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/current Introduction: