Botany’s Colonial Present and Alternative Futures: A Conversation with Banu Subramaniam

This podcast interview is the twentieth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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Banu Subramaniam, author and professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, joins me in conversation about botany’s colonial origins and its possible futures, as discussed in Subramaniam’s new book Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024).

Drawing on queer studies, Indigenous studies, and biological science, the book and our conversation trace the ways in which colonial ambitions for order and control radically shaped our perceptions of the plant world through reductionist understandings of gender, sexuality, and race. Banu Subramaniam also imagines more capacious ways of practicing and understanding botany—untethered not only from its colonial origins but also present-day predilections towards crisis and purity.

If purity isn’t the goal, Subramaniam asks, then what new worlds might we inhabit? What new traditions of naming and norming might be found? This conversation offers some possibilities, exploring current debates over “invasive” biologies, apocalyptic imaginaries, and disciplinary boundaries.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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interview highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Laleh Ahmad: For our listeners who haven’t read your book, could you tell us about the scope and what drew you to this project?

Banu Subramaniam: In a way, this book comes out of many decades of work.

I grew up in India and finished my undergraduate there. I was completely grounded in STEM. In India, you either are or aren’t. You can’t be interdisciplinary. It’s only in grad school that I started asking questions about the culture of science and the politics of science. And once I was introduced to the history and philosophy of science—especially what we call feminist science and technology studies today— biology seemed so constructed through various histories that it felt impossible for me to go back and do biology pretending I hadn’t read any of it.

So, my work is really about trying to figure out how one does experimental biology, knowing its history.

I have come to discover how layered this history is—how contextual it is. I came upon how important the legacies of colonialism are to present-day science, and I started asking how colonialism shapes how we understand plants. And, does colonialism just shape the stories we tell about the past, or does it have material effects on our theories and methods today?

This book focuses on three subfields within biology: biogeography, plant reproductive biology, and plant taxonomy. The book traces the history of colonial power in each of these subfields, including why they were interested in particular kinds of theories, how those theories came to be, what effect those theories have in the present, and how we might do things differently.

LA: How do you feel your own identity—either having grown up in India or being a migrant yourself—has played into your thought processes about things like the movement of plants (if at all)?

BS: I think all my work comes from that.

That, in part, comes from feminist studies, which really asks that you question yourself and where your ideas come from.

The discourse of purity that has taken hold in biology is very striking to me: that there is some pure nature we need to return to. When Indigenous people talk about return, it’s a political return—getting back what was stolen. And I don’t think they have this kind of purity language that invasion biology or mainstream biology has.

When I was growing up, we moved every two or three years to a new city because of my father’s work. The constant moving has really shaped who I am. I really want to ask the question: Can there be an alternate mode of theorizing plant geography? Because as I read the histories of plant biogeography, honestly, it made me so angry. These plants were moved around willy-nilly during colonialism, and now we say, “Oh, you are an evil plant. You don’t belong here.” And the violence that is done to eradicate species—and the glee some people take in eradicating them—is just very striking.

And today, what is happening in immigration politics in the U.S. has palpable similarities. I was doing a set of experiments with some colleagues in Southern California, and I was going through the green card process at that time. And, I noticed we use the same terminology for plants that we use for some categories of humans. You can become a naturalized citizen, but you will never be a native, right? There’s always that distinction.

So, I think that positionality is important because positionality is all over biology as well.

Part of doing interdisciplinary work for me is also about undisciplining your mind. Now I’ve spent so much time in feminist studies, but my biological training runs very deep. Part of interdisciplinary work is also letting your imagination run wild to ask: How are we where we are? How else might we study?

A lot of the fiction in the book were odd ideas that I took seriously and played with.

LA: In many ways, the interludes mark a departure from traditional, academic text. They almost, to me, rendered it speculative nonfiction. Was that intentional on your part? What was your thought process behind the interludes?

BS: One of the early insights for me when I started reading feminist science and technology studies is that writing is itself an epistemology. How you write allows you to say some things and doesn’t allow you to say other things.

For example, if you’re writing a scientific paper, there are clear sections. You write the introduction, you do the materials and methods, you present your results. Then you discuss them and you have a conclusion. Now, lots of odd things happen in an experiment, and sometimes you actually started an experiment to study something else, and then there was an interesting result that came out of it. Often, the story becomes, “I did it this way because it was a question I had all along.” So much subjectivity in science gets erased because of how one writes (and, in part, because scientific papers are very short).

Similarly, each discipline has its own genre of writing. I’ve always taken genres very seriously, and I have tried to experiment with them, thinking about: If I were going to write the scientific paper from another field, what might it look like?

In all my books, I have biography, autobiography, and speculative fiction because they allow me to say things that I cannot say in traditional academic prose.

In this book, what I was trying to do with fiction was to imagine otherwise.

LA: What kinds of works would you like to see more of in the field?

BS: I would love more pictures of so-called invasive species living in harmony with other things, which happens all the time.

I would like more thinking about other ways to talk about plants. If kudzu is a plant that is doing destructive work in your neighborhood, let’s not just say, “Bad kudzu.” Let’s examine the complicity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which paid people to plant it all over. Let’s tell the whole story, rather than just say that this is a bad plant.

Let us talk about the amount of disturbance that we are creating and about our management policies. What does it mean to talk about native species when we are already seeing natives moving their ranges? We now call these neonatives. What does it mean to talk about native species when we don’t have native environments?

The solution to invasives is always, “Take your Saturday and go pull purple loosestrife or garlic mustard.” But environmental action has to be at a deeper political level than these cosmetic things—especially as biologists. We are often trained to be “apolitical,” but when you use the language of invasive species, to me, you’re being very political. So maybe we can also be political about intervening in the larger politics that are shaping why our land use is the way it is.

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Featured image: An illustration from the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1890—1907).

Banu Subramaniam is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. Author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), and Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Banu’s current work focuses on decolonizing botany, nativism in plant biology, and the relationship between science and religious nationalism in India. Contact.

Laleh Ahmad is a reader and writer from Karachi, Pakistan. She is presently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the Environment and Resources program. Her research focuses on urban flood management in Karachi, Pakistan. Her last contribution to Edge Effects was “Knowledge Politics and the Making of Indian Environmental History: A Conversation with Ramachandra Guha” (September, 2025). Contact.