Botanical Imaginations

The symbology of plants is all around us, representing everything from the edenic environment to one of the most consolidated, extractive industries of the modern world (agriculture). We see plants in complex, varied, and contradictory ways. We love them; we hate them; we need them; we ignore them. They’re useless and the basis of life. They feed us and they poison us. They make us smile, sneeze, and itch. They are a kin, our kin, and our opposite. They’re mysterious and unknowable, yet utterly dull and explainable; indescribably wild and yet proudly engineered and contained. They are sentient, knowledgeable, and deserve our respect at the same time that they are mere decor.

Within the Western academy, one popular narrative about plants is that there isn’t one. “Plant blindness” drives us to overlook the agency and even presence of plants around us as we focus instead on the animals who more closely embody our understanding of aliveness and agency. At the same time, scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Suzanne Simard have inspired conversation around the wisdom and multispecies entanglements of plants, and journalists like Michael Pollan and Zoe Schlänger have reframed plants as agentic, intelligent, and conscious. This series asks, who exactly overlooks plants, and where does attention already turn to the botanical? How might we draw together a network of critical plant studies?

In this special series, Edge Effects diversifies, complicates, and proliferates Botanical Imaginations. We follow plants across the boundaries they transgress: geographically and culturally. In the cultural contact zone where ideas of and relations to plants abound and collide, we explore key themes of semiotics, agency, kinship, epistemology, ontology, justice, animacies, and imperialism. Plants, after all, have never obeyed our borders, stories, or hierarchies.

Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

A black and white photo. Two adult women and one young women, all of which wear scarves around their heads, white shirts, and skirts sit on a porch, two of them holding potatoes. Three young boys stand around them, wearing tunics with a rope around them and baggy pants. Everyone looks at the camera. The women's mouths are turned slightly up in a smile. The boys do not smile.

Essays

Tuberous Entanglements and the Potato Empire

Contaminated Art on the Plastic Archipelago

Winter’s Muted Garden

The Colonial Roots of Catholic Plants

A Multispecies Approach to Learning from Invasive Plants

Faculty Favorites: Critical Interventions in the Plant Humanities