Critical Plant Studies – serie

“Our” world is vegetal. None of it would have been in existence were it not for the life activity of plants. Time, discernible in the rhythms, intervals, logics, articulations, and disarticulations of the world, is the time of plants. Starting from scientific, philosophical, and theological insights into the time of plants, Michael Marder’s new study gently steers readers toward the vegetality of time. Specters and spirits, cosmic trees and phytogenesis, the vegetal apriori and weird chronos, the seeds of events and the branches of divergent chronologies, diachronic phases and symbiotic assemblages join the rich tapestry of this work to proclaim, Time is a plant!"Michael Marder’s Time Is a Plant is philosophy at its most productive. As far as imaginable from the postmodern conundrum, it states its premise openly in its title and elaborates it in a clear way with impeccable logic. The life of a plant in all its alterations, its generation and decay, is treated as more than just a metaphor of time: it renders visible the innermost structure of the deployment of time. What makes Marder’s book unique is the very feature that makes it naïve in the best sense of the term: Marder ignores all the endless self-reflexive precautions that characterize much of contemporary thought and simply plunges into basic ontological considerations. Time Is a Plant is a breath of fresh air in our stale philosophical scene. It proves that a thing can be done by simply doing it."-Slavoj Žižek, author of Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed (2022) and Freedom: A Disease without Cure (2023)

Critical Plant Studies in Taiwan presents a historical overview of vegetal ecocriticism in Taiwan. Divided into 12 chapters, it examines the human-plant entanglements on the island. Covering a wide spectrum of topics, such as the imperial plant explorations, the military casuarina afforestation, the mangrove conservation movement, the ecofeminist rooftop garden, the Indigenous millet restoration, the underground mycorrhizal network in urban Taipei, etc., it discloses the phyto-politics in the historical context of the vegetal materialist condition of the island. Intersecting the poetics and politics of plant narratives, it presents the multispecies plantscapes of the island. The first of its kind, the collection launches the historical and localized critical plant studies in Taiwan.

Tracing lines of vegetal influence and affect, Shaped by Vegetal Matters: Phyto-Influence on Humans, Other Animals, and Place describes how plants influence and shape humans, their relations with other animals, and place. Highlighting vegetal matters related to four plant species and the triad of plants-elephants-humans in Sri Lanka, each case study opens up multi-directional influences across situated multispecies social milieus. From jacaranda trees in Australia, to wapato on a river island in the United States, to willow and weavers in Denmark, to sugarcane plantations in Sri Lanka, to dying yet mythic ash trees, features emerge of human-plant social intimacies, power dynamics, and intersubjectivities. A central glue of plant-human relations is poiesis, meaning the creation of something new, yet etymologically related to the poetic. Beyond explorations of poiesis, the vegetal offers an epistemology of recursion that is relevant for understanding place-based relationships. Elizabeth Oriel presents vegetal influence in analytical and descriptive styles, reflecting multispecies ethnography and other analytics brought to vegetal matters.

Cartographies of Postcolonial Vegetal Politics takes a deep dive into the stratified and rigidly segmented territorialities of Plant Humanities or Critical Plant Studies. It strikes up an epistemic departure from the arboreal structures of “plant-thinking” and subsequently lays out “plant-becoming” in terms of ontophytological thinking revised in alignment with rhizomatics so as to critically design the discursive edifices of postcolonial vegetal politics—the differential grammatology of which stands wedded to the production of the “new” and thus is understood to be able to position vegetality as event-in-(dis)order. Abhisek Ghosal emphasizes the profound importance of Deleuzo-Guattarian grammatologies in pulling up “plant-becoming” from being subjected to a set of rigidly structured models of vegetality. It is by working out aleatory eventualities of postcolonial haecceities, that the rigid “structures” of vegetality constituting the intellectual terrain of Critical Plant Studies are tenably discarded to foreground “n-1” becomings of vegetality—the multiplicities of which can well be sensed by means of reckoning vegetality as deterritorial vector that can facilitate scholars to map the eventual unfolding of postcolonial vegetal politics afresh.

Dilek Bulut Sarikaya scrutinizes human-plant entanglement in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath from the perspective of critical plant studies, which is committed to restoring the lost connection between humans and plants. The author offers a theoretical reading of Hardy and Plath’s poetry, focusing specifically on how plants are depicted by these two poets as self-conscious and emotional individuals who are turned into vulnerable victims of humans’ exploitative practices. The author develops a critical argument on the necessity of eradicating humans’ anthropocentric mindsets, categorizing plants as sessile, inert objects and replaces it with a plant-centric world view, perceiving plants as instantly active biological organisms who exist with their botanical accuracy rather than with the impositions of humans’ metaphoric meanings upon them.

Australia has some of the most unusual and unique plants in the world and today many of these plants are appreciated and valued. However, this has not always been the case. Through Australia’s colonial and settler history plants have been misunderstood, cursed, and demonised. There was also a total disregard for the Indigenous Peoples’ understanding of the native plants. An area where these struggles and tensions reveal themselves is in the creative imaginings of authors. This book explores how plants have been written about, represented, and imagined from the early writings of colonial authors where plants are conquered, ripped out and replanted to contemporary representations of native, hybrid and collective gardens. It explores the complex and diverse relationships that authors and plants have had in an Australian context and discusses how writers have written about plants to raise not only ecological concerns but also to offer alternatives to knowledge systems and ideologies. While Australian art and paintings have been well researched and written about in their representations of plants there has been little on the relationship between literature and plants. This book goes someway into addressing this gap.

Developments within continental philosophy and humanistic theory within the 21st century have increasingly turned to more embodied, including ecologically-attuned, accounts of the basis of experience, acting as a corrective to social constructivist views that foreground distinctively linguistic and cultural forces in comprehensively shaping worldly affairs. Some of these accounts struggle to find a way to articulate how experience that outstrips the human can be articulated by situated human perspectives (e.g. new materialisms and speculative realisms), while others struggle to outrun the legacy of deeply anthropocentric, immaterial methodologies and concerns (e.g. eco-phenomenologies). Using a transactional or “neutral monist” pragmatist metaphysics (a la John Dewey) as a theoretical touchstone, this book will provide a philosophically rigorous yet accessible and empirical account of how localizable botanical entities and their undergirding landscapes provide a material wellspring for humanistic affects, endeavours, and relationalities, demonstrating how privileging so-called “human” or “extrinsic” values must always necessarily entail acknowledgement of and protections for greater-than-human existences and the conditions and goods that typify them.

Verdant Narratives: The Botanical Tapestry of Italian Cinema and Literature offers a timely, interdisciplinary examination of botanical agency as a symbolic and aesthetic force in Italian literature and Italian cinema. This work critiques the traditional notion of plants as merely sessile and passive, and instead explores the significant role of botanical agency in symbolic, aesthetic, and psycho-cultural Italian traditions. Structured in a dipartite manner, the first part comprises two sections – The Male Muse and The Female Muse that investigate and interpret the employment of vegetal metaphors in Italian literature, and the second part explores botanical symbolism in Italian fairy tales, offering philosophical and psychological interpretations of plant-related narratives. The book weaves together literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy to reveal the dynamic agency of plants in Italian cultural imagination.

Altered climatic patterns, rising sea level, denuding green cover and extinction of species have thrown environmental ecosystems into disarray worldwide and affected in multifarious ways life on earth, human and vegetal, in all its intersections and entanglements. This book project explores these intersections and entanglements in North East India, in ways that challenge, question, and problematize anthropocentric understandings of the region in the present day and time.

Ethnomedicinal Practices and Application of Traditional Medicinal Plants in Contemporary Indian Society provides a significant contribution to the broad academic fields of ethnomedicine, environment, and sustainable development. It presents empirical studies, theoretical understandings of ethnobotanical knowledge, benefits of traditional medicinal plants, and ethnomedicinal values of various Indigenous communities across India in the context of the current healthcare system. This collection presents diverse applications of traditional medicinal plants by different groups of Indians, contributing a complete overview of folk therapeutic practices by selected contemporary Indian Indigenous communities (Onges, Tai, Andamanese, Nicobarese, Rabhas, and Limbu). This book is distinctive in its rich contents from experts who present diverse viewpoints on significant themes related to medicinal plants, concepts of health of Indigenous communities, and ethnomedicinal values in contemporary Indian society.

In Media, Modernity and Dynamic Plants, Janet Janzen traces the motif of the “dynamic plant” through film and literature in early 20th century German culture. Often discussed solely as symbols or metaphors of the human experience, plants become here the primary focus and their role in literature and film is extended beyond their symbolic function. Plants have been (and still are) seen as closer to static objects than to living, moving beings. Making use of examples from film and literature, Janet Janzen demonstrates a shift in the perception of plants-as-objects to plants-as-living-beings that can be attributed to new technology and also to the return of Romantic and Vitalistic discourses on nature.

The Plant Contract argues that visual and performance art can help change our perception of the vegetal world, and can return us to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants, and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human disassociation from the natural world. It is also a gesture of respect for the genius of vegetal life, where new science proves plants can learn, communicate, remember, make decisions, and associate. Art is a litmus test for how climate change affects human perception. This book responds to that test by expressing plant-philosophy to a wider public, through an interrogation of plant-art.

Forest Family highlights the importance of the old-growth forests of Southwest Australia to art, culture, history, politics, and community identity. The volume weaves together the natural and cultural histories of Southwest eucalypt forests, spanning pre-settlement, colonial, and contemporary periods. The contributors critique a range of content including historical documents, music, novels, paintings, performances, photography, poetry, and sculpture representing ancient Australian forests. Forest Family centers on the relationship between old-growth nature and human culture through the narrative strand of the Giblett family of Western Australia and the forests in which they settled during the nineteenth century. The volume will be of interest to general readers of environmental history, as well as scholars in critical plant studies and the environmental humanities.

Winner of the 2019 Outstanding Academic Titles award in Choice, a publishing unit of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)Why Look at Plants? proposes a thought-provoking and fascinating look into the emerging cultural politics of plant-presence in contemporary art. Through the original contributions of artists, scholars, and curators who have creatively engaged with the ultimate otherness of plants in their work, this volume maps and problematizes new intra-active, agential interconnectedness involving human-non-human biosystems central to artistic and philosophical discourses of the Anthropocene.Plant’s fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. However, the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise this relationship at a time of deep ecological and ontological crisis. Why Look at Plants? challenges readers’ pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies.

Can we discover morality in nature? Flowers and Honeybees extends the considerable scientific knowledge of flowers and honeybees through a philosophical discussion of the origins of morality in nature. Flowering plants and honeybees form a social group where each requires the other. They do not intentionally harm each other, both reason, and they do not compete for commonly required resources. They also could not be more different. Flowering plants are rooted in the ground and have no brains. Mobile honeybees can communicate the location of flower resources to other workers. We can learn from a million-year-old social relationship how morality can be constructed and maintained over time.

Water plants of all sizes, from the 60-meter long Pacific Ocean giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) to the micro ur-plant blue-green algae, deserve attention from critical plant studies. This is the first book in environmental humanities to approach algae, swimming across the sciences, humanities, and arts, to embody the mixed nature and collaborative identity of algae.Ranging from Medieval Islamic texts describing algae and their use, Japanese and Nordic cultural practices based in seaweed and algae, and confronting the instrumentalization of seaweed to mitigate cow methane release and the hype of algal photobioreactors, amongst many other standpoints, this volume comprehensively addresses the ancestors of terrestrial plants through appreciating their unique aquatic medium.

Human-Plant Entanglement: Thinking with Plants in the Anthropocene is an edited collection that redefines the boundaries of phytocentric scholarship. By foregrounding the question of the Anthropocene at the centre of plant studies, this book illustrates how attentiveness to plant life can allow our habitual anthropocentric/instrumental assumptions to be invaded by a unique ‘phytocentric’ impression that presents a new ethical imaginary for a human-plant relationship. With eleven carefully argued essays, this book sets a new benchmark in the field of Critical Plant Studies.

Plant Poetics explores the forms and functions of the vegetal across a broad body of literature. From Homer to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and from Jamaica Kincaid to Esther Kinsky, the contributions to this volume trace plants in literary works from around the world. Based on nuanced theoretical and historical groundwork, these readings bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on literary and cultural plant studies. The volume shows how vegetal beings have impacted the ways humans think about narrative time, genre, and writing as a literary practice. Plant Poetics illustrates the capacity of plants to make (literary) worlds and shape their forms.

Myth, art, literature, film, and other discourses are replete with depictions of evil plants, salvific plants, and human-plant hybrids. In various ways, these representations intersect with “deep-rooted” insecurities about the place of human beings in the natural world, the relative viability of animalian motility and heterotrophy as evolutionary strategies, as well as the identity of organic life as such. Plants surprise us by combining the appearance of harmlessness and familiarity with an underlying strangeness. The otherness of vegetal life poses a challenge to our ethical, philosophical, and existential categories and tests the limits of human empathy and imagination. At the same time, the resilience of plants, their adaptability, and their integration with their habitat are a perennial source of inspiration and wisdom. Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies examines the manner in which literary texts and other cultural products express our multifaceted relationship with the vegetable kingdom. The range of perspectives brought to bear on the subject of plant life by the various authors and critics represented in this volume comprise a novel vision of ecological interdependence and stimulate a revitalized sensitivity to the relationships we share with our photosynthetic brethren.

Focusing on four plant species in the riparian landscapes of Galicia (Northern Spain), this book examines the ecological, conceptual, artistic, and material reality of exotic–invasive plants and the traces they leave behind after land management processes. Rather than treating these individuals as problems, this research approaches them as collaborators. Through artistic practice and scientific experimentation, vegetal biomass is transformed into new materials —pigments, paper —and artworks, opening unexpected paths for creation and reflection. Blending theory with practice, this book brings together art experiences, ecological thinking, environmental humanities, and experimental processes to question the boundaries between disciplines, nature and culture, and human and non-human agency. Finally, the author proposes that art and science, working together, can help us perceive the complexity of ecosystems and rethink our role within them.

This book examines the ways in which Victorian flora and garden culture and the amateur botany movement influenced and circumscribed American feminine poetics from the late Transcendental period to the early Modern period. Delineating an ecofeminist tradition, as well as a variety of other theoretical sources, including human and feminist geography, the author interrogates the ways in which women, plants, botanical study, and feminine poetics were “othered” and delegitimized during the nineteenth century and beyond.

Plants have always shaped what it means to be human, changing our behaviours, settlementpatterns, and our relations with the world. Taking inspiration from ethnobotany, human geography, and anthropology, plantiness is a theoretical framework for understanding plant liveliness, intelligence, and labour. These characteristics are then combined with existing archaeological theories such as making-in-growing, plant aesthetics, and plant edibility to provide us with a practical way of viewing plants’ lively influences, opening up new windows to the past. Plants are not just good to use or eat, they are good to think with. They have the ability to connect us to different places, people, and times. They allow us to make and shape objects — shaping ourselves in the process — and provide relationships to landscapes and others, whether human or not.Beginning with the well-preserved fallen trees at Star Carr, an excavated English Mesolithic site, the book dives into case studies that demonstrate plants' influence on human becoming. Ultimately, the book contradicts narratives of human domination over all things, encouraging us to workalongside — rather than against — the world around us. In highlighting how plantiness shapes human becoming, archaeologists can help redefine our relationship with plants for the future.

This volume is a critical examination of the sudden burgeoning of plant studies across the disciplines. From ecocriticism that features fantastical plants, biological studies and concerns about changing plant biodiversity, environmental focus on the role of plants in mitigating climate change, neo-liberal campaigns to offset carbon through tree plantings, and popular tropes of thinking and feeling plants, we see plants as front and center of imaginations for planetary futures. As scholars who have tracked the shifting focus from human to animal studies and now plant studies, we believe something is afoot. We examine the current moment through an examination of the histories that have brought us here, a theorization of the current moment, and finally the lessons we can learn through such analyses.