Plants Beyond Borders

“This enthralling new book focuses on vegetal borders that shield and divide, borders that establish who belongs and who does not. This focus on the tension between neocolonial lines of dominion and vegetal life is a significant innovation in the plant humanities field.” —Prudence Gibson, author of The Plant Thieves: Secrets of the Herbarium

“Defying disciplinary boundaries, geographical delimitations, and neat gender, racial, and other ontological frontiers, this book reimagines plants as agents of decolonization, world-making, and critical thought. The volume invites readers to move with plants across borders in order to cultivate more capacious, pluriversal forms of coexistence.” —Patricia Vieira, editor of The Environment in Brazilian Culture: Literature, Cinema, and the Arts

“Unique in its multidisciplinary approach and composed with a genuine sense of political urgency, Plants Beyond Borders is a generous introduction to the burgeoning field of critical plant studies. It is necessary reading.” —Vin Nardizzi, author of Marvellous Vegetables in the Renaissance

Centers vegetal life as a force that disrupts the borders of race, gender, sexuality, and colonial power.

Although plants are the most abundant life form on earth, the environmental humanities have paid them scant attention until recently, even as new challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, war, and the global rise of the right have piqued interest in plants as signs of life that challenge the Anthropocene and the logic of extraction. In Plants Beyond Borders, Courtney B. Ryan and Alicia Carroll have marshalled a range of innovative contributions that focus on vegetal borderlands—or spaces in which plant and human life overlap—where vegetal life exceeds and uproots human borders. Containing perspectives from English, landscape architecture, Native American studies, performing arts, and more, Plants Beyond Borders foregrounds Indigenous sovereignty and plant knowledge; explores the shared transmutability of plants and trans, queer, and pregnant bodies; and investigates phytographia, or plant writing, as plants thinking beyond borders. No matter the objective, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection center vegetal life, considering how agentic plants not only rupture myths of settler colonialism, gender, and sexuality but also inscribe themselves and us in the world.

Contributors:
Cinthya Ammerman Muñoz, Alicia Carroll, Gwendolyn Cohen, Isaac Cohen, Xinyue Fu, Patrícia de Nóbrega Gomes, Katie Hogan, Kaley Makino, Melissa Parrish, MacKenzie Patterson, Courtney B. Ryan, John Charles Ryan, Saghar Safaeyan, Jeannette Schollaert, Kathryn Van Wert, Christina Welch

Courtney B. Ryan is Assistant Professor of Theater at Lafayette College, author of Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the US, and a researcher of plant art and eco-theater.

Alicia Carroll is Professor and Chair of English at Auburn University, where she researches and teaches critical plant studies and British literature of the long nineteenth century. Her previous work includes New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond.

Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Foreword Of Pando, Pilpil, and Porosity

Introduction Vegetal Borderlands

Part 1 Breaking Borders: Plants and Decolonization

Chapter 1 A Madi Salve for Settler-Colonial Ruptures
Chapter 2 Unearthing Enslaved African and Indigenous Plant Knowledge in the St. Vincent Botanical Garden, 1785-1811
Chapter 3 The Marginal Man and American Borderlands: Diasporic Botany in Minari
Chapter 4 Gardens as a Caminho: Ancestral Plants as a Strategy of Indigenous Critique in Contemporary Brazilian Art

Lateral Roots

Chapter 5 What We Ask of Plants and Why We Ask It

Part 2 Borderless Bodies: Plants, Gender, and Sexuality

Chapter 6 The New Plant Science and Trans Women of Color Fiction
Chapter 7 Mirrors of Green: Queer Fear and Ecopoetics in Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Chapter 8 Herbal Medicine and Abortion Narratives in Ana Castillo’s Fiction

Lateral Roots

Chapter 9 Lyric Poetry and Mutual Aid at the Borders of the Human

Part 3 Becoming Vegetal: Plant Writing

Chapter 10 “There Is Nothing but Border. There Is No Border”: The (Xeno)phyto-Ontography of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Series
Chapter 11 “Messengers of Vegetable Love”: Phytographia in Dead Astronauts
Chapter 12 Talking Trees: Arboreal Messaging and the Metaphysics of Voice

Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index