Upcoming Graduate Course – Plant Humanities and Postcolonial Studies (Studies in Post-Colonial Literature)
This seminar considers what the emerging field of plant humanities brings to new modes of reading postcolonial literature. Also known as the “vegetal turn” in environmental humanities – a wave of theoretical and practical interest in the complexities and peculiarities of plant life and plant-human relations – the course integrates interdisciplinary research on concepts such as ‘plant blindness’, ‘the Plantationocene’, and research from the field of garden studies, the history of economic botany, and the global circulation of plants tied to the Columbian Exchange. We will situate this history in relation to key theoretical interventions in the field of critical plant studies, including Jeffrey Nealon’s Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetal Life (2017), Banu Subramaniam’s Botany and Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (2024), and Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022). Through the lens of ‘phytopoetics’ (Jacobs 2019) we will explore the form and functions of the vegetal across a set of contemporary fiction, poetry, children’s literature and personal essays, including Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden: Book (1999) and An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (2024), Madhur Anand’s A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015), Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2015) and The Serviceberry (2024), Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree (2022) and Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (2024), Daniel Coleman’s Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017) and Robert McFarlene’s Landmarks (2015) and The Lost Words: A Spell Book (2017). Students will also visit the Marie-Victorin Herbarium at the Jardin botanique de Montréal to be introduced to its botanical collection. Students will also consult the resources connected with Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks’ Plant Humanities Lab (such as Maura Flannery’s “How to Read an Herbarium Specimen”) and be familiarized with the process of proposing and creating their own multi-model digital plant narratives. Creative Writing students may also develop research-creation or creative final projects on request.
Jill Didur 