This project delves deep into colonial botany, utilizing mediums such as historical investigation, cinema, photography, live performance, and installation art.
This project delves deep into colonial botany, utilizing mediums such as historical investigation, cinema, photography, live performance, and installation art.
Surveying perspectives from Europe, the U.S., Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, it positions plants—both native and foreign—as active participants and silent observers in colonial narratives. By viewing through the prism of visual and performance art, this book touches on diverse topics like the economic value of plants, traditional and Western medicine, state-endorsed scientific endeavours, migration patterns of flora and people, bio-contact areas, nationalistic views, and botanical diplomacy. It offers fresh insights into colonial botany's multifaceted history, emphasizing the intricate interplay between Eastern, Western, and Southern nations during the 20th century and its enduring impact today.
Serving as an invaluable addition to the realms of art history, performance studies, botany, visual culture, decolonial initiatives, and environmental politics, this book arrives at a pivotal moment when its insights are most crucial.
Acknowledgments
Chapter
1. Flora Fantastic. An Introduction
Corina L. Apostol and Tashima Thomas
Part I, Colonial Legacies and Natural Intersections: Critical Perspectives on
Culture, Nature, and Identity
Chapter
2. A Ripening Injury
Michael Marder
Chapter
3. Estonians, Orchids, and Exotic Others: Baltic Colonial
Entanglements Revisited
Ulrike Plath
Chapter
4. Against Orchidelirium and Pornotropics: Indonesian Artists on
the Coloniality of Nature, Gender, and Race
Sadiah Boonstra
Chapter
5. Propagated in Obscurity: Bermuda Grass and Rhizomatic Queerness
C.C. McKee and Jamison Edgar
Chapter
6. Scores for the Sensitive
Dennis Dizon
Part II, Botanical Narratives: Art, Ecology, and Postcolonial Reflections
Chapter
7. Botanical Timeline
Corina L. Apostol
Chapter
8. Addressing Erasures and Imagining Resistance: On Working with
Colonialism and Memory, Environment and Extractivism in the Age of Crisis
Kristina Norman and Linda Kaljundi
Chapter
9. Unmasking the Palm Oil Paradox: Elia Nurvista's 'Long Hanging
Fruits'
Corina L. Apostol
Chapter
10. Gardening in the Beautiful Wake of Empire in the work of Ebony
G. Patterson at New York Botanical Gardens
Tashima Thomas
Chapter
11. From Soil to Subversion: The Artistic Alchemy of Nikita Kadan
Corina L. Apostol
Chapter
12. Unearthing the Blind Spots of Botanical History: An Exploration
of Uriel Orlow's 'Theatrum Botanicum'
Corina L. Apostol
Chapter
13. Red Forests, Table Manners: Zina Saro-Wiwa's Artistic Reclamation
of Ecological and Cultural Identity
Corina L. Apostol
Chapter
14. Interlacing Roots and Feminine Forms: Wangechi Mutu's Ecological
Reflections on Hybridity and Transformation
Corina L. Apostol
Chapter
15. Botanical Monstrosity and Kincentric Ecologies in the Work of
Firelei Báez
Tashima Thomas
Glossary of Botanical Terms
Corina L. Apostol and Tashima Thomas
Index
Biographies
Corina L. Apostol is an art historian, curator and writer specializing in socially engaged art and visual culture. She currently serves as assistant professor of social practice in contemporary art and culture at the University of Amsterdam.
Tashima Thomas is an art historian, gastronome, curator, and cultural critic specializing in the art of the African Diaspora in the Americas. She currently serves as assistant professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University in the Meadows School of the Arts.
