Plant Lives - Yota Batsaki on "The Plant at the End of the World: Invasive Species in the Anthropocene" | 10 March
You are warmly invited to the fourth session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Yota Batsaki will speak on
"The Plant at the End of the World: Invasive Species in the Anthropocene"
Click here for paper
Plants are edging closer to the center of critical inquiry in the Anthropocene because they are intimately tied to legacies of settler colonialism, forced migration, related practices of extractive capitalism, and their environmental and human harm. Ostensibly sessile, plants travel constantly through their adaptations to ensure their survival and reproduction. In the modern period, this movement was taken to unprecedented scale by humans, triggering massive displacement of people and disruption to ecosystems. Among the many instances of plant movement, the scandalous mobility of invasives unsettles us because it exposes the worst excesses of the Anthropocene. This essay focuses on the practice of multimedia artist Precious Okoyomon, whose installations feature prominently kudzu, the most notorious weed in the US. The highest concentrations of kudzu are found in the former Cotton Belt—Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—making it cotton’s unlikely successor. The essay analyzes how Okoyomon’s kudzu installations explore the dark side of the landscape, peeling off layers of human and environmental harm while acknowledging the resilience of more-than-human life. But a focus on invasive species also challenges plant theory’s celebration of entanglement, showing how the theoretical effort to produce the plant as a generalized concept bumps against the contingencies of its natural history in time and place, its ontological slipperiness, its ethical ambiguity.
Yota Batsaki is the executive director of Dumbarton Oaks, a research center of Harvard University located in Washington, DC. There, she also heads the Plant Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary project to study and communicate how plants have shaped human cultures. Among her publications are three co-edited volumes: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (2016); Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space (2013); and Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (2011). Her recent work has appeared in Environmental History and Critical Inquiry.
Monday, 10th March 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
Click here to register
Plant Lives is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
It follows two previously successful series, Heated Conversations and Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
In these calamitous times, are plants a distraction from pressing problems, or a new way to approach them? Is the burgeoning field of the plant humanities just another fad with little bearing on the global South? Can we imagine a seedy and weedy politics in which plants are less metaphors for human logics and more themselves? Can we shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives? And if so, with what consequences?
This seminar series explores the global plant humanities and the conversations that plant worlds enable. We envisage a postcolonial plantarium* which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Our starting point is 'ruderal', a term which describes a plant that grows in disturbed grounds. A plant humanities for the global South takes shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.
*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term