REMINDER | Plant Lives - Banu Subramaniam on Queering Global Flora | 24 Feb | 4pm (Johannesburg time)

You are warmly invited to the second session of WiSER’s online seminar series

Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South.

Banu Subramaniam will speak on
Queering Global Flora: Plant Worlds and the Afterlives of Empire

Click here for paper

How have histories of colonialism and their foundational language of gender, race, sexuality, and nation shaped the language, terminology, and theories of the modern plant sciences? How and why do botanical theories remain grounded in the violence of their colonial pasts? In wrestling with these difficult origins, I develop the concept of migrant ecologies to retheorize plant migration and reproductive biology. I explore new biological frameworks that harness the power of feminist thought in order to reimagine and reinvigorate our love of plants.

Banu Subramaniam is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is author of Botany of Empire (2024), Holy Science (2019) and Ghost Stories for Darwin (2016)

Monday, 24^th February 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