Plant Lives by Isabel Hofmeyr
You are warmly invited to the first session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South.
Isabel Hofmeyr will speak on
Plant Lives: Framings from Southern Africa
Click here for paper
This paper is designed to launch the Plant Lives series, creating different avenues of discussion. I begin by discussing some themes from current plant theory and how these do, or don’t mesh with global south concerns. The paper then presents a mapping of southern African plant-attentive scholarship. Finally, I offer close readings of two ‘texts’ – firstly a short story by Doris Lessing which I read for plants, and secondly, a tracking of the archival lives of a particular species, Commelina africana/idangabane which illustrates a method of reading plants. The paper covers a wide range of issues in order to provide a generous framing for the series and to open as many points of entry for debate as possible.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and was Global Distinguished Professor at New York University from 2013 to 2022. She has worked extensively on print culture and book history and has combined these with environmental and oceanic themes. Recent publications include Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (2022) and a co-edited special issue on “Reading for Water” in Interventions 24 (3) 2022. From 2018 to 2023, she co-directed a project Oceanic Humanities for the Global South with partners from Mozambique, India, Jamaica and Barbados.
Monday, 17th February 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
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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