The Quest for the Plant Script
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Sumana Roy will speak on
The Quest for the Plant Script
Click here for paper
Why have our writers, artists, thinkers and scholars been compelled to turn their attention towards the ‘plant script’ in the last one hundred years? Beginning from Jagadish Chandra Bose’s ‘torulipi’ – literally the plant script, through which he hoped plants would write their autobiography – and moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the ‘language of flowers’ to poets writing about the syntax of the falling of leaves to artists trying to coax a vocabulary out of plants or creating a ‘tree alphabet’, I shall speak about the quest for the plant script, its codes, its compulsions, and its intimate histories.
Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
Monday, 5th May 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