Plant Lives - Riley Snorton On the Resurgence of Pioneer Species
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Riley Snorton will speak on
On the Resurgence of Pioneer Species
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As racial capitalism and the exploitation of natural and human resources sustain and perpetuate our current ecological condition, this talk asks what if the “answer” to climate catastrophe is decolonization and abolition? In a close reading of the film, Uyra: The Rising Forest (Dir. Curi, 2022), set in the Amazon forest, Snorton traces a mycorrhizal network among pioneer species plant life and people that make evident that “the seeds of a different world are already alive in the everyday practices of ordinary Black and Indigenous people” (J.T. Roane, et. al. 2022).
C. Riley Snorton is a visiting professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature and with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (UMN 2017), Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (UMN 2014), and co-editor of The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt UP 2024) and Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (MIT/New Museum 2020). He is also the co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Monday, 19th May 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