Botany of Empire
Description
An accessible foray into botany's origins and how we can transform its future
Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, Indigenous studies, and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how botany's foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how colonizers obliterated plant time's deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like foreign humans. Subramanian then pivots to imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of feminist and scientific thought to chart a course for more socially just practices of experimental biology.
A reckoning and a manifesto, Botany of Empire provides experts and general readers alike with a roadmap for transforming the colonial foundations of plant science.
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Banu Subramaniam is professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Holy Science and Ghost Stories for Darwin.
Content
- Cover
- Advance praise for Botany of Empire
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Epigraphs
- Contents
- Prologue: Telling History
- Introduction: Through Linnaean Labyrinths: A Botanical Colonization
- Part One: Rootings
- Chapter One: The Botanical Sublime: Affective Ecologies and Plant Life
- Chapter Two: The Coloniality of Botany: Reckonings with the History of Science
- Interludes
- Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene-Chirp, Play, Love
- Revisiting the "Women in Science" Question: Diversity, Gender, and the Coloniality of Science
- Part Two: Kinship Dreams | Classifying Plant Systematics
- Chapter Three: Categorical Impurative: Names, Norms, Normings
- Chapter Four: Perhaps the World Ends Here: Spicy Embranglements in the Postcolony
- Interludes
- Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene-Making a Little Trouble Everywhere
- An Ordinary Botany: Haunted Archives of Livingness
- Part Three: Floral Dreams | Sexing Reproductive Biology
- Chapter Five: The Orchid's Wet Dreams: Sex Told, Untold, Retold
- Chapter Six: In the Dark Shadows of the Tree of Life: Sex, Race, and Reproduction
- Interludes
- Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene-The Queer Vegennials
- International Council for Queer Planetarity: The Botanical Debates
- Part Four: Pangaean Dreams | Mapping Biogeography
- Chapter Seven: Botanical Amnesia: Colonial Hauntings in Plant Biogeography
- Chapter Eight: Like a Tumbleweed in Eden: Diasporic Lives of Empire
- Interludes
- Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene-Love the Dandelion
- A Cosmopolitan Botany: Tagore's Vision for Santiniketan
- Part Five: Uprootings
- Chapter Nine: Vegetal Sublimations: Cartographies for Adisciplinary Sciences
- Chapter Ten: Dreams of a Lively Planet
- Interludes
- Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene-The Memory Gardens
- Against Eden
- Abolitionist Futures: A Manifesto for Scientists
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Series List
- Back Cover
