Botany of empire : Plant worlds and the scientific legacies of colonialism / Banu Subramaniam.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Subramaniam, Banu, 1966- author.

Series:

Feminist technosciences.

Feminist technosciences

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Feminism.

Botany.

Science--Social aspects.

Science.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 312 pages.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2024]

Summary:

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.-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Epigraphs

Contents

Prologue: Telling History

Introduction: Through Linnaean Labyrinths. A Botanical Colonization

Part I: Rootings

Introduction

1. The Botanical Sublime: Affective Ecologies and Plant Life

2. The Coloniality of Botany: Reckonings with the History of Science

Interlude: Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene—Chirp, Play, Love

Interlude: Revisiting the “Women in Science” Question: Diversity, Gender, and the Coloniality of Science

Part II: Kinship Dreams: Classifying Plant Systematics

3. Categorical Impurative: Names, Norms, Normings

4. Perhaps the World Ends Here: Spicy Embranglements in the Postcolony

Interlude: Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene: Making a Little Trouble Everywhere

Interlude: An Ordinary Botany: Haunted Archives of Livingness

Part III: Floral Dreams. Sexing Reproductive Biology

5. The Orchid’s Wet Dreams: Sex Told, Untold, Retold

6. In the Dark Shadows of the Tree of Life: Sex, Race, and Reproduction

Interlude: Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene – The Queer Vegennials

Interlude: International Council for Queer Planetarity: The Botanical Debates

Part IV: Pangaean Dreams. Mapping Biogeography

7. Botanical Amnesia: Colonial Hauntings in Plant Biogeography

8. Like a Tumbleweed in Eden: Diasporic Lives of Empire

Interlude: Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene – Love the Dandelion

Interlude: A Cosmopolitan Botany: Tagore’s Vision for Santiniketan

Part V: Uprootings

9. Vegetal Sublimations: Cartographies for Adisciplinary Sciences

10. Dreams of a Lively Planet

Interlude: Fables for the Mis-Anthropocene – The Memory Gardens

Interlude: Against Eden

Interlude: Abolitionist Futures: A Manifesto for Scientists

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Feminist Technosciences

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780295752471

0295752475

OCLC:

1417600466