Can untangling globalised plant stories help us to compost and compose decolonisation?

• In Event: COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities 1: Decolonising Naturecultures

Abstract

This paper explores the role of narrative storytelling and multispecies ethnography in the Environmental Humanities, focusing on one particular species of plant made nomadic during colonial seed scattering. Traversing from the initial sites of colonization in South Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, to the first sites of colonization in Australia, New South Wales coastline areas such as Kurnell, Bitou Bush (Chrysanthemoides monilifera) has become much more than just an aesthetic botanical background in surprising ways. I found that for this plant protagonist, the borderlands of systems of valuing have shifted over time and remain in a state of flux. In an attempt to unsettle borders engrained by lingering colonial histories of classification, I argue that by focusing on these particular plant histories and their wider cultural contexts, we might re-write plants as key actors with agential capabilities, helping to shape history and culture using vastly different sensory dexterities. Weaving through fieldwork along the NSW coast I found that these particular histories and present entanglements between humans and plants hold the seeds of more respectful and collaborative approaches to our relationships with plants and other-than-human, as well as between human communities in various ways. Hopefully, it looks for decolonized ways to engage in collaborative work with plant assemblages in the ‘bush’ in NSW, developing the notion of ‘compos(t)ing decolonization’ in human-plant contact zones.

Author

• Emily Crawford, Composting Feminism