“Mauvaises Herbes”: Vegetal Recalcitrance in the Plantationocene

• In Event: Controlling Plants, Growing Environments - I

Abstract

What does it mean when plant life refuses to be disciplined into orderly boxes, planters, or rows? In what ways can “bad plants” help us rethink strategies of evasion and obduracy in order refuse the simplified ecologies, or “machines of replication” (Tsing 2018), that are predicated on enduring plantation forms of production? Can we get out of Plantationocene ecologies while refusing the seductive illusion of “efficient” models of green growth?

This paper looks to how small clusters of cash crops, namely sugarcane and fatak (Arundo Donax), have refused to be managed by rigid plantation structures. By respectively cultivating and staving off their plant-kin relations, sugarcane and fatak queer understandings of survival amidst ecological catastrophes already in-the-making. These strategies of evasion and obduracy offer novel ways of thinking about getting along to get by doing kinship athwart to structures hostile to disorderly ‘well-being.’ As such, this paper posits that vegetal kin-making practices can offer guidance on ways to resist Plantationocene systems of control by generating strategies of living otherwise (Sandilands and Erikson 2010).

Author

• Jessica Caporusso Caporusso, York University