I describe thevaried analyses and stakes of settler colonialism as well as indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonial thought.

“botanical sublime.”

Feminist economists powerfullydemonstrate how caring labor has been long been relegated to unpaid work and the private domestic sphere—eveninside academia. Histories of care work remain deeply feminized and racialized. Indigenous, disability, and queerrights activists remind us that caring for each other and the planet is critical for life and for social and planetaryjustice. 

Planttaxonomy provided that colonizers sought to organize the natural world. In systemizing the world intocategories and an evolutionary tree for life on earth, plant taxonomy is a critical node of colonial botany and itsenduring afterlives. Plant reproductive biology chronicles how the imaginaries of gender and race under colonialsexuality were imposed on plants. Reproduction, central to theories of Darwinian evolution, is the bedrock ofmodern biology. Finally, understanding plant biogeography through invasion biology centers questions of space andtime. Do organisms in a particular place and time? What work do concepts such as native and foreign do?

At its core, the book advocates for the critical need for work across academic disciplines. The sciences needhumanistic inquiry, and the humanities need the sciences. The future of the planet depends on it. For biologists, thisbook historicizes the field, making a familiar world unfamiliar. For social scientists and humanists, it introducesbotanical worlds in a new idiom, making unfamiliar worlds more familiar. An interdisciplinary approach is criticalfor the problems we face. The natural world and its myriad environmental crises cannot be adequately understood bythe tools of botany alone. In opening up the worlds of botany and feminism through interdisciplinary approaches, wesee new multispecies possibilities

In disrupting this story by bringing898feminism and botany together, we see how botany remains grounded in the violence of its colonial pasts.Collaborations between feminist, indigenous, and biological thought can help us work toward more just planetaryfutures.

Rather thanfixate on an “ideal” or “right” nature, queer and trans ecologies stress multiplicity and opening up space forgenderqueer and nonconformist bodies in many senses of the word (human, animal, plant, land, water). Similarly,links between disabled ecologies and environmental devastation allow us to see how key concepts from disabilitystudies—loss and limitation, vulnerability, interdependence, and adaptation—might offer key lessons for accessiblefutures for myriad disabled beings and impaired landscapes.

Both queer time and crip time remind us of how expectations of the normal link to experiences of time and space,and why challenging normative ideas in describing plant worlds is productive. After all, plants are forever forcedinto human time for science and commerce—botany, agriculture, horticulture, and plant biotechnologies. As plantlovers and passionate interlocutors with plant worlds, we must reckon with this history.

Like crip time, queer time captures how queer people have had to contend with a world where heterosexual (andcis-bodied) expectations of marriage, children, and family were, and are, closed to many.

To think, read, or act queerly is to think across boundaries, beyond the normal and the normative; toexplore the spaces deemed marginal, vulnerable, precarious, and perverse

hallenging heterosexuality and reproductive(hetero)normativity, queer studies emphasizes the necessity of thinking about sexuality not in terms of bodies oridentity but as a field of power

The most violent and misarticulated impact of colonization is what Sumana Roy refers to as the“substitution of forest-time by this imported industrial idea of time.” The term from disability studies 
!captures how disabled, chronically ill, or neurodivergent people experience time (and space) very differently thanable-bodied/minded people. There is a difference between crip time and “normate” time. Crip time captures disabled peoples’ different experiences of time in the world.

Crip theory eloquently captures ableism with the term . As Eli Clare writes, the supercrip is one of the"dominant images of disabled people. We are taught to celebrate the boy without hands who bats well, or a blind manwho hikes the Appalachian Trail, or an adolescent girl with Down’s syndrome who learns to drive. The nondisabledworld is suffused with such stories where resilience against all odds is celebrated—a visible and repeated lesson thatdisabled people must overcome disability to be celebrated

Hearing and seeing worlds also dominate our lives. Incontrast, accessible practices and thoughtful infrastructure open up the world for all. As activists powerfullydemonstrate, the problem is not the excluded but the built infrastructures that exclude.

Four concepts in particular—natural, normal, unnatural, and abnormal—form a powerful matrix of inclusion andexclusion. The link between binaries of natural/unnatural and normal/abnormal are resonant frames throughout thisbook. The solution is always about finding ways to “help” and to restore ability of some kind, thus reinforcing thenormal and the normative as desirable spaces that all must emulate. But who sets the standards?

Medical sciences came to anoint themselves as saviors

undesirable, with profound consequences. Eugenic laws, for example, were instrumentalized across the world tosterilize, institutionalize, and at times even eliminate queer and disabled bodies. The history of eugenics is a grimreminder of the power of science, medicine, and the state, especially when all align

The fieldof disability studies chronicles how science and medicine were critical to transforming ideas of biological variation,understood within realms of the moral, spiritual, and metaphysical during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intomedicalized bodies. Under “the medical model,” disabled and queer bodies were pathologized as lesser, deviant, and

In the course of my work, the fields of queer studies and disability studies emerged as important interlocutors. Bothchallenge binaries: abled/disabled and straight/queer. In challenging the binary classification of bodies as abnormalor deviant, they invite us into rich landscapes and worlds with variety and diversity rather than pathology.

We need to historicize botany and our accountsof plant life in their complex global ecologies of relationality if we are to have any hope of scientific explorationsthat do not merely reinscribe histories of colonial investments. In short, we need to queer botany.

Repeatedly, desirable objects become USAmerican while the undesirable retain their foreign monikers. The majority of US crops are plants of foreignorigin, while most insects that cause damage are considered native

or example, in a naturecultural world, plants are often assigned ethnonationalgroups even as they develop new ecologies in changing networks of botanical and political geographies. In theUnited States, for example, we identify some plants with such names as Japanese knotweed or Chinese privet and yetanoint the Georgia peach as American even though it is of Chinese origin.

Rising beyond the tendencies to conceptualize groups as individual, population, species, genus, variety,class, phylum, or kingdom, rememory foregrounds networks of relationality that emerge from a hypermobile, cross-pollinated, interbreeding world

Rather than critique from without, Ichoose to work from within, to excavate botany’s disciplinary formations and foundations and expand its limited andmyopic sphere of “nature” into new articulations, theories, and concepts that can better account for our embrangledworlds.

For example, how did the tumbleweed, aforeign and indeed invasive plant, become an icon of the American West? Why are some plants reviled and otherscelebrated? Rememorying plant life through naturecultures helps us narrate embrangled lives under and in the wakeof slavery, colonialism, conquest, and servitude, helping us imagine more just futures.

It allows us to unlearn our disciplinarynarratives about natures and cultures and instead commit ourselves to rememorying new genealogies of anaturecultural planet—through fracture and union, through conquest and liberation, through competition andcooperation—to produce a dizzying vista of thoroughly embrangled lives.

If scientific stories narrate the history of life out of Africa inthe language of race, species, populations, or individuals, then rememory opens up our ability to explore the textureof those memories in the flesh, in the sinew, in the pores of the living and the dead—the ghostly afterlives ofMalthus, Darwin, Humboldt, and Linnaeus and new tales of life on earth.

Linnaean “marriage of plants” produced modern reproductive biology and its battle of the sexes.

Rememory can help us recognize theprofound botanical amnesia that produced xenophobic concepts such as invasive species, “discovery” of plants longknown to natives, and translating the exuberance of plant reproduction into the decidedly human registers of “sex.”

What is powerful about the concept of rememory is that it opens up the past, especially the lessons wehave forgotten, unlearned, or never been taught

For Morrison, the past does not remain in the past but emerges as a sitewhere we can make deeper discoveries. In a language “indisputably black,” Morrison opens up spaces for thosehistorically excluded. To Morrison, ghosts do not return; they are “immanent to space.” 

from the fact that we have beenviolated or even that violation continues, but from a condition of inability to locate the heart and soul of theproblem.”

turns the present of narrative#enunciation into the haunting memorial of what has been excluded, excised, evicted.” “Rememory,” as VivianeSaleh-Hanna argues, “is preserved in institutions, branded upon their violently structured bureaucracies andpracticed upon the bodies of the colonized by the bodies of colonizers: a specter is haunting modernity—the specterof colonialism.”

In bringing feminism and botany together, I trace how botany’s colonial roots shape itsfoundational language, terminology, and theories; the field remains grounded in the violence of its colonial pasts.

So much of botanical history remains grounded in internal histories of the west and the biosciences. Lost,forgotten, and erased are the genealogies of women of color feminists, indigenous feminists, and postcolonial,diasporic, crip, queer, and trans feminists, who have always written more syncretic symbiotic stories that do notprivilege the “human.”

While Traditional Ecological Knowledge ( ) is recognized 91as having an equal status with scientific knowledge and being “an intellectual twin to science,” it is consistentlymarginalized by the scientific community

Importantly, coloniality’s infrastructure, grounded on colonial ideas of race andgender, erased other models of social organization and myriad local systems of knowledge the world over. RobinWall Kimmerer frames indigenous ecologies as maintaining good relations in everyday life. She points to anemerging consensus about indigenous knowledge systems as fundamental to conserving biodiversity

Colonialism isn’t an event or a historical blip of actions but an!# BD"C
enduring installation. As Edouard Glissant succinctly observes, “the West is not a place, it is a project.” Understanding colonialism as a project allows us to see its vast infrastructures in academic disciplines. It is thususeful to talk about , the embedded histories of colonialisms that persist. Infrastructures of coloniality!C include not only the epistemologies, methodologies, and methods that structure disciplines but also infrastructures ofsex, gender, race, and sexuality

I hope this book demonstrates the immense power of an interdisciplinaryeducation and why such approaches produce more robust knowledge about the world

For example, as a biologistconfronted with the idea of native and foreign plants, I use my critical thinking skills to interrogate definitions ofand . Are these historical terms? As we will see in the later discussion of invasion biology,!# historicizing botany allows us to recognize these as imprecise, indeed political, categories rather than natural orbiological ones. Is the natural world organized into species? No; these are human constructs. To be sure, suchconceptions can be immensely helpful, but they are also deeply constraining and sometimes misleading. Historiesand contexts matter.

Interdisciplinarity necessitates thinking critically and questioning one’s assumptions

This book’s foundation rests on refusing the binaries of nature and culture, instead embracing Donna Haraway’ssuccinct and interdisciplinary term . Woven through the book you will encounter interdisciplinary!""!"

Feminist science and technology studies ( ) reminds us that there are no sites of purity in the world, no898sites exempt from the hauntings of colonial domination.

Our knowledge production has been far too mediated by the politicsof the academy. The field of botany, like other fields, has “disciplined” itself into a narrow, myopic field, with aprescribed object of study (the plant world) and prescribed methods (the scientific method). Disciplinary educationenables exploring the world from particular perspectives, reproduced generationally—perspectives that are taught,learned, rehearsed, practiced, remembered, and then replicated endlessl

It creates sites of purity such as“wilderness,” and botanical technologies to help “tame” nature.

The wise words of Audre Lorde are a central refrain throughout this book: “It is not our differences whichseparate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions whichhave resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.” I expand this wisdom to understand that wedo not need to collapse the diversity of life on earth into a quest for neatness, sameness, parity, or equity. As Lordereminds us, we must celebrate difference by attending to our shared histories

Weneed rich epistemological and methodological landscapes to ground a countercolonial view of biology. We need tointerrogate and challenge linguistic traditions that ground our theories, epistemologies, methodologies, and methodsthat shape botanical practices. Indeed, the clear boundaries between classificatory schemes of life on earth that shapebiology classrooms—animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and so on—are more porous than we acknowledge.Likewise, the idea of singular organisms and ecologies has given way to more complex understandings ofassemblages, aggregates, microbiomes, ecosystems, networks, symbionts, holobionts, and so on. I want to createbodies and landscapes without centers and peripheries and without hierarchical ordering.

Colonialism is an ideological, imperial, economic, and cultural project. Thehistory of colonial botany is a story about more than plant worlds—how plants, animals, and colonized humans wereused by and for the colonial project. By centering the plant, we see how colonists remade plants in their image, fortheir needs, consumption, and profit and for empire.

Yet this is not a comprehensive history of the colonial impact on the plant world. Rather, it is aretelling of botany through the histories of colonialism. It is a fascinating story about colonialism in all its variedavatars—ongoing settler colonialism, indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonial thought. I bring these in conversationwith one another through plant worlds.

Years ago, I might have agreed that plants are an odd focus to revisit histories of colonization, but research for thisbook has astonished me. Understanding plant worlds through history reveals how central plants were to colonialismand vice versa.

Why is thisthe center of the narrative of the plant world? Importantly, how might we narrate otherwise? In challenging Linnaeansexual binaries, we challenge all binaries. Surely there are always more than two sides to every issue? Not a singularor binary view but a polyphonic, polybotanical imagination. In revisiting the labyrinth of infinite plant life, I urge usto see botany not as a site of the dark unknown of colonial scripts but as a site of joyful and playful exploration forflourishing botanical futures.Botany of Empire : Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, University of Washington Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central,http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=31362286.Created from utoronto on 2025-11-09 19:08:52.Copyright © 2024. University of Washington Press. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 14-36 | Printed page 2 of 11

Linnaeus attempted to resolve the labyrinth of biologicaldiversity by organizing it into a simple system of nomenclature and classification. But in this system, the complexityof biological life and the richness of its worlds, especially the indigenous cultural contexts, were lost. Linnaeus builta thread that rendered biological life as a model of human gender, race, and sexuality as saw it.

Linnaeus’s thread that showed the way out of the labyrinth of colonialC !
!"botany continues to tether modern botany to colonial ideologies and sciences. Contemporary plant worlds, theirnames, and theories of histories, geographies, ecologies, and evolutions remain bound to the powerful hand ofLinnaeus

When Linnaeus began his career, “natural history was amess, and people needed guidelines.” Drawing on the Greek myth where Ariadne fell in love with Theseus andgave him a ball of string to help him find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, an ardentbotanist, praised Linnaeus’s work as Ariadne’s thread, allowing botany to find its way out of a dark labyrinth ofcolonial excess

Its imaginationand structures were fueled by powerful ideas about colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, and nation. The lastinglegacy of this history is that all modern scientists are de facto Linnaeans.

When Linnaeus began his career, “natural history was amess, and people needed guidelines.” Drawing on the Greek myth where Ariadne fell in love with Theseus andgave him a ball of string to help him find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, an ardentbotanist, praised Linnaeus’s work as Ariadne’s thread, allowing botany to find its way out of a dark labyrinth ofcolonial excess

The rise of botany transposed colonial views onto nature. No surprise,then, that there is more scientific work on competition than on cooperation, more on conflict than on coexistence,more on battle between the sexes than on joyful cooperative living. Colonial worldviews ground branches ofbiology—both botany and zoology

By the mid-nineteenth century, theprofession of botany was thoroughly a masculine enterprise and the ascendant male botanist its celebrated prototype.Likewise, we see the erasure of artisanal and working-class botanists. As in other fields, women, once present inlarge numbers, were systematically excluded as the field emerged as a “science” and a male enclave.One of the key insights of feminist work on the sciences is that even though nature is consistently genderedfeminine (for example, “mother nature”), biology has persistently shaped the workings of nature as masculine andpatriarchal—nature red in tooth and claw.

Ann Shteir documents powerfully that as botanymarched toward becoming “modernized” and “scientific,” the field embraced strategies to defeminize botany. Shewrites, “through textual practices and other means, women and gender-tagged activities were placed into a botanicalseparate sphere, set apart from the mainstream of the budding science.

phytocentrism.

vertiginous

nomenclature

As I hope to show in this book, plant biology poorly captures the richnessof plant worlds. We need alternative, richer epistemologies. This book is written from the field of botany, andA!for all who share an abiding love of plant worlds and a thirst for justice.