The solution is always about finding ways to “help” and to restoreability of some kind, thus reinforcing the normal and the normative as desirablespaces that all must ennulate,

Under“the medical model,” disabled and queer bodies were pathologized as lesser,deviant, and undesirable, with profound consequences. Eugenic laws, for ex-arnple, were instrumentalized across the world to sterilize, institutionalize, andat tirnes even eliminate queer and disabled bodies.

In the United States, for example, we identifysome plants with such names as Japanese knotweed or Chinese privet and yetanoint the Georgia peach as American even though it is of Chinese origin.Repeatedly, desirable objects become US American while the undesirableretain their foreign morikers.’ Phe majority of US crops are plants of foreignorigin, while most insects that cause damage are considered native.”

Rememory can help us recognizethe profound botanical amnesia that produced xenophobie concepts such as in-vasive species, “discovery” of plants long known to natives, and translating theexuberance of plant reproduction into the decidedly human registers of “sex.”As we rememory the history of botany, the past opens up.

s Edouard Glissant succinctly observes, “the West isnot a place, it is a project.”*! Linderstanding colonialism as a project allows usto see its vast infrastructures in academic disciplines.

native and foreign. Are these historical terms? As we will see in the later dis-cussion of invasion biology, historicizing botany allows us to recognize these asimprecise, indeed political, categories rather than natural or biological ones.

Some sugeest that western science is itself best understood as an “ethnosci-ence’ and that appreciating its roats, routes, and evolutions are important anduseful, Our knowledge production has been far too roediated by the politics ofthe academy.'* The field of botany, like other fields, has “disciplined” itself intoa narrow, myopic field, with a prescribed object of study (the plant world) andprescribed methods (the scientifte rnethod). Disciplinary education enablesexploring the world from particular perspectives, reproduced generationally—perspectives that are taught, learned, rehearsed, practiced, remembered, andthen replicated endlessly.

If colonization still informs our scientific knowledge practices, how might weundo these bistories? We need rich epistemological and methodological land-scapes to ground a countercolonial view of biology. We need to interrogateand challenge linguistic traditions that ground our theories, epistemologics,methodologies, and methods that shape botanical practices.

Plants are anything but static; theyare dynamic and evolving.

The history ofcolonial botany is a story about more than plant worlds—how plants, animals,and colonized humans were used by and for the colonial project. By centeringthe plant, we see how colonists remade plants in their image, for their needs,consumption, and profit and for empire. While my focus is botany, revealingand resisting the hauntings of colonialism in botany reveals these same bssuresin science as a whole.

We get to ask,Why this canon? Why is this the center of the narrative of the plant world?importantly, how might we narrate otherwise? In challenging Linnaean sexualbinaries, we challenge all binaries, Surely there are always more than two sideste every issue? Not a singular or binary view but a polyphonic, polybotanicalimagination. In revisiting the labyrinth of infinite plant hfe, [ urge us to seebotany not as a site of the dark unknown of colonial scripts but as a site of joyfuland playful exploration for flourisbing botanical furures.

when colonial explorers in Al-rica, Asia, and the Americas described species they encountered, the diversityof those species astonished and overwhelmed. When Linnaeus began his ca-reer, “natural history was a mess, and people needed guidelines,”

Little did Irealize that my botanical artwork followed in a long history of the sciencessteeped in histories of sexism, racism, and colonialism, While many peopleacross the world observed, studied, drew, painted, and used their knowledgeof plants, only a few were allowed the privilege of a professional life in botany.

Botany Hourished during colonial expansion as explorers “discovered” atreasure trove of plants chicing their global voyages. At its peak, botany wasbig business, fucling commerce and propelling the growth of merchant capi-talism.”

She writes, “through textual practices and other means, women andgender-tagved activities were placed into a botanical separate sphere, set apartfroro the mainstream of the budding science.”* By the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, the profession of botany was thoroughly a masculine enterprise and theascendant male botanist its celebrated prototype. Likewise, we see the erasureof artisanal and working-class botanists.’

He in-troduced a novel system of classification and nomenclature—a “sexual system”organized as a binomial with a genus and species name (for exarople, Homosapiens for humans). Me organized plants and flowers around an anthropo-morphic imagery and in sexual binaries—male and female. In flowers, stamensbecarne raale and busbands, and pistils became female and wives; fertilizationwas likened to husbands and wives on their nuptial Hower bed consummating asexual union and marriage.”