Introduction: Plant Performance
Abstract
Plants perform their own interests and purposes. Plants perform in ways that afford and invite specific human experiences. Plants also perform complex biopolitical roles. With these multivalent understandings of plant performance in mind, this introduction to the “Plant Performance” issue of Performance Philosophy outlines the editors’ broadly feminist approach to the challenges facing scholars and artists in the field of Critical Plant Studies. We present these challenges, including colonisation and decolonisation, botanical aesthetics and its vegetal limits, instrumentality and vegetal respect, and phytopolitics and plant liveliness, as provocations for scholars and artists grappling with ecological, political and creative human relations with the vegetal world. The introduction, alongside the eight essays included in the issue, considers how thinking with plant performance might create conditions for a more contextual, critical, reflexive, nuanced, and/or urgent understanding of plant-human relationships, both historically and in the current moment. In addition to considering questions of plant performative agency, the issue foregrounds the politico-aesthetic conditions in which plant performances cannot help but occur. It details how specific works of performance art intervene in these conditions, and it contributes to the development of a more global and multiply-situated network of performative, critical plant knowledges, relations, and practices.
References
Native North American Literature,” in We the Peoples: Indigenous Rights in the Age of the Declaration, edited by Elvira Pulitano, 228–249. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139136723.009
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Aloi, Giovanni, ed. 2020–21. Four issues of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Issues 51–55 http://www.antennae.org.uk/
APCOR (Associação Portuguesa da Cortiça). nd. “Cork Oak.” https://www.apcor.pt/en/montado/cork-oak/
Archambault, Julie. 2016. “Taking Love Seriously in Human-plant Relations in Mozambique: Toward an Anthropology of Affective Encounters,” Cultural Anthropology 31 (2): 244–271. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.2.05
Baber, Zaheer. 2016. “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 46 (4): 659–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2016.1185796
Bacon, J.M. 2019. “Settler colonialism as eco-social structure and the production of colonial ecological violence.” Environmental Sociology 5 (1): 59–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2018.1474725
Baldy, Cutcha Risling. 2015. “Coyote is not a metaphor: On decolonizing, (re)claiming and (re)naming Coyote.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4 (1): 1–20.
Barndt, Deborah. 2007. Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Bousfield, Dan. 2020. “Settler colonialism in vegetal worlds: exploring progress and resilience at the margins of the Anthropocene.” Settler Colonial Studies 10 (1): 15–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2019.1604297
Brandenburger, Claire. 2021. Interview with Prue Gibson, Zoom, 10 August.
Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: Oxford University Press.
Brummitt, Neil A., Steven P. Bachman, et. al. 2015. “Green Plants in the Red: A Baseline Global Assessment for the IUCN Sampled Red List Index for Plants.” PLoS ONE 10 (8): e0135152. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0135152
Carney, Judith A. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/3134146
Chamovitz, Daniel. 2012. What a Plant Knows. New York: Scientific American. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0512-62
Chicago Botanic Garden. nd-a. “Frequently Asked Questions About the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanium).” https://www.chicagobotanic.org/titan/faq
Chicago Botanic Garden. nd-b. “Spike’s Wide World.” https://www.chicagobotanic.org/blog/plant_science_conservation/spikes_wild_world
Churchill, Jennie, ed. 2007. The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney: The First 200 Years. Sydney: Halstead.
Cluitmans, Laurie, ed. 2021. On the Necessity of Gardening: An Abecedarium of Art, Botany and Cultivation. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Coccia, Emmanuelle. 2018. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Cambridge: Polity.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda. 1934. The Transformation of Nature in Art. New York: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674283862
Crabtree, Louise. 2013. “Decolonising property: exploring ethics, land, and time, through housing interventions in contemporary Australia.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 99–115. https://doi.org/10.1068/d25811
Craig, Lauren. 2014. “Thinking Flowers? As Black Eco-feminist Activism.” Feminist Review 108: 71–80. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2014.21
Davis, Michael. 2021. “Davis Encountering Aboriginal Knowledge.” Academia.edu. Accessed August 8, 2021: https://www.academia.edu/17327010/Davis_Encountering_Aboriginal_Knowledge
Dirt Witches. 2021. Barlow Street Banksia Scrub Forest. https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/artwork/barlow-street-forest/
Drouet, Laura, and Olivier Lacrouts, eds. 2020. Plant Fever: Towards a Phyto-centred Design. Brussels: studio d-o-t-s / CID au Grand-Hornu.
Foster, Laura. 2017. Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants and Patents in South Africa. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Gagliano, Monica. 2018. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Geniusz, Wendy Siisip. 2015. Plants Have So Much to Give Us: All We Have to Do is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson, Prudence. 2010. The Rapture of Death. Sydney: Boccalatte.
Gibson, Prudence. 2018. The Plant Contract. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004360549
Gibson, Prudence. 2021. “The Green Man.” Sydney Review of Books, 19 July. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/the-green-man/
Gibson, Prudence, and Monica Gagliano. 2017. “The Feminist Plant: Changing Relations with the Water Lily.” Ethics and the Environment 22 (2): 125–146. https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.22.2.06
Goddard, Stephen, ed. 2018. Big Botany. Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 2009. The Metamorphosis of Plants. Translated by Douglas Miller. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hall, Michael. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: SUNY Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934
Hay, Ashley. 2002. Gum. Sydney: Duffy and Snellgrove.
Head, Lesley, Jennifer Atchison, Catherine Phillips, and Kathleen Buckingham. 2014. “Vegetal politics: belonging, practices and places.” Social & Cultural Geography 15 (8): 861–870. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.973900
Herbaria 3.0. 2021. https://herbaria3.org/
Holway, Tatiana. 2013. The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, The Quest to Make It Bloom, and the World It Created. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jacobs, Joela. 2019. “Eden’s Heirs: Biopolitics and Vegetal Affinities in the Garden.” In Why Look at Plants, edited by Giovanni Aloi, 120–123. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004375253_014
Kac, Eduardo. 2009. Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kelley, Theresa. 2012. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Kimmerer, Robin. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
Kimmerer, Robin. 2017. “Speaking of Nature,” Orion Magazine, 12 June. https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520276109.001.0001
Kok, Daniel. 2021. Hundreds and Thousands: Multicity Germination. Liveworks Performance Space, Sydney. https://performancespace.com.au/program/hundreds-plus-thousands-multi-city-germination/
Kull, Christian, and Haripriya Rangan. 2015. “The political ecology of weeds: a scalar approach to landscape transformation.” In The International Handbook of Political Ecology, edited by Raymond L. Bryant, 487–500. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9780857936172.00045
Liberona, Ayelen, and Natasha Myers. 2019. Root into the Planthroposcene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHEwLmK7dBM
Mabey, Richard. 2015. The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Mabey, Richard. 2010. Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants. New York: Harper Collins.
Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. 2015. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Marder, Michael. 2014. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/mard16902
Mastnek, Tomaz, et al. 2014. “Botanical Decolonization: Rethinking Native Plants” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014 (32): 363–380. https://doi.org/10.1068/d13006p
Merchant, Carolyn. 2008. “Secrets of Nature: The Bacon Debates Revisited.” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (1): 147–162. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2008.0000
MIFTAH. 2012. Olive Trees – More Than Just a Tree in Palestine. The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy. http://www.miftah.org/Doc/Factsheets/Miftah/English/factsheet-OliveTrees.pdf
Myers, Natasha. 2021. “How to Grow Liveable Worlds: Ten (Not-so-easy) Steps for Life in the Planthroposcene.” ABC Religion and Ethics. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548
Nealon Jeffrey. 2016. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804796781
Ngai, Sianne. 2015. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute and Interesting. New York: Harvard University Press.
Ojala, Maria. “Hope and grief in the anthropocene: re-conceptualising human-nature relations.” Local Environment 22 (8): 1035–1037. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2017.1306499
Picard, Caroline. 2016. Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening. Chicago: Green Lantern Press.
Plumwood, Val. 1986. “Ecofeminism: an overview and discussion of positions and arguments.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (1): 120–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.1986.9755430
Pollan, Michael. 2001. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York: Random House.
Powers, Richard. 2018. The Overstory. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Pujol, Ernesto. 2021. “Decolonising a Caribbean Garden.” Planthunter 77. https://theplanthunter.com.au/gardens/decolonising-a-caribbean-garden/
Rajme, Oscar Domingo. 2020. “T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss.” Canadian Art, 16 January. https://canadianart.ca/reviews/tuyttanat-cease-wyss/
Reid, Georgina, ed. 2013–21 Planthunter. https://theplanthunter.com.au/
Reo, Nicholas J., and Laura A. Ogden, 2018. “Anishnaabe Aki: An Indigenous Perspective on the Global Threat of Invasive Species.” Sustainability Science 13: 1443–1452.
Roy, Sumana. 2017. How I Became a Tree. New Delhi: Aleph Books.
Ryan, John. 2018. Plants and Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315643953
Sandilands, Catriona. 2016. “Floral Sensations: Plant Biopolitics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, edited by Teena Gabrielson et al., 226–237. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199685271.013.33
Sandilands, Catriona. 2020. “Timber. Douglas-fir. Art,” in Plant Fever: Towards a Phyto-centred Design, eds. Laura Drouet and Olivier Lacrouts, 38–49. Brussels, studio d-o-t-s / CID au Grand-Hornu.
Sandilands, Catriona. 2022. “Loving the Difficult: Scotch Broom” in Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose, edited by Thom Van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew, 33–52. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Schiebinger, Londa. 2004. “Feminist History of Colonial Science.” Feminist Science Studies 19 (1): 233–254. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2004.tb01276.x
Schiebinger, Londa. 2005. “Agnotology and Exotic Abortifacients: The Cultural Production of Ignorance in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149 (3): 316–43.
Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1bvnfk9
Shiva, Vandana. 2016. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Simard, Suzanne. 2021. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Penguin.
Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372363
Sprayregen, Molly. 2020. “How This Black Queer Activist Became the Plant Kween of the World.” Buzzfeed, 10 July. https://www.buzzfeed.com/mollysprayregen/how-this-black-queer-activist-became-the-plant-kween-of-the
Szczygielska, Marianna, and Olga Cielemęcka. 2019. “Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technology 5 (2): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i2.32875
Thorsen, Line Marie. 2017. Moving Plants. Naestved: Ronnebaeksholm.
Trewavas, Anthony. 2003. “Aspects of Plant Intelligence.” Annals of Botany 92 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcg101
Troy, Jakelin. 2019. “Trees are at the heart of our country – we should learn their Indigenous names.” Guardian, 1 April. Accessed 28 August 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/01/trees-are-at-the-heart-of-our-country-we-should-learn-their-indigenous-names
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873548
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (1): 1–40.
Turner, Nancy, ed. 2020. Plants, People and Places: The Role of Ethnobotany and Ethnoecology in Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights in Canada and Beyond. Montreal and Kingston: Queen’s University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv153k6x6
Veracini, Lorenzo. 2007. “Settler Colonialism and Decolonisation.” Borderlands 6 (2). Archived at University of Wollongong Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers. https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/1337
Vieira, Patrícia. 2015. “Phytographia: Literature as Plant Writing.” Environmental Philosophy 12 (2): 205–220. https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil2015101523
Webber, Bruce, et al. 2014. “Invasive Plants in a Rapidly Changing Climate: An Australian Perspective.” In Invasive Species and Global Climate Change, edited by Lewis Ziska and Jeffrey S. Dukes, 169–197. Baltimore: CAB International. https://doi.org/10.1079/9781780641645.0169
Weston, Phoebe. 2020. “’This is No Damn Hobby’: The ‘Gangsta Gardener’ Transforming Los Angeles.” Guardian, 28 April. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/ron-finley-gangsta-gardener-transforming-los-angeles
Willoughby, Sharon, and Prudence Gibson. 2021. “Mastery and the Banksia Tree.” Europe Now 45 (forthcoming). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62018-9_4
Yusuff, Katherine. 2019. A Thousand Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Prudence Gibson, Catriona Sandilands
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).