Plant Poesis: Aesthetics, Philosophy and Indigenous Thought

Dear Colleagues,

Plants have erupted in the past decade in the interstices of literary and film studies, art criticism, philosophical reflection and historical inquiry, destabilizing conceptualizations of the human firmly anchored at the core of humanities research. The blossoming of plant studies—also called critical plant studies—within the environmental humanities has joined earlier work on animal studies to question engrained notions of human superiority and divinely granted power to dominate and control all other forms of existence. Following in the footsteps of recent research on plant biology showing that vegetal life displays capacities previously ascribed only to humans and some other animals, including intelligence, memory, and language, (Gagliano, Mancuso, Trewavas), philosophers (Hall, Marder, Nealon, Coccia) have argued that, while relegated to the margins of philosophy in the Western tradition, plant forms of existence nevertheless hold the potential to upend key philosophical tenets, such as those of subjectivity, interiority or agency, and to redefine the meaning of ethical behavior and political action. Historical analyses of plant–human interactions, in turn, have emphasized the active role played by vegetal life in human socio-economic and political developments. At the same time, literary, film and art studies highlighted that, far from being a mere background to human action, plants often take center-stage in fiction, poetry, cinema and the arts, deeply transforming artistic praxis.

The rise of plant studies within the environmental humanities has gone hand in hand with a growing awareness of the significance of vegetal existence in non-Western forms of thought. For many Indigenous peoples, plants are regarded as ancestors, allies and teachers with particular goals, desires and a will of their own, often displaying forms of sociality akin to those of humans and other animals. Anthropologists (Tsing, Sztutman, Chao) have increasingly drawn attention to the multiple socio-political ties binding human and more-than-human animals together with plants, connections mirrored, for instance, in cosmological narratives, Indigenous art and shamanic rituals.

This Special Issue on “Plant Poesis” calls for articles that consider various forms of creation together with vegetal life. We welcome essays that examine literature, cinema and artworks that foreground plants, as well as reflections on plant interactions with humans and other forms of existence. By encouraging a dialogue between views on vegetal life hailing both from philosophy and from other traditions of thought, we seek to contribute to the process of decolonizing plants studies and the environmental humanities. The acknowledgment of often-implicit racial and gender biases in human relations to plants in a Western context, opens the path to learning from alternative approaches to the vegetal world.

I am currently working on a project financed by the European Research Council: eco.ces.uc.pt

Prof. Dr. Patricia I Vieira
Guest Editor

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