Gardening in the Tropics: Ecology and Race in Caribbean Art


Inspired by a volume from Jamaican poet Olive Senior, this panel endeavors to cultivate critical art historical methods for engaging the relationship between tropical ecology and race in artistic practices, visual and material culture from the Caribbean archipelago. Whether considering the past or the present, the environment’s most (neo-)colonial features all too often obfuscate the subaltern indigenous, African and Asian diasporic forms of being entwined with tropical nature. An array of theorists offer perspectives that bolster an environmental approach to representations of racialized being: Kamau Braithwaite’s tidalectics eschew dialectical synthesis in favor of a non-progressive existential flow where the ocean meets land. Édouard Glissant’s creolized ecology finds modes of Caribbean existence in the environment beyond a “traumatic reaction” to the ongoing legacy of slavery and indentureship. Suzanne Césaire’s theorization of the homme-plante (plant-man) contends that African diasporic life is “tied to the plant, to the vegetative cycle” to redress colonialism’s violence and valorize black culture developed under enslavement. Although the material implications of these positions abound, they predominately refer to racialized and (post-)colonial being-in-language. Embracing the region’s intrinsic heterogeneity, this panel welcomes proposals that address aesthetic engagements across historical period, national and imperial context, and artistic medium. Submissions may focus on, but are not restricted to, the following themes:

  • Marronage as an environmental ontology
  • Locating black being between-the-lines of natural history
  • Wage work and the acclimatization of indentured labor
  • Gender, race, and science in the kitchen garden
  • Decolonial queerness and the tropical landscape
  • Generative catastrophe in Caribbean aesthetics

Field of Study:
Geographic Area: Caribbean
Time Period: Early Modern (1450-1800)
Time Period: Modern (1800-present)
Time Period: Twenty-First Century
Time Period: Twentieth Century

Chair:
C.C. McKee, Bryn Mawr College - cmckee1@brynmawr.edu