Abstract A legume originally hailing from Africa, the cowpea sojourned across the Atlantic in slave ships and circulated in Caribbean provision grounds before becoming a staple of Black Southern food culture. This article analyzes literary and cultural works by Black authors in the US South—Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899), George Washington Carver's early twentieth-century writings at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935)—to demonstrate how the cowpea foments what the author terms a “radicle ecology”: the power of its leguminous roots to replenish soils and thus foster radical resistance to plantation structures. This radicle ecology marks a broader ecological praxis of Black world making and storytelling that nourishes the soil and, in turn, the community in service of liberatory presents and futures. Bringing together scholarship in Black ecologies, plant studies, and the environmental humanities, this transnational analysis of the cowpea counteracts colonial historiographies by turning to the cowpea as a shaper of Black abolitionist and narrative imaginaries.
Abstract In this article the authors trace the many names of the coca—a controversial yet culturally significant plant species deeply rooted in Andean history. The authors critically engage with the complex task of naming, designating, and representing this group of plants, tracing diverse practices across scientific, vernacular, and artistic domains. To do so, they contrast scientific names and their philosophical foundations with Indigenous symbolic references, recent vernacular terms used in illicit cultivation contexts, and contemporary artistic representations. They argue that these diverse naming practices reflect fundamentally different ways of knowing and relating to coca. Understanding this contrast invites the reimagination of coca beyond the narrow frames of criminalization and scientific objectification. By recovering their many names, this article reclaims the imagination of coca as vegetal beings entwined with memory, ritual, labor, and land—meanings that far transcend its more recent association with the illicit drug trade.
Abstract Referring to both a botanical taxonomic rank and a legal category, the very nature of the term variety itself is contested, ambiguous, and contextually contingent. Varieties became the subject of national concern by the early 1900s, as European states instituted national breeding programs and variety catalogs. Designed to replace more localized and biodiverse forms of crops such as landraces, these “modern” varieties set the standard following the establishment of (trans)national registers and enforcement that maintained varieties as linear, stable, and productive. These standards fail to account for a plant's dynamism, as varieties interbreed, mutate, and adapt. In this way, “varieties” are often at odds with themselves: Their difference is enforced through legal and physical intervention, their uniformity is rarely total, and they are rarely stable when faced with environmental stressors and other factors. This article examines how grassroots organizations contend with these tensions in naming and maintaining varieties. Drawing from work with the London Seed Bank and the Utopian Seed Project, we contend that these practices of negotiating varietal ambiguity challenge the supremacy of commercial varieties. In contemplating, contesting, or even deciding to preserve varietal purity, seed stewards are creating possibilities for other ways of knowing plants.
Abstract This article traces how Arab writers invoked vegetal life to think through questions of organic and political belonging in and around late nineteenth-century Beirut. Close readings of natural theologies by Ibrahim al-Hurani, Nawfal Nimatallah Nawfal, Husayn al-Jisr, and Salim Kassab show how they theorized a regime of vegetal belonging based around mulāʾima (divine accordance) that pointed in multiple political directions. On one hand, their plant knowledge undergirded emerging theories of territorial nationalism, human mastery, and settlement as civilization. At the same time, the work also harbored arguments about organic mobility, multispecies adaptation, and nonindustrialized lifeways that challenged the hierarchies and boundaries those theories presumed. By identifying the cross-pollination between Arabic ecological thought and emerging political vocabularies in the Levant, the essay shows how basic terms for thinking about human politics and place emerged in relation to more-than-human worlds. Arabic theories of mulāʾima also complicate the common assumption in the contemporary environmental humanities that attention to multispecies ecologies and plant mobility is necessarily progressive. Instead, we see how mulāʾima opened up various political possibilities, demonstrating an unfinished conception of belonging that both formed part of the complex genealogy of modern nationalism and exceeded its terms at the same time.
Abstract This essay rereads George Staunton's two-volume An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1797) through the lens of posthuman discourse. The author studies Staunton's descriptions of plants to develop an alternative theory of East-West relations that is not defined by antagonism, romanticization, or even ambivalence, but rather by a form of weak friendship that slips constantly into illegibility. If reading an archive of human interactions allows us to better understand the competing interests and differences in worldviews that undergird political life, attending to human-plant interactions allows us to see how forms and rituals of sociality might in fact create new intimacies that in turn destabilize or dissolve these recognizable forms. Indeed, as the article shows, plants can often function as a form of asemic writing, teaching us to interpret the human gestures and words that occur around them as emotive or opaque rather than as signifiers of meaning.
Abstract What is the relationship of nationalism to genetically modified (GM) crops? This article explores this question in the context of India, a country central to the global GM debate. The debate has moved far beyond the question of subordination of farmers in the global South to transnational agribusinesses like Monsanto/Bayer. It today encompasses GM crops developed through transnational networks of research and germplasm, but with domestic capital and national public institutions in the lead. As transnational, uncertain plants, GM crops articulate multiple, divergent constructions of nationalism. Focusing on parliamentary deliberations on GM crops between 2010 and 2017, the article finds that the highest legislative body in India framed nationalism in capacious, inclusive terms, in contradistinction with a narrow, exclusive nationalism favored by successive governments. This challenges monolithic accounts of statist nationalism, and calls for rescuing cultural nationalism from the political nationalism of dominant social groups. Ultimately, the article contributes to the GM debate a much-needed reckoning with nationalism and suggests that research on nationalism can be enriched by accounting for the heterogeneities of institutional practices and cultures that make up the state.
Abstract The Encephalartos woodii (E. woodii) is a rare cycad, classified as “extinct in the wild,” known solely from a single pollen-producing specimen removed from its natural habitat. The species has been preserved in cultivation through clonal propagation, with all existing specimens being genetic replicas that produce only pollen cones. As a dioecious species requiring an ovulate (seed-bearing) counterpart for sexual reproduction, E. woodii remains reproductively static, dependent on human intervention. This article explores the author's technologically mediated search for an ovulate E. woodii in the oNgoye Forest, its last known habitat. More broadly, it interrogates the unintended legacies of colonial extraction, the heteronormative framings embedded in E. woodii's conservation narrative, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding the data extraction used in this search. Through a series of artistic interventions, including drone-based imaging, algorithmic identifications, and speculative inquiries into sexual plasticity, the article raises the question of whether these efforts constitute restoration or a reengineering of extinction itself.
Stories from Scoresbysund (2003) was a creative research project by the Danish Greenlandic artist Pia Arke (1958–2007) that documented her painstaking excavation and collection of material from primarily unofficial and private archives concerning the history of Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoomiit, a colonial outpost in eastern Greenland. After the Danish authorities established the outpost in 1925, they also resettled of a group of Greenlanders into the area, among whom was Arke's maternal grandparents. For Arke, the importance of the collected images was that they anchored, released, and activated marginalized memories. Drawing from Edward Said's concept of contrapuntal reading, the article argues that Arke positioned these photographs as a visual counterpoint to the dominant historical narratives of Greenland's colonization, subverting Denmark's image as a “humane colonizer,” and a benefactor and international guardian and protector of Greenland. Through a montage of this photographic material with other anillustrations and critical essays about the history of European mapping of the north by Stefan Jonsson, Stories from Scoresbysund also offers a counterpoint to the Western cartographic representations of the Arctic as remote peripheries of civilization ripe for exploration and exploitation, which inspired imperial desires, galvanized competition and conflict, including between Norway and Denmark for the control of eastern Greenland. Stories from Scoresbysund shows how colonial representations aided the extension of European states’ sovereignty over Native peoples’ lands and livelihoods. The article suggests that Arke's art-research can be productively conceptualized as a practice of contrapuntal imagining; both as work of anticolonial art activism and as a deeply personal reflection on her severed communal connections and belonging in an act of reparative remembrance.
In Australia the ideology of homeownership is akin to national fantasy — homeownership is not only considered the more natural form of tenure, but it is also connected to ideas of citizenship and national belonging. However, like many regions around the world, Australia is in the midst of a housing crisis; house prices are far outpacing wages, generating new forms of inequality and precluding many from accessing the dream. This article is interested in cultural representations of the crisis, and it considers what these representations reveal about the mode through which the crisis is being managed. Namely, this article proposes the emergence of a new style of “property TV,” which has gained prominence since the global financial crisis of 2007–8, in which representations of the home have shifted away from everyday, domestic, or nationalistic associations and toward the spectacle of luxury real estate that is available only to the superrich. Through an analysis of the Amazon Prime Video series Luxe Listings Sydney (2020–22), this article therefore considers the ideological function of enjoyment in luxury property TV — with diminished prospects for homeownership for many Australians, the imperative to enjoy the pure spectacle of the luxury real estate market itself becomes a way to manage the crisis.
Scholars of the operational image have detailed how expanded 3D technologies are important to the ongoing transformation of images from representations to be looked at to prompts for action. Yet, to date, the status of the holographic image in this shift has yet to be fully explored. This article breaks new ground in the discourse of the operational image by investigating the position of the hologram in a genealogy of expanded 3D imaging. It focuses on the optical holograms made by the artist Bruce Nauman in the late 1960s. The article produces original visual analyses of Nauman's holograms, offers primary archival research into their reception, and uses these discussions to develop a theory of the holographic image in relation to the scholarship of Elsaesser, Crary, and de Bruyn. It makes the original claim that the holographic image is aligned with the operational image through its displacement of the body from the image's apparatus. It suggests the holographic imaginary solicited a conceptualization of the image as a spatial territory beyond the pictorial frame in which bodies might be situated. Its findings are significant for contemporary understandings of the operational image as an agent of remote action and reveal how the holographic imaginary anticipated aspects of the operational image.
In 2021 social upheavals took hold across Colombia, with diverse groups protesting an array of violences, from the state's mismanagement of the pandemic to the ongoing assassination of community leaders. Alongside road blockages, assemblies, and marches, a primary feature of the protests was the prevalence of cultural activities that took place in public spaces. Many were led by young people, whose role in the upheavals has been described by Nathalia Lamprea Abril as a “political awakening” that articulated “an alternative political subject: young people.” However, such a framing ignores the diverse ways in which young people were already politically engaged in everyday life. Drawing from the graffiti film Los hongos (2014), this article argues for a deeper recognition of youth culture as everyday politics. Significantly, the backdrop to both the estallido social and the film is one of inequality, corruption, and police violence, and in both instances youth culture is mobilized as a form of refusal. Tracing the connections between the everyday of graffiti subcultures and the momentous performances of social upheavals helps both position youth cultural politics on a continuum and highlight the risks taken by young people as they create spaces for care, creativity, and critical engagement.
The invisibility of air means that it is it easy to for us to ignore. Yet in recent times it has moved from being a presence that we rarely have to think about, to becoming a fear-provoking and unquantifiable substance, containing diseases and pollutants that need to be filtered out or blown away in order to be made safe. How, then, do we deal with such an invisible yet explicitly material entity? How do we see it? This article explores some of the different ways that air is exposed and visualized, from early scientific experiments with air through to the material consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. It moves through various fields of research: science and technology, art practice, public health, and building design, taking us through the identification, conceptualization, measurement, and datafication of air, as well as the actuality of our experience. Ultimately, it is argued that to have any hope of achieving clean air, we must first learn to work through its invisibility and understand its precarity, through the formation of a broad community of practice.
In 2020 the term revenge bedtime procrastination — or the act of purposefully staying up late to regain time for one's own use and interests — broke the internet. While media coverage largely dismissed this phenomenon as a problem for the self-help industry, this article argues that revenge bedtime procrastination can and should be understood as a struggle over the temporal relations of life under capitalism. Reading this practice through a Marxist feminist lens, this article aims to generate new insights on how capitalism works through the temporal regulation of life making, whether one is “on the clock” or not. This case demonstrates the political possibilities of reclaiming time through uncovering and theorizing a politicized version of “leisure” as radical unproductivity. This article contends that revenge bedtime procrastination is a key example of a laborer's desperate attempt to fulfill a need not easily satisfied, the resources for which are not freely given or equally accessible: time and, more specifically, time to oneself. Revenge bedtime procrastination, and leisure more generally, have broader implications for expanding visions of the fight against capitalism beyond the workplace and the workday.
This article situates the ethical function of health within contemporary deregulation, as a broad governing logic focused on individual entrepreneurial freedom. The article presents three US-based case studies that resonate internationally and are positioned across the health spectrum, examining a blood diagnostic company, a popular wellness brand, and conspiratorial health influencers. The author develops the framework of deregulatory folkway to underscore the way deregulation in health (1) stratifies the population, as a means of generating value and profits; and (2) justifies inequality in terms of exceptional individuals, enterprising companies, salvific campaigns, and other claims on the future. The case studies foreground three specific deregulatory folkways — disruption, aspiration, and awakening — that the author scrutinizes as extractive and complicit in guiding health toward individualized entitlement, possessive freedom, and transactional relations with the human body. The triptych reveals a process of value creation — of generating capital (economic, political, social, bodily) — that promises better health awareness, efficiency, enlightenment, even life expectancy, yet depends on and deepens inequality. The article ends by positing political care for interdependency — health as solidarity — against the myth of the individual and deregulation's cynical endorsement of ongoing gendered racialized ills.
This brief introduction outlines the scope and tenor of the essays that compose the current special issue of Cultural Politics devoted to Jean-Luc Nancy. It makes a case for the relevance of his multifaceted work in a time of perpetual crisis, while also showing its resistance to becoming a totalizing paradigm awaiting “application” within specific contexts. Foregrounding a new alignment of bodies and worlds, the introduction situates Nancy as a thinker of ever-new beginnings, a thinker attuned to the uniqueness of each and every present, those world-shaking moments that he experienced while still in life, as well as the moments still to come and that demand our thoughtful care.
In 1962 there appeared a volume of essays, The Radical Right, edited by Daniel Bell, with contributions by such scholars as Richard Hofstadter, Talcott Parsons, Seymour Martin Lipset, and others. The authors sought to explain the emergence of the “New Right” in post – World War II America, then embodied primarily by McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. Drawing from previous work of the 1930s analyzing the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism by Parsons, Harold Laswell, Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others, The Radical Right, the author argues, not only offered an empirical and analytical view of right-wing sentiments in the United States but also crystallized a full-scale paradigmatic treatment of these ideological tendencies, with “resentment” at the center. What the author calls the Resentment Paradigm relied on several intellectual props, including modernization theory, a commitment to psychoanalytical concepts, the concept of status (rather than class), and an embrace of Cold War liberalism. These props endowed this paradigm with persuasiveness and power until the 1970s when a sustained critique of modernization theory and Freudianism, along with disillusionment with traditional liberalism, led to its decline. What was left, to be sure, is the still-useful concept of resentment—deployed these days more than ever; but without a paradigmatic packaging that, with all its flaws, endowed it with analytical heft.
