Botany of Empire : Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism / Banu Subramaniam.

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2024]

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2024

©[2024]

1 online resource (328 pages).

Access is available to the Yale community.

Description based on print version record.

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"Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, Indigenous studies, and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. This book demonstrates how botany's foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how colonizers obliterated plant time's deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like foreign humans. Subramanian then pivots to imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of feminist and scientific thought to chart a course for more socially just practices of experimental biology"-- Provided by publisher.

Project MUSE complete collection 2024.

Print version: Subramaniam, Banu, 1966- Botany of empire Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2024]

Books / Online

English

June 10, 2024

Includes bibliographical references and index.