Plants beyond Borders
Due Date: 05-01-2024
Although they are the most abundant life form on earth, plants have received scant attention from ecocritics until recently. As allies in the rethinking of human exceptionalism and the limits of human conceptions of nation, race, sexuality, disability, and invasion, plants challenge us to reimagine our philosophical and material relationship to the beings which enable each breath we take.
For this edited collection (working title: Plants beyond Borders) we invite 4,000–6,000-word contributions that take an interdisciplinary approach to reimagining and rethinking plants or human relationships with plants throughout the Americas. Genres might include literature, performance studies, film studies, and art. This collection comes out of our critical plant studies Modern Language Association panels in 2021 and 2024. It has attracted interest from a university press, and we anticipate publishing through a university press.
Proposals might consider:
RESISTANCE: exploring how gardening and deploying plants in art, culture, and performance offer models of resistance for human crises like war, systemic racism, industrialized capitalism, unnatural disasters, and climate change.
VITALITY: exploring how plant temporality, sentience, and mobility challenge philosophical, judicial, and ontological limits on current definitions of life and the right to exist across multiple categories of beings.
SEXUALITY: exploring the vast range of plant sexualities and reproductive modes, which challenge contemporary and historical notions of the spectrum of sexual desire and experience.
“INVASIVE SPECIES”: considering how colonization, decolonization, deforestation, the plantationocene, and histories of vegetal life connect to human histories and contiguities of slavery, anti-Blackness, and anti-Indigeneity.
DISABILITY STUDIES AND PLANT STUDIES: Exploring atypicality and adaptations in humans and plants.
Please send proposals (300–500 words) and brief biographies (100 words) to Alicia Carroll and Courtney Ryan by 1 May 2024. Collaborative proposals are welcome, and proposals from BIPOC scholars are encouraged. If accepted, completed chapters of 4,000–6,000 words will be due 2 September 2024.