Radical Botany
Plants and Speculative Fiction
by Natania Meeker, Antonia Szabari

---

Auteur(s)

Natania Meeker, Antonia Szabari

Uitgever

New York : Fordham University, 2019

Omvang

304 p., geïllustreerd, 23 cm.

ISBN

9780823286621

---

Radical Botany uncovers a long speculative tradition of plant fiction that conjures up new languages to grasp the life of plants - their vegetality - in all its specificity and vigor. The first part of the book reaches back to seventeenth-century materialisms to show how plants, rather than being systematically excluded from human deliberation, have in fact participated in modernity. Authors Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants' liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. The radical botanical works this book explores not only prioritize plants as active participants in “their” world but suggest that the apparent passivity of plants can function as a powerful destabilizing force in its own right. In 2022 the writers were invited at Kaaitheater, Brussels, to talk about the book and ‘tendrilesque writing’. What happens to human speech if vines enter our flesh, roots crawl through our veins, and we turn into hybrid plant monsters? What happens if we let plants speak through us and what kind of new language, new bits of knowledge and new worlds can emerge from there? ‘Radical Botany’ traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought.

---

Trefwoorden

queer theory

Locatie in de bibliotheek

Kast 11 - 4: Antropoceen

Opmerkingen

Incl. bibliographical references and Index