The lecture is part of the conference Vegetal Mediations: Plant Agency in Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities
Some of the most innovative Caribbean writers organize their texts around images of plants and flowers. Even when their novels do not seem to be concerned with environmental issues at all, but rather with globalization and exploitation, they abound with fragrant, creepy or dark references to flowers, insects, trees, gardens, and mud. Indeed, ecocritics will read these references as a critical reflection on the destructive environmental effects of colonialism and globalization. While such a reading is undoubtedly enlightening, it does not give us the whole story. References to nature and plants do more. The Caribbean texts I will discuss in my presentation, suggest that exclusionary practices such as racism, sexism and homophobia are all legitimized by oppressive notions of what is natural and what is not. A radical revision of traditional concepts of nature can therefore open a space for alternative, post-colonial and posthumanist imaginations of race, gender and sexuality. Through a discussion of several literary evocations of plants and flowers in Caribbean novels (esp. by Shani Mootoo, Jamaica Kincaid), I propose to read these references within an intersectional frame that brings together ecocriticism with Caribbean and postcolonial studies, the study of gender and sexuality, and posthumanism. In this way, I hope to show that plants can help us to rethink the relation between human beings and the environment, and human identity itself.
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Isabel Hoving is Chief Diversity Officer at Leiden University. She is also associate professor at the Department of Film and Literary Studies and the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, where she specializes in gender studies, interculturality, the environmental humanities, and, lately, games studies. Her publications include a study on Caribbean migrant women writers, In Praise of New Travellers (Stanford UP, 2001), co-edited books on (Dutch) migration, Caribbean literatures, African literature and art; an edited volume,Dutch Racism,with Philomena Essed(Rodopi, 2014), (as co-author) a book on Dutch literary writing on multiculturality (ACCO, 2015), and Writing the Earth, Darkly: Globalization, Ecocriticism, and Desire(Lexington Books, 2017). She is member of the editorial boards of Thamyris/ Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race; Ecocritical Theory and Practice;Ecozon@: the European Journal on Literature, Culture and the Environment;and StudienzuLiteratur, Kultur und Umwelt / Studies in Literature, Culture, and the Environment.In 2012, she launched the Benelux Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment, BASCE.In addition to her academic work, she is an awarded writer of cross-over and adult philosophical fantasy.