Description
Book SynopsisUnderstories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.
Trade Review‘A timely exploration of plant studies in the hemispheric Americas, Understories showcases diverse methodologies for uncovering the imbrications of plant and human world-making across the two continents. Each chapter uniquely challenges the place of plants—from trees to succulents, breadfruit to transgenic soy—in the popular imaginary by charting dynamic histories of growth, transplantation, contamination, and adaptation in a variety of human-plant entanglements.’ Amanda M. Smith
‘What impresses the reader of, specially, Latin American literature is the ways in which the fitting title of the collection – Understories also brings to mind plant stories/histories that have passed before our eyes unseen – among other production of its contributors, and in particular its editor, Lesley Wylie, has changed the ways in which we read canonical fictions about plants.’ Felipe Martinez-Pinzon
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Figures Introduction. Green Power: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics Lesley Wylie
The Dark Twin: Cacao from Mesoamerican Cosmology to the Contemporary Neotropics Bruce Dean Willis “A Good Thing Spring Up”: The Breadfruit Story in the Caribbean Elaine Savory Ceiba pentandra: Axis of the Mesoamerican World / Mirror of Climate Change in the Caribbean Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert The Politics of Yerba Mate Nina Gerassi-Navarro Transgenic Soy in Argentina: Arts of the Toxic Zone Sebastián Figueroa
“A Home of Cactus and Maguey”: Dwelling and Cultural Representation of Succulents of the Americas Odile Cisneros
From Tropical Pathology to Tropical Plantation: the Hevea brasiliensis, 1839 to 1945 Lesley Wylie
The Vine at the End of the World: Reimagining Kudzu in the U.S. South Jessica Martell and Zackary Vernon
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