The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America

The Garden Politic argues that botanical practices and discourses helped nineteenth-century Americans engage pressing questions of race, gender, settler colonialism, and liberal subjectivity, challenging the idea of American exceptionalism. It shows how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends, and how the nineteenth century's extractive political economy of plants contains both the roots of our contemporary environmental crisis and the seeds of alternative political visions.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 07 February 2023
Publisher: New York University Press

The Garden Politic argues that botanical practices and discourses played a significant role in shaping nineteenth-century American politics and society. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness contributed to narratives of American exceptionalism, but by the nineteenth century, these ideas were challenged by the unprecedented scale of plant prospecting and exchange across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of science, The Garden Politic explores how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends. Reading the work of influential nineteenth-century authors from a botanical perspective, Mary Kuhn recovers how domestic political issues were entangled with the global circulation and science of plants. The diversity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's gardens contributed to the evolution of her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. Nathaniel Hawthorne's struggles in his garden inspired him to write stories in which plants defy human efforts to impose order. Radical scientific ideas about plant intelligence and sociality prompted Emily Dickinson to imagine a human polity that embraces kinship with the natural world. Yet other writers, including Frederick Douglass, cautioned that the most prominent political context for plants remained plantation slavery. The Garden Politic reveals how the nineteenth century's extractive political economy of plants contains both opportunities and challenges for social and environmental justice.

Weight: 560g
Dimension: 158 x 237 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479820122