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

The Garden Politic explores how botanical practices and ideas helped nineteenth-century Americans re-envision politics and society, challenging narratives of American exceptionalism and prompting alternative political visions. It draws on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of science to show how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized for divergent political and social ends.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 07 February 2023
Publisher: New York University Press

The Garden Politic explores how botanical practices and discourses influenced nineteenth-century Americans to re-envision politics and society. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness fueled narratives of American exceptionalism. However, by the nineteenth century, the unprecedented scale of plant prospecting and exchange between the United States and European empires unsettled these ideas. The book draws on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of science to demonstrate how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized for divergent political and social ends.

Mary Kuhn recovers how domestic political issues were entangled with the global circulation and science of plants by reading influential nineteenth-century authors from a botanical perspective. Harriet Beecher Stowes diverse gardens contributed to her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. Nathaniel Hawthornes 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.

However, other writers, including Frederick Douglass, cautioned that plantation slavery remained the most prominent political context for plants. The Garden Politic reveals how the nineteenth-century extractive political economy of plants contained both the promise of new botanical ideas and the perpetuation of oppressive systems.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479820153