{"id":799,"date":"2025-07-01T09:15:26","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T09:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/?p=799"},"modified":"2026-03-10T12:39:50","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T12:39:50","slug":"queer-and-anti-colonial-gardening-a-syllabus-m-ty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/?p=799","title":{"rendered":"Queer and Anti-Colonial Gardening: A Syllabus\u00a0\u2013\u00a0M. Ty\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The garden is for me an exercise in memory . . . 
\u2014 Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden<\/em> (Book)<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One cannot rule out the possibility of a connection between . . . two events, or the existence of a hidden link, as one sometimes finds with plants, for instance, like when a clutch of grass is pulled out by the roots, and you think you\u2019ve got rid of it entirely, only for grass of the exact same species to grow back in the same spot a quarter of a century later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Adania Shibli, Minor Detail<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gardening has been called the slowest of the performing arts. It\u2019s true\u2014plants most often transform and extend their reach at a pace that eludes immediate perception. Time-lapse photography can speed up their long choreographies so that the eye can catch a glimpse of them. But anyone who has ever put a seed in the dirt and waited for something to happen\u2014wondering if it will, then waiting and waiting some more, within a bouquet of question marks\u2014has some intimacy with that gap between the cadence of their acts and the temporalities of the land\u2019s expression. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The vegetable time of the garden is not only unhurried in relation to the tempos of human perception, it is also intergenerational\u2014sometimes ancestral. When the Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter wrote of the subsistence plots that black captives kept on the edges of the plantation, she noted how they were also places of burial: the squash, yam, and other harvested crops would be gifted as offerings to those who, recently buried, were making the \u201cluminous transition\u201d into the ancestral realm. As spaces of gathering, these gardens could alchemise mourning into militance and incite grief into rebellion.1<\/a><\/sup> That they harboured seeds of radicalism was one of the primary reasons the plantocracy surveilled and tried\u2014never completely succeeding\u2014to regulate them with a desperate paper trail of prohibitions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plantation economy drove monolingualism into the throat of the earth, so that the soil could say only one thing: sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar<\/em>, cotton cotton cotton cotton cotton<\/em>, indigo indigo indigo indigo indigo<\/em>. Drawing from the embodied memories of alternative practices of subsistence, enslaved people cultivated gardens that were polyrhythmically polycropped. They did not sow for profit, but for collective nourishment.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These provision grounds were often left unsupervised. Beyond offering food for the belly and a provisional reprieve from the routine brutality of the master, they acted as a portal to another cosmology. Gardening was a practice of remembering how to live otherwise than the laws of capitalist white supremacy dictated. The plots were places for plotting a way to a different world, in the midst of the impossibilities of this one. For these reasons, Wynter calls them sites of \u201ccultural guerilla resistance.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This syllabus is designed to amplify Wynter\u2019s insight, and to open the ears wide to the frequencies of possibility that take root in non-normative acts of gardening. Imagine a stalk with two leaves, each with its own direction of reach: one that invites reflection on the way imperial projects have leveraged botanical knowledge for the purposes of indigenous dispossession and global extraction; and another that gathers dispersed practices of gardening which refuse colonial modernity\u2019s exhaustion of land and labour, along with its humourless fetishisation of heteronormative reproduction as the holy grail of social value.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The readings, soundings, video works, and experiments in sociality that are featured in this syllabus come together in conjuring a provisional ground for minoritised horticultures. These resources guide attention towards how these planting practices seed refusals of the sexual, ecological, political, and epistemological norms through which European colonial modernity reproduces itself as an eternal catastrophe. Part of the invitation here is to study the possibility that subsistence grounds contribute to the material basis of what Wynter elsewhere refers to as a \u201cdemonic ground\u201d\u2014or the inhabitation of meaning which does not submit to the hegemonic \u201cregime of truth\u201d that presently governs global reality.3<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a kind of initiation into these peripheral grounds, you can cruise this patch of questions:  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recalling that diaspora<\/em> is rooted etymologically in words that evoke the scatter <\/em>of spore<\/em>, how have gardens offered resources for collective memory in the wake of the tremendous displacements induced by (neo)colonial accumulation? And what have they offered by way of therapeutic and medicinal relief?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are repertoires not only of root-work but of root-play? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What visions are given by the spark between the steadfastness of indigenous plant<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

knowledges and the various arts of refusing to submit to occupation? What are the primary strategies that settlers have deployed in waging their centuries-long war against black and brown subsistence? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do gardens act as both an expression and site of queer desire, and in doing so, potentially derange traditional delineations of public and private spheres? What gestures of gardening enact the forms of queer dependency that constitute one of the roots of crip wealth? And which gardens have offered themselves as allies in holding opacity for forbidden contact? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What undictated possibilities of eros and knowledge have emerged from frequenting garden grounds?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can one think of gardening as a kind of poiesis<\/em> that isn\u2019t held hostage to conventional framings of the capacity for literacy? What of its rituals activate the radical<\/em> (a word that derives from \u201croot\u201d)? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How has gardening become, at times, an exercise of liberation\u2014even if only seasonal, partial, or precarious?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are the strange and stranger fruits of a garden that does not conform? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Groundings<\/em><\/strong> <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s begin with the alphabet and some story. At the entryway of the syllabus, painter Kara Walker and novelist Jamaica Kincaid greet you. Recently, they collaborated on the making of An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children <\/em>(2024). The slender, green book proceeds through each letter of the alphabet, elaborating a word related to the garden\u2014with Walker on the illustrations and Kincaid on the word. \u201cB is for Breadfruit. . . . S is for Solanaceae. S is also for Sugarcane.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still warming up, you can listen to Kincaid speak about traditions of gardening as an ambivalent inheritance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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