Receding Margins: Black Rice and the Rhythms of Tidal Transfer

Abstract:Plants and their cultivators play a privileged, if ambiguous, role in the recreation, maintenance, and transmission of cultural practices that settler colonialism believes to have definitively erased for having violently interrupted. Raising the question of what does and does not carry over in the transfer of roots and transport of seeds, survivance through the continued flourishing and tending of certain plants brings into focus what this special issue’s call for papers identifies as the dialectic of priority and incompletion defining a destruction that both precedes contemporary environmental calamity and escapes conclusion, remaining as unfinished, as unachieved, as it is still ongoing. In the words of the call, the articles collected here proceed from “a dual impulse: both to say there are things that have been destroyed which have yet to be perceived, and, there are things which have not been destroyed, which subsist without the need for critical recovery.” Numerous times when trying to write this essay, I have been stopped in equal measure by awe and grief: awe at the beauty of the cosmic rhythms of rise and fall, flood and recession, in relation to which human societies have learned to move and live, bringing these rhythms into relief through scalar mimesis and selective accentuation; grief at settler colonialism’s violent disruption of this mutual patterning.