Radical Botany: An Introduction

This chapter uncovers a tradition of radical botany in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Offshoots of this tradition wend their way from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first, moving through different historical periods and cultural frameworks and gradually taking on global significance. In a context where modernity is often equated with the exploitation and brutalization of nature, the authors, critics, filmmakers, and theorists whose works are introduced here develop an understanding of vegetality as driving the production of technology, scientific knowledge, and new media forms. This chapter includes a survey of critical plant studies (including the work of Michael Marder, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and Natasha Myers) to show how, in this emergent field, plants remain partners with humans in modernity, even as both plants and humans find themselves under threat by forces that vastly outstrip their abilities to master, grasp, or model them.