How can plants and food help us understand our family history?
Plants, like people, are intelligent life forms that hold memory and transmit knowledge. In this course, students examine the evolution of botany alongside the rise of colonization to draw parallels between the policies and practices that shaped their family migrations. With the aid of edible medicinal plants and traditional recipes, students research their histories and curate cultural archives that tell complex stories of belonging and longing.
Participants will learn how to grow medicinal plants, employ ethical research practices, and develop their family archives.
Students will begin by examining various ways plants establish communities across the planet and studying the complex chemical and social lives of plants. Next, learners will parallel postcolonial theories of plants and peoples to connect the ways plants, like humans, seeded themselves across the globe for survival. Finally, students will incorporate primary sources from the family narrative, oral history, and government archives to help students visualize botanical imprints on their ethnic, racial, and national identities.
Learners will survey the research of botanists, horticulturalists, folk medicine practitioners, and urban gardeners. The works of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Fred Moten will provide the course’s literary foundation. The art practices of Fred Wilson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alison Janae Hamilton, and Deb Willis will create avenues for social art exploration. Importantly, students will read research from a cross-section of postcolonial theorists challenging Western cartography and naming conventions of land.