Rhetoric and Plants
My dissertation defense is seven years behind me, and it seems like a lifetime has transpired between then and now. As I turn back to the manuscript in earnest, I find myself with new perspectives on science, human sociality and behavior, communication, academic writing and knowledge production, time—even my relationship to backyard gardening has had to be reformulated post-Covid. (Side note: we need a word that means "after the onset of Covid," but doesn't imply that Covid is behind us the way "post-Covid" does.) My dissertation project originally developed out of an interest in animal studies, which very quickly led me to wonder about the kinds of questions that could be asked within something like “plant studies,” which did not seem to exist at the time. Hell, animal studies barely existed at the time, at least in rhetoric. Throughout the process of writing Rhetoric and Plants, I resisted taking the ecocritical turn until the very end. It felt, to me, like there were logically prior questions I needed to ask before I could begin to think the relationship between humans and plants ecocritically. In hindsight, the apocalyptic pressure we probably all feel was certainly a driving force behind the urgency of the project for me, even as I wrestled with more organism-level problems like sex, pain, sentience, and consciousness. Though I did turn to environmental rhetoric in my final chapter, it was primarily as a form of critique in light of the new perspectives on plants that my previous chapters had developed, with the idea that this pointed the way toward a plant-inclusive ecocriticism. I still believe that it’s a mistake to endocytotically engulf plants into these preexisting conversations without re-theorizing our understanding of and relationship to them. As I revisit the manuscript, however, the ecological urgency that underwrites the whole endeavor is becoming far more explicit as context for the conceptual questions I’m continuing to ask.
Correspondents: The Rhetorical Life of Maclura pomifera
If you’ve spent any time in the rural areas of the US, you likely know Maclura pomifera, though you may not know that you know it. It is an evolutionary anachronism, a species whose ecological partners have largely died out, leaving it to make fruit that entices no one. It has no predators and no pollinators, which has rendered it largely absent within the native plant movement. It has a tiny native range but an enormous naturalized one, covering most of the contiguous US—it has been described as weedy and opportunistic, moving in easily to disturbed or abused land. It was once valued by white colonists as a living hedge, but barbed wire and steel supplanted it. It is still valued by Native American bow makers of many different tribes, though there are not many such bow makers in practice today. It burns hot, resists disease, refuses to rot, and may be the hardest wood in North America. For all these reasons, Maclura seems like an ideal candidate for widespread cultivation. Yet aside from its (now defunct) use as a living hedge, it does not seem to have been deliberately planted in large numbers by Native peoples or by colonists. This essay asks: why not? Tracing the rhetorical life of Maclura pomifera raises questions about the relationships between written and oral histories, evolution and cultivation, empiricism and generational wisdom, commodification and care. To tell the story of this tree, this project constructs an intersection of science studies, historiography, bow-making, gardening lore and memoir, ecological rhetoric, and conservation.
Foreign and Familiar: Making Space for Plants
This short video served as the introduction to my work preceding the roundtable discussion, "The Language of Roots and Pollen: Toward Transformative Theories of Plant Communication," delivered at the 2021 NCA Annual Convention.
