Book ID: CBB038984582

Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (2019)

unapi

Meeker, Natania (Author)
Szabari, Antónia (Author)


Fordham University Press


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 304
Language: English

Winner, 2019 Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book PrizeRadical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants’ liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity. The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism’s manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction.A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.

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Reviewed By

Review Susan McHugh (2020) Review of "Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction". Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology (pp. 521-523). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB038984582/

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Authors & Contributors
Bo Ruberg
Dana von Suffrin
Barclay, Katie
Murphy, Graham
Gabbriellini, Chiara
Schmeink, Lars
Concepts
Science fiction
Science and art
Motion pictures; cinema; movies
Modernity
Science and culture
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Time Periods
Early modern
Modern
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
Renaissance
Places
Great Britain
Italy
India
East Germany
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