Decolonizing Garden Ecologies: the Visual and Material Cultures of Imperial Landscape

This panel explores the productive tensions of designed landscapes with a focus on gardens and their (post)colonial histories. Like other forms of ecological imperialism, gardens are produced landscapes in which natural resource extraction and internment of colonial subjects’ bodies are intermingled in cycles of death, decay, and regeneration. The beauty and seeming innocence of garden spaces conceal entangled histories of the Middle Passage, diaspora in its literal meaning as “dispersal,” and the brutalities of globalization. Reeling us in with lushness and adornment, the cultivated gardens idealized in the collective Euro-U.S. imaginary operate as symbols of empire and memorializations of colonial violence. And yet, gardens, as Swati Chattopadhyay argues, are also “small spaces” historically minimized in importance within the literature on imperial infrastructure. As microcosms of an unruly world, gardens conform to the orderly logic of imperial power, but are also invested with potential resistance threatening to explode their very boundaries. The garden thus acts as a site ripe for staging a reckoning.

We welcome submissions that approach gardens as part of what Malcolm Ferdinand describes as decolonial ecology — imagining alternative ecological futures that reconcile the struggles of oppressed peoples with that of the environment for an emancipatory way out of ecological crisis. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: decolonial explorations of garden designs; art/ artists critiquing the imperial histories of garden cultivation and/ or imagining gardens as spaces of resistance; or ecocritical readings of gardens in the contexts of interspecies destruction and climate collapse.