The goal of this panel is to examine scientific and literary representations of weeds and invasive plants within a comparative framework. The topic is timely: in recent years, plants have gained significant traction as objects of scientific and humanistic inquiry, undoing biases favoring humans and non-human animals and contributing to interdisciplinary fields such as Critical Plant Studies.

This plant turn from what James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler called “plant blindness” towards an exploration of plant life is perhaps best expressed in the success of books such as Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. In “The Less Selfish Gene,” Rob Nixon attributed this success to the fact that people have turned their attention to plants in search of cooperative societal models that counter biological metaphors of individualism.

But plant life also presents itself in more ambiguous ways. Defined as plants growing and unwanted, weeds disrupt Nixon’s hypothesis since they are usually represented as destroying forces. As Nina Edwards points out in Weeds, rather than being a specific species, weeds stand for what we find threatening in the plant world, including their ability to spread and quickly occupy other plants’ habitats. Banu Subramaniam has shown how weeds perceived as “invasives” and “out of place” can elicit a rhetoric of fear deeply rooted in colonial and gender dynamics. If, as Jeffrey T. Nealon argues in Plant Theory, the plant is the abjected form of life within a dominant regime of biopower, weeds are the abjected other within the vegetable world itself.

The papers in this panel engage with representations of weeds as plants growing “out of place” to understand how they challenge notions we take for granted when discussing biodiversity, such as native and alien. Moreover, because these terms speak to questions of belonging and identity, we chose three papers that analyze discourses on weeds hailing from different disciplines and literary traditions.

We will begin with “(Un)Natural Selections: Native Fragility and the Racialized Specters of Weeds” by Banu Subramaniam. This paper sets a conceptual framework to consider weeds and invasive plants, as it investigates how they conjure visions of proliferation, abundance, and potentially infinite growth in an era of massive biodiversity loss. Examining recent scientific discourses on weeds and invasive species, Subramaniam argues that weeds have been racialized to pathologize migrants of color into settler colonies. Still, in an era of climate change, when native species struggle to adapt and survive, the question arises––should we welcome weeds and invasives instead as agents of positive ecological change? Thus, what it means to be “out of place” is radically redefined.

Building on Subramaniam’s presentation, the following papers examine what “out of place” means in the work of Octavia E. Butler and Jorge Luis Borges. In her paper “Alien Weeds and the Ambiguities of Coexistence in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Amnesty,’” Yota Batsaki investigates how literature can undo the military rhetoric of invasion biology (and the biological rhetoric of political discourse) in the Anthropocene, when weeds and invasives flourish in ecosystems disrupted by humans. In Butler’s short story “Amnesty” (2003), alien “Communities” are named “Weeds” pejoratively and described as “plantlike.” But rather than only restating the negative personification of weeds, Batsaki argues that Butler’s narrative also reverses the plot of settler colonialism and imagines new and unexpected multispecies encounters that can be thought of along the lines of the ontological turn within environmental studies.

The third and final paper, “A Home Among Weeds: Madreselvas and Other Invasives in Borges’s Buenos Aires” by Lucas Mertehikian, examines the overlooked role of weeds in Borges’s early texts about his hometown, Buenos Aires. While scholarship has vastly explored the critical role that the edges of the cities (the orillas, in Spanish) play in Borges’s literature, little to no attention has been paid to the role plants have in shaping such liminal spaces. Offering a close reading of the short story “Man on Pink Corner” (“Hombre de la esquina rosada,” 1935), Mertehikian argues that the appearance of varieties of honeysuckle ­­––which are portrayed as native when they are alien and even invasive species–– adds an ecological layer to Borges’s concern with belonging and definitions of the local and the cosmopolitan.

To promote discussion, we have selected three presenters who will deliver 15-minute papers, followed by a response by Nicolás Campisi, whose research on Latin American eco-horror will serve as a counterpoint to further analyze the role of weeds and invasives in literature and science.