Plants, Plantations, and the Anglophone Caribbean: Exploring Indigenous and African-descendent knowledge through text, archive, and orality

The British colonial project vastly altered the ecology of Caribbean island landscapes through agricultural methods which exploited both nature and human bodies. In the ‘sugar isles’ of Barbados and Saint Lucia, the production of sugar destroyed biodiversity as plants, forests, animals, and indigenous communities were cleared to facilitate large monocrop cane plantations. In spite of this, enslaved and indigenous communities often resisted oppressive conditions through maintaining traditional ecological practices and botanical knowledge during and beyond the period of plantation slavery. However, recovering and locating such knowledge poses challenges given colonial archives and texts about plantations often serve to marginalise or silence so-called subaltern agency. This project aims to explore and recover indigenous and African-descendent knowledge with a specific focus on the ecology of planation and post-plantation landscapes in the Anglophone Caribbean. It develops an approach which brings archival methods into dialogue with oral cultures through collaboration with partners in Saint Lucia and Barbados, including students and community groups from the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College and the University of the West Indies. The project aims to reposition the plantation as a site not solely on which colonial ideology was enacted, but also where multiple knowledge systems existed in shaping the landscape in ways that have lasting legacies today. Scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith have underlined how colonial texts (here broadly considered as travel narratives, diaries, and administrative documents) often enact forms of epistemological violence on colonised subjects through erasing or marginalising knowledge systems, underlining the need for scholars to decolonize research methods when working with archives. Drawing on Smith’s call, this project encourages scholars, students, and community groups to think beyond Eurocentric narratives of the global spread of Western science to consider traditional ecological and indigenous knowledge in relation to both textual and ancestral/oral sources. Crucially, the project challenges, in Walter Mignolo’s terms , ‘zero-point epistemology’; whereby the knowing European coloniser maps the world, observes its people, plants, and projects an assumed universal knowledge. Primary research will consider texts on the ecology of the Caribbean, including J.B. Moreton’s 1791 travel narratives which deal extensively with ‘West-Indian’ botany; as well as gothic novelist and slave-owner Matthew Lewis’s plantation diaries; and botanical works by naturalists such as Alexander Anderson which include numerous contributions from indigenous and enslaved individuals. Textual references to traditional ecological knowledge will be brought into dialogue with oral cultures through workshops held on Balenbouche Estate (Saint Lucia) and Walkers Reserve (formerly known as Willoughby Plantation in Barbados) with students, poets, academics, and community groups. These workshops will explore ancestral knowledge and the ways in which epistemologies were maintained or severed by coloniality and the plantation economy. This process will allow for new readings of botany and natural history in contemporary Caribbean writing, with a specific focus on considering ‘creolized plantation landscapes’ in the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Kamau Braithwaite, and Kendel Hyppolyte among others. Findings will be disseminated through a book, collaborative art project, website, and two community-centred exhibitions.