Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics

Buch | Hardcover

272 Seiten

2023
Liverpool University Press (Verlag)
978-1-83764-473-5 (ISBN)

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Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

Lesley Wylie is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester and has published widely on the subject of plants across Latin American culture.

Acknowledgments Figures Introduction. Green Power: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics Lesley Wylie
The Dark Twin: Cacao from Mesoamerican Cosmology to the Contemporary Neotropics Bruce Dean Willis “A Good Thing Spring Up”: The Breadfruit Story in the Caribbean Elaine Savory Ceiba pentandra: Axis of the Mesoamerican World / Mirror of Climate Change in the Caribbean Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert The Politics of Yerba Mate Nina Gerassi-Navarro Transgenic Soy in Argentina: Arts of the Toxic Zone Sebastián Figueroa
“A Home of Cactus and Maguey”: Dwelling and Cultural Representation of Succulents of the Americas Odile Cisneros
From Tropical Pathology to Tropical Plantation: the Hevea brasiliensis, 1839 to 1945 Lesley Wylie
The Vine at the End of the World: Reimagining Kudzu in the U.S. South Jessica Martell and Zackary Vernon
Bibliography Contributors

Erscheinungsdatum	05.12.2023
Reihe/Serie	American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography ; 9
Verlagsort	Liverpool
Sprache	englisch
Maße	163 x 239 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Botanik
	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-83764-473-X / 183764473X
ISBN-13	978-1-83764-473-5 / 9781837644735
Zustand	Neuware