“A Coffee-Plantation is a Thing that Gets Hold of You and Does Not Let You Go”
Plant-Writing in Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20156440 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Mortensen (0000-0003-1622-8272, Aarhus University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 28-45 |
| Publication date | 2019-10-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387 |
| Publisher | Unisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02564718.2019.1690805 |
| OpenAlex | W2994650711 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
One of the powerful but mostly overlooked productive forces in and behind Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) is Coffea arabica, the coffee bush of Arabia. In this article, I first discuss the dominant anti-pastoral tendency in recent Blixen-criticism, which has classified Out of Africa as a neo-colonial text and reduced Blixen’s interest in more-than-human nature to an expression of conservative ideology. I introduce two alternative concepts – “arabesque” and “phytographia” – that help me reposition Out of Africa and reconsider the significance of the text’s many plant-references. Blixen’s writing, in my understanding, holds a more timely interest and performs a more culturally productive function than is often assumed, especially insofar as it fore-grounds the life of many different plants and asks us to consider their powerful impact upon humanity. Read at a time when we are beginning to understand the disastrous implications of Western culture’s deep-rooted “plant blindness”, Blixen’s text helps question the insignificance of plants and problematise the powerful conviction that humans and plants lead separate and unrelated lives
Biology · Blindness · Coffea arabica · Colonialism · Conviction · Criticism · Environmental ethics · Humanity · Ideology · Insignificance · Political science · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology
The Romantic Absolute
The Environmental Imagination
Preventing Plant Blindness
Plant Horror
Pastoral
Kenya's Literary Ladies and the Mythologizing of the White Highlands
The Colonial Pygmalion
Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies (HPS)
Both men and beasts”
The Botany of Desire
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene
From the anthropocene to the planthroposcene
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |