The Plant at the End of the World
Precious Okoyomon's Invasive Art
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2230079 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yota Batsaki (0000-0002-1053-1732, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 585-609 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0093-1896 • E-ISSN: 1539-7858 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/730350 |
| OpenAlex | W4399327615 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 26 |
Plants are edging closer to the center of critical inquiry in the Anthropocene because they are intimately tied to legacies of settler colonialism, forced migration, related practices of extractive capitalism, and their environmental and human harm. Ostensibly sessile, plants travel constantly through their adaptations to ensure their survival and reproduction. In the modern period, this movement was taken to unprecedented scale by humans, triggering massive displacement of people and disruption to ecosystems. Among the many instances of plant movement, the scandalous mobility of invasives unsettles us because it exposes the worst excesses of the Anthropocene. This essay focuses on the practice of multimedia artist Precious Okoyomon, whose installations feature prominently kudzu, the most notorious weed in the US. The highest concentrations of kudzu are found in the former Cotton Belt—Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—making it cotton's unlikely successor. The essay analyzes how Okoyomon's kudzu installations explore the dark side of the landscape, peeling off layers of human and environmental harm while acknowledging the resilience of more-than-human life. But a focus on invasive species also challenges plant theory's celebration of entanglement, showing how the theoretical effort to produce the plant as a generalized concept bumps against the contingencies of its natural history in time and place, its ontological slipperiness, its ethical ambiguity
Aesthetics · Art · Animal and Plant Science Education · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History
Black Rice
In the Shadow of Slavery
How Forests Think
The Nutmeg's Curse
Ecological Imperialism
Dirt
The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
Preventing Plant Blindness
The Less Selfish Gene
Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography, and Drought
The Aliens Have Landed
Hybrid histories and indigenous knowledge among Asian rubber smallholders
Placing Plants in Territory
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene
Visualizing the Anthropocene
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |