What Is a “Plant-Human”?

This article examines the figure of the “plant-human” as an anticolonial symbol in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. It traces the plant-human’s shifting political and generic uses by comparing Suzanne Césaire’s essay “Malaise of a Civilization” (1942) and Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996). For both authors, becoming a plant-human represents a way of resisting assimilation to colonial norms. But rather than treat the plant-human as ontological, as recent environmental humanities scholarship might, this article argues the plant-human is allegorical in Césaire’s and Mootoo’s texts. As an allegorical heuristic, the plant-human represents a relationship between two fundamental senses of trans life in the Caribbean: a capacity of gendered embodying, and the geopolitical longue durée of bodies set in motion to fuel racial capitalism. The article thus brings the methods of trans and decolonial studies into dialogue with environmental humanities, while showing how the former challenge the latter’s notion that ontology is a necessary prophylactic to politics.