Reparative plantings amidst the plantation: engaging with Sylvia Wynter

Subsistence struggles, whether as social movements or in the form of less organized expressions have highlighted the importance of plants and food, and of human-plant interactions more broadly for the study of politics. In this essay, we are interested in the meanings and forms of decolonization when explored in relation to plants by way of a conversation with Sylvia Wynter’s 1971 essay, “Novel and History: Plot and Plantation”. Wynter not only situates plants within a longer history of struggles for political and economic freedom, but also grapples with the material and imaginative possibilities afforded by plants, as well as the ambivalences, conflicts and challenges engendered by such liberatory enactments. Wynter’s provocations have been illuminating for us in our work on the afterlives of apartheid among small-scale growers in the rural settings of KwaZulu-Natal. Her work has broadened our understanding of the potential of plants and foodways to repair the wounds of racialized modes of displanting and how such utilizations escape the colonial logic altogether.