Cultivating Breath, Creating Shelter with Plants: Replanting Plantation Afterlives

Abstract Drawing on Black studies scholarship that interrogates plantation afterlives, this article examines how contemporary Black authors and artists harness the symbolic and authorial power of plants to develop what the author terms cultivation of breath: a praxis of gardening that bears witness to and yet resists the material legacies of racial colonialism. The first section, on Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book): (2001), illustrates how colonial imaginaries of the garden enabled a logic of domestication that divested Black laborers of breath. The second section shows how contemporary Black artists and authors Cauleen Smith, Kadir Nelson, and Ross Gay use plant imagery to evoke this genealogy of domestication and situate the racial injustice pandemic—defined by its struggle for breath—within a plantation continuum that honors lives affected by antiblack violence. By foregrounding the agency of plants, Ebony G. Patterson’s 2020 exhibition, examined in the third section, broadens the cultivation of breath to include plants so that the garden resolves into a critical, ecological zone. Together, these works bring together Black life and plant life to demonstrate the role of plants in negotiating, and potentially remaking, the ongoing realities of the plantation, what environmental humanities scholars term the Plantationocene.