Abstract The recent resurgence and renewed attention to plants, framed under critical plant studies, or the vegetal turn or plant turn, reimagines the plant from its earlier nonsentient self into a fully sentient life endowed with sociality, communicative skills, and ability to relate. Having studied the animal turn and now the plant turn, the editors find such turns and re-turns generative but reiterative of West-centric knowledge worlds. By critically studying how plants constitute nations and nationalisms, and how transnational political economy can both broaden the parameters for the flow of global capital and subvert them, this special issue endeavors to study messy plant travel and how it negotiates the national and transnational. The editors’ call for transnational plant studies situates the need to engage deeply with national and transnational encounters to understand the framing of plants.
Chatterjee et al. (Sun,) studied this question.