Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics

Lesley Wylie editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Liverpool University Press

Published:12th Dec '23

Should be back in stock very soon

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics cover

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

‘A timely exploration of plant studies in the hemispheric Americas, Understories showcases diverse methodologies for uncovering the imbrications of plant and human world-making across the two continents. Each chapter uniquely challenges the place of plants—from trees to succulents, breadfruit to transgenic soy—in the popular imaginary by charting dynamic histories of growth, transplantation, contamination, and adaptation in a variety of human-plant entanglements.’ Amanda M. Smith


‘What impresses the reader of, specially, Latin American literature is the ways in which the fitting title of the collection – Understories also brings to mind plant stories/histories that have passed before our eyes unseen – among other production of its contributors, and in particular its editor, Lesley Wylie, has changed the ways in which we read canonical fictions about plants.’ Felipe Martinez-Pinzon

ISBN: 9781837644735

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

272 pages