Weedy Life: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Tropicality
Journal Publication ResearchOnline@JCUAbstract
Respect for any form of life entails nurturing all the potentialities proper to it, including those that might be unproductive from the human point of view. Are there lessons to be learnt about decolonisation of the tropics from a focus on ‘weeds’? The contributors to this photo-essay collectively consider here the lessons that can be learnt about the relationship between colonisation and decolonisation through a visual focus on life forms that have been defined as weeds and, consequently, subject to a contradictory politics of care, removal, and control – of germinating, blooming, and cutting. The essay demonstrates the continuing colonial tensions between aesthetic and practical evaluations of many plants and other lifeforms regarded as ‘invasive’ or ‘out of place’. It suggests a decolonial overcoming of oppositions. By celebrating alliances of endemics and ‘weeds’ regeneratively living together in patterns of complex diversity, we seek to transcend policies of differentiation, exclusion and even eradication rooted in colonial ontology.
Journal
Etropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics
Publication Name
N/A
Volume
22
ISBN/ISSN
1448-2940
Edition
N/A
Issue
1
Pages Count
34
Location
N/A
Publisher
James Cook University
Publisher Url
N/A
Publisher Location
N/A
Publish Date
N/A
Url
N/A
Date
N/A
EISSN
N/A
DOI
10.25120/etropic.22.1.2023.3985