“Om ʼn tamatie te kan vertrou”: plantpolitiek in Jeanne Goosen se Vrydag-rubrieke (1996-1999) en Plante kan praat (2010)

Abstract

SummaryThe post-humanist intellectual rush to promote the interests of non-human communities has given rise to the establishment of critical plant studies, a new transdisciplinary field of study which has so far received little attention in South African literary criticism. Pollan (2002, 2013), Hall (2011), Chamovitz (2012), Marder (2013) and Mabey (2014) criticise the zoocentric favouring of human and nonhuman animals as subjects in the Western tradition and argue that this historic preference has resulted in the exclusion of plants as category for moral consideration. Matthew Hall's model of plant personhood and biospheric integrity, based on the inclusion of, and care and respect for plants as autonomous, complex life forms, is employed here to develop a terminology for revisiting selected texts by Jeanne Goosen. Hitherto unacknowledged newspaper columns (1996-1999) from the regional newspaper, Vrydag, as well as the short story, “Plante kan praat” (in the collection of short stories by the same name) will be considered in this ecocritical reading of said texts within the contours of contemporary plant studies.