Plant Life and More-than-human Agency in Zainab Amadahy’s Resistance

Paula Wieczorek

doi:10.17951/nh.2021.6.79-91

Abstract

For centuries humans have acted as if the environment was passive and as if the agency was related only to human beings. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, scholars, and artists express the need to narrate tales about the multitudes of the living earth, which can help perceive the Earth as vibrant and living. The following paper discusses Black/Cherokee Zainab Amadahy’s speculative fiction novel 2013 Resistance as an example of a story resisting the claim about human beings as the ultimate species. The paper initially scrutinizes the phenomena of “plant blindness” and then explores how Zainab Amadahy illustrates plant life in her book. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, the writer presents tobacco as an active and responsive agent that influences the characters, which, consequently, opposes anthropocentrism. The article also addresses the cultural violence and disregard that has dominated the Western perception of animistic cultures and expresses the need to rethink the theory of animism. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by scholars including Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Stacy Alaimo. It also refers to some of the most influential contributions to critical plant studies made by Indigenous thinkers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’ s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).

Highlights

Timothy Clark points out that the Anthropocene is a period in which the environment “ceases being only a passive ground, context and resource for human society and becomes an imponderable agency that must somehow be taken into account, even if we are unsure how” (Clark 2010, 134)
In her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway stresses the importance of imagination and the need for telling Gaia stories, i.e. the stories that change the way humans position themselves in the natural environment
The paper addresses the cultural violence and disregard that has dominated the Western perception of animistic cultures and expresses the need to rethink the theory of animism

Summary

Introduction

Timothy Clark points out that the Anthropocene is a period in which the environment “ceases being only a passive ground, context and resource for human society and becomes an imponderable agency that must somehow be taken into account, even if we are unsure how” (Clark 2010, 134). Environment was passive and as if agency was related only to human beings. Clark points out that the environment can no longer be perceived as something at material or philosophical distance from the human species, but it needs to be viewed as something within which humans are inextricably entangled. In her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway stresses the importance of imagination and the need for telling Gaia stories, i.e. the stories that change the way humans position themselves in the natural environment. The following paper looks at Black/Cherokee writer Zainab Amadahy’s Resistance (2013) as an example of a story that opposes anthropocentrism. It resists the claim about human beings as the ultimate species and, instead, discloses a view of plants as. It refers to some of the most influential contributions to critical plant studies made by Indigenous thinkers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Plant Blindness

Rethinking the notions of life and animism

Conclusion