Microsoft Word - 32309_Laura Foster DR.docx Foster, Laura A. (2019). Critical perspectives on plants, race, and colonialism: An introduction. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5(2), page 1-6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Laura A. Foster, 2019 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Critical Perspectives on Plants, Race, and Colonialism: An introduction Laura A. Foster Indiana University–Bloomington University of Cape Town fosterl@indiana.edu When I learn from plants, I imagine possibilities for rethinking and doing science and law otherwise. I begin to get a feeling for plants and how they offer alternative ways of sensing, relating to, and being responsible in co-becomings with human and more-than-human beings. This learning has been a process. When I began working with and alongside ‡Khomani San peoples over a decade ago, I focused my learning on San struggles in South Africa over the patenting of Hoodia gordonii plants and their knowledge of them. I did not consider what Hoodia succulent plants could teach me. I was initially curious how San peoples, through their own South African San Council, strategically deployed benefit sharing to interrupt regimes of patent ownership and pharmaceutical science in ways that offered both possibilities and limits for their efforts to establish belonging in a changing South Africa. Through the urging of members of the South African San Council, my learnings were directed at decolonizing regimes of US patent law by showing how patent ownership is inherently racialized, gendered, and Western, and by rethinking practices of science and law in support of Indigenous Peoples’ efforts at self- determination (Foster 2016, 2017). Patent law rules in most countries, for example, grant exclusive patent ownership rights only for inventions that are markedly different from nature. In the case of Hoodia, South African scientists Critical Perspectives | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Laura A. Foster, 2019 2 obtained a patent for extracting steroidal glycoside molecules from the plant that could suppress appetite as proven by their laboratory testing, which patent law considers different from merely discovering the plant or its molecules as found growing in the Kalahari Desert. Patent ownership is thus based upon understandings of nature as distinct from human-made culture, which is a binary style of thought that has been historically used to subordinate marginalized groups such as Indigenous Peoples, women, and people of color by characterizing them, in similar and different ways, as closer to nature and less than human. As South African San peoples interrupted forces of patent ownership and their binary logics in powerful and limited ways through benefit sharing, so too did Hoodia plants through their own enactments or doings. Hoodia plants (e.g., chemicals, seeds, metabolites, spatial arrangements) refused, changed, or even aligned with practices of patent law and pharmaceutical science by evolving in patchy spatial distributions, growing too slowly when cultivated, and interacting with the human body in unpredictable ways that interrupted desires to make a Hoodia-based anti-obesity product. Their doings interrupted and exceeded their confinement as patented objects, thus acting back against the forces of law and science that sought to contain them. Hoodia plants taught me that strategies of refusal and interrupting power can be found in practices of failure, moving slowly, tasting bitter, and causing nausea. They and San peoples, in different ways, demonstrated alternative ways of sensing and responding to the world in relation to beings such as rain, soil, insects, porcupines, the sun, and collectivities of peoples. Thus, they offer possibilities for rethinking what producing knowledge means and who gets to produce it, and for doing research with and in support of San peoples, lands, and Hoodia plants. The authors in this Critical Perspectives section produce similar but also different insights through asking how plants and research with plants can inform feminist and Indigenous technoscience and, specifically, understandings of race, colonialism, and colonial settler legacies. They develop ways of learning with and from plants as witnesses to human suffering, producers of memory, preservers of flesh, guides for learning, healers of caring, wise knowers, and builders of more- than-human worlds. By addressing human–plant co-becomings with attention to colonial pasts and their legacies, they offer further directions for feminist and Indigenous technoscience that bring together a rich set of conversations. Critical Perspectives | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Laura A. Foster, 2019 3 Feminist and Indigenous scholars of science have produced different and valuable insights into how colonialism and colonial settler societies have involved the taking of peoples, plants, lands, and resources that informed the making of hierarchies of gender, indigeneity, race, sexuality, and nation (Harding, 1998, 2008; Philip, 2004; Shiva, 1997; Subramaniam, Foster, Harding, Roy, & TallBear, 2017; TallBear 2017; Tilley, 2011; Verran, 2001). They have shown how eighteenth- century assumptions of sex, gender, sexuality, and race informed botanical understandings of plants and nature more broadly (Schiebinger, 2004a), and how colonial empire depended upon the appropriation and transfer of certain Indigenous Peoples’ botanical knowledges and relevant plant specimens to Europe (Brockway, 1979; Schiebinger, 2004b; Tilley, 2011; Verran, 2001). Still others have demonstrated how colonial pasts continue to inform contemporary debates over, for example, invasive plant species (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001; Subramaniam, 2014) and the appropriation of Indigenous Peoples’ medicinal plant knowledge (Harry & Kanehe, 2007; Hayden, 2003; LaDuke, 2005; Shiva & Moser, 1995; Laveaga, 2009; Tauli-Corpuz, 2004). The authors in this Critical Perspectives section demonstrate how these rich insights inform emerging work in feminist and Indigenous technoscience that engages with human and more- than-human worlds (Haraway, 2016; Kimmerer, 2013; Myers, 2017a, 2017b; TallBear, 2017; Tsing, 2015). Histories of colonial science involved practices, Sarah Ives here reminds us, of categorizing plants as subordinate to human animals, while simultaneously classifying certain peoples as “nonwhite” and closer to nature through racial taxonomies that constructed and reinforced whites as superior. Colonial Botanists with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for instance, extracted plants from colonized lands and developed plant classification schemes, which reinforced Eurocentricism and norms of white, male expertise. These colonial histories continue to endure in new yet familiar ways through the Royal Botanic Garden’s more recent Millennium Seed Bank Project, which Xan Sarah Chacko here argues, produces a depoliticized valence of “biodiversity conservation” to re-assert its epistemic authority while simultaneously flattening out its colonial pasts and legacies. These histories, as William Ellis explains, also inform the colonial and apartheid pasts and legacies of South Africa, but it is through an exploration of the milkwood tree that connections between peoples and plants more fully emerge. An emphasis on connection and relation arises as a central theme across each of these entries, which simultaneously challenges histories of modern dualistic thinking and offers possibilities for thinking otherwise. In tracing the generative, Critical Perspectives | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Laura A. Foster, 2019 4 multifaceted and intertwined relations of Kanna plants and San and Khoi peoples, Diana Gibson invites alternative conceptions of temporality and history. Alternative ways of knowing are what Krisha J. Hernández articulates are needed for building settler futurities and “doing academic work that listens to and thinks with more-than-human beings as having bodies and lives worthy of living.” This means “something other than seeing plants or seeing like plants in addition to people” but rather, as Elaine Gan explains through her research on rice, considering “different modalities of plants as more-than-human entanglement, dynamic assemblages of biogeochemical and technoscientific ways of being.” Through their insights here, they offer exciting possibilities for more-than-human futures and for feminist and Indigenous technoscience. References Brockway, L. H. (1979). Science and colonial expansion: The role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. American Ethnologist, 6(3), 449-465. Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. L. (2001). Naturing the nation: Aliens, apocalypse and the postcolonial State. Journal of Southern African Studies, 27(3), 627-651. Foster, L. (2016). The making and unmaking of patent ownership: Technicalities, materialities, and subjectivities. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 39(1), 127-143. Foster, L. (2017). Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, plants, and patents in South Africa. Seattle, WA: Washington University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harding, S. (1998). Is science multicultural?: Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Harding, S. (2008). Sciences from below: Feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harry, D., & Kanehe, L. M. (2007). The right of Indigenous peoples to permanent sovereignty over genetic resources and associated indigenous knowledge. The Journal of Indigenous Policy, 6, 28-43. Hayden, C. (2003). When nature goes public: The making and unmaking of bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. LaDuke, W. (2005). Recovering the sacred: The power of naming and claiming. Critical Perspectives | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Laura A. Foster, 2019 5 Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Myers, N. (2017a). Becoming sensor in sentient worlds: A more-than-natural history of a black oak savannah. In G. Bakke & M. Petersen (Eds.), Between matter and method: Encounters in anthropology and art (pp. 73-96). London: Bloomsbury Press. Myers, N. (2017b). Ungrid-able ecologies: Decolonizing the ecological sensorium in a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 3(2), 1-24. Philip, K. (2004). Civilizing natures: Race, resources, and modernity in colonial South India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Schiebinger, L. L. (2004a). Nature's body: Gender in the making of modern science. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Schiebinger, L. L. (2004b). Plants and empire: Colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shiva, V. (1997). Biopiracy: The plunder of nature and knowledge. Boston, MA: South End Press. Shiva, V., & Moser, I. (Eds.) (1995). Biopolitics: A feminist and ecological reader on biotechnology. London: Zed Books; Third World Network. Laveaga, G. S. (2009). Jungle laboratories: Mexican peasants, national projects, and the making of the pill. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Subramaniam, B. (2014). Ghost stories for Darwin: The science of variation and the politics of diversity. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Subramaniam, B., Foster, L., Harding, S., Roy, D., & TallBear, K. (2017). Feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. In C. Miller, L. Smith-Doerr, U. Felt, & R. Fouché (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology studies (4th ed.) (pp. 407-433): Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/4S. TallBear, K. (2017). Beyond the life/not life binary: A feminist-indigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking and the new materialisms." In J. Radin & E. Kowal (Eds.), Cryopolitics: Frozen life in a melting world (pp. 179-202). Boston, MA: MIT Press. Tauli-Corpuz, V. (2004). Biodiversity, traditional knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples. Indigenous Perspectives, 6(1), 7-33. Tilley, H. (2011). Africa as a living laboratory: Empire, development, and the problem of scientific knowledge, 1870-1950. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Critical Perspectives | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Laura A. Foster, 2019 6 Verran, H. (2001). Science and an African logic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Author Bio Laura A. Foster is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies, and Affiliate Faculty in Law and African Studies with a Senior Researcher appointment at the University of Cape Town Faculty of Law’s Intellectual Property Unit. Her research examines the co- constituted relations of law, technoscience, and markets as they pertain to intellectual property rights, Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, medicinal plants, genomics, and data politics in South Africa.