Centers vegetal life as a force that disrupts the borders of race, gender, sexuality, and colonial power.

Although plants are the most abundant life form on earth, the environmental humanities have paid them scant attention until recently, even as new challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, war, and the global rise of the right have piqued interest in plants as signs of life that challenge the Anthropocene and the logic of extraction. In Plants Beyond Borders, Courtney B. Ryan and Alicia Carroll have marshalled a range of innovative contributions that focus on vegetal borderlands--or spaces in which plant and human life overlap--where vegetal life exceeds and uproots human borders. Containing perspectives from English, landscape architecture, Native American studies, performing arts, and more, Plants Beyond Borders foregrounds Indigenous sovereignty and plant knowledge; explores the shared transmutability of plants and trans, queer, and pregnant bodies; and investigates phytographia, or plant writing, as plants thinking beyond borders. No matter the objective, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection center vegetal life, considering how agentic plants not only rupture myths of settler colonialism, gender, and sexuality but also inscribe themselves and us in the world.

Contributors:
Cinthya Ammerman Muñoz, Alicia Carroll, Gwendolyn Cohen, Isaac Cohen, Xinyue Fu, Patrícia de Nóbrega Gomes, Katie Hogan, Kaley Makino, Melissa Parrish, MacKenzie Patterson, Courtney B. Ryan, John Charles Ryan, Saghar Safaeyan, Jeannette Schollaert, Kathryn Van Wert, Christina Welch