Book chapter
Literary Ethnobotany and Human-Plant Intercorporeality in Aboriginal Australian Poetry: “Into the Sap Stream”
The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities, pp.347-362
Bloomsbury Academic, First edition
2022
Metrics
9 Record Views
Abstract
As sustenance, fiber, medicine, and ornamentation, vegetal bodies sustain human and more-than-human health and well-being. Yet, in many ways, the neoliberal transfiguration of plants into natural resources, globally exchanged commodities, and aestheticized objects decorporealizes them, negating their vibrant presence in the world. However, theorizations of phenomenological intercorporeality (Weiss 2013) and new materialist transcorporeality (Alaimo 2010, 2016: 111–41) foreground human–nonhuman bodily interdependencies particularly regarding the shared effects of environmental contamination. In conjunction with emerging scientific research into plants’ complex sensory and somatic faculties (Chamovitz 2012; Lamers, van der Meer, and Testerink 2020), the premise of botanical corporeality offers a generative provocation for an inclusive view of human, vegetal, and other bodies-in-the-world as co-extensive and co-agential. In developing the concept of human-plant intercorporeality, this chapter examines the narrativization of human and vegetal entanglements in Aboriginal Australian poetry and the ancestral stories that underlie this literary-ethnobotanical tradition.
Details
- Title
- Literary Ethnobotany and Human-Plant Intercorporeality in Aboriginal Australian Poetry: “Into the Sap Stream”
- Creators
- John Charles Ryan - Southern Cross University
- Contributors
- Scott Slovic (Editor)Swarnalatha Rangarajan (Editor)Vidya Sarveswaran (Editor)
- Publication Details
- The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities, pp.347-362
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic; London
- Edition
- First edition
- Identifiers
- 991013154276402368
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Book chapter