Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments: People and Places
- Introduction: Living in Relation: Plants, Place-Making, and Social Justice
- 1 Landscapes: Infrastructures, Power Topographies, and Feral Gardens in Juli Zeh's Unterleuten (2016), Valeska Grisebach's Western (2017), and Anna Sofie Hartmann’s Giraffe (2019)
- 2 Uncanny Gardens: Migration and Belonging in Dörte Hansen's Altes Land (2015) and Saša Stanišić's Herkunft (2019)
- 3 Trees, Roots, and Anti-Racism in Ilija Trojanow's Nach der Flucht (2017), Mo Asumang's Roots Germania (2007) and Die Arier (2014), and Elliot Blue's Home? (2018)
- 4 Defiant Flowers and ManufacturedHappiness in Vera Chytilová's Daisies (1966), Pipilotti Rist's Pepperminta (2009), and Jessica Hausner's Little Joe: Glück ist ein Geschäft (2019)
- 5 Senses, Queer Interrelations, and Decolonial Geographies in Yōko Tawada's Das nackte Auge (2004), Shari Hagen's Auf den zweiten Blick (2012), and Faraz Shariat's Futur Drei (2020)
- Epilogue: Erasures and Different Stories
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue: Erasures and Different Stories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments: People and Places
- Introduction: Living in Relation: Plants, Place-Making, and Social Justice
- 1 Landscapes: Infrastructures, Power Topographies, and Feral Gardens in Juli Zeh's Unterleuten (2016), Valeska Grisebach's Western (2017), and Anna Sofie Hartmann’s Giraffe (2019)
- 2 Uncanny Gardens: Migration and Belonging in Dörte Hansen's Altes Land (2015) and Saša Stanišić's Herkunft (2019)
- 3 Trees, Roots, and Anti-Racism in Ilija Trojanow's Nach der Flucht (2017), Mo Asumang's Roots Germania (2007) and Die Arier (2014), and Elliot Blue's Home? (2018)
- 4 Defiant Flowers and ManufacturedHappiness in Vera Chytilová's Daisies (1966), Pipilotti Rist's Pepperminta (2009), and Jessica Hausner's Little Joe: Glück ist ein Geschäft (2019)
- 5 Senses, Queer Interrelations, and Decolonial Geographies in Yōko Tawada's Das nackte Auge (2004), Shari Hagen's Auf den zweiten Blick (2012), and Faraz Shariat's Futur Drei (2020)
- Epilogue: Erasures and Different Stories
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Same story: once, a boy
Stood in the woods
Until he became it
Same story: a boy is a tree
Same story: my mother cries
Whenever she sees a tree
—Danez Smith, “Differences,” 2017Both the “I” and the “you” require a sustaining world. These social relations can serve as a ground for thinking about the broader global obligations of nonviolence we bear towards one another.
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence, 2020During the final week of the year 2020, as I was in the middle of writing this book, my family and I took a short trip from our home in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Edisto Beach, South Carolina. The COVID- 19 pandemic was still raging and Donald Trump continued to, without evidence, contest the election results. As part of this trip, we went to explore Botany Bay Plantation and Driftwood Beach, nearby. Today marketed as a Wildlife Management Area and “Heritage Preserve,” Botany Bay is the site of some of the most violent plantations of the area, where countless enslaved people were murdered. The Catawba and Edisto tribes inhabited these coastal lands before the plantation owners stole them. At the entrance, people register, pay a fee, and can take a map and guide for a driving tour through the grounds. There is no explicit mention or any form of commemoration of the site's brutal, racist history, yet the place had an eerie, haunted beauty (Fig. 36 and Fig. 37). After a turn from the main road, from which, passing over the marsh, we had seen a shamaniclooking tree decorated with colorful shreds of fabric and what looked like small dolls, the drive took us through overgrown fields, past some remnants of human structures, freshwater ponds, to the beach, where the shoreline seems to have slowly eroded the oaks that used to grow along this stretch of land. We wandered along this beach and climbed over halfsubmerged skeletons of trees, tasting the salty sea air.
The surfaces of the trees on the beach are smooth, not wrinkly and “old” as suggested in Pepperminta, when Pepperminta strokes the bark of a tree cross-cut with her touching the wrinkly skin of an elderly woman. The trees feel smooth because they have died, lost their bark to the raging sea and, maybe, the rising sea levels.
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- Information
- Plants, Places, and PowerToward Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film, pp. 156 - 160Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021