Here we share a call for papers from Arun Sood, Tara Inniss, and Malica Willie for the edited volume Botanical Islands: Ecologies of Resistance in the Caribbean World. The deadline for submitting abstracts is June 1, 2026.
Description: Concern for the environment and an emphasis on the connection between humans and botanical life has long been a preoccupation of Caribbean writers, academics, artists, and activists. In recent years, emergent theories of the Plantationocene have also provided frameworks for understanding the ecological legacies of plantation economies whilst underlining the need to centre Indigenous and African-descendent environmental knowledge at this moment of vast planetary transformation.
This edited volume invites contributions that engage with botany and botanical knowledges across pan-Caribbean contexts. We seek papers that address both historical and contemporary concerns, and that bring together perspectives from literature, art, social science, environmental studies, and grassroots activism among other disciplines.
However, recovering and locating such knowledge poses challenges given colonial archives and texts about plantations often serve to marginalise or silence so-called subaltern agency.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
* The Plantationocene and the politics of monoculture
* Ethnobotany and African-descendant/ Indigenous knowledges
* Plants as figures of resistance, survival, or creolization
* Eco-critical readings of Caribbean poetry and prose
* Plant symbolism
* Plant-human entanglements in Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions
* Botanical gardens, imperial science, and literary representation
* Foodways, subsistence, and ecological memory
* Experimental aesthetics of growth, decay, or rootedness
Submission Guidelines: Please submit an abstract of 300–350 words, along with a short bio (100 words), by 1 June 2026 to a.sood@exeter.ac.uk. Accepted contributors will be notified by 1 August 2026 and full papers (5,000–7,000 words) will be due by 25 January 2027.
Contact: For inquiries or submissions, please email Dr Arun Sood at a.sood@exeter.ac.uk
For more information, see https://plantsandplantations.exeter.ac.uk/call-for-papers/
[Image above: Annalee Davis’s “A Book of Healing Plant”, (detail) A Hymn to the Banished, 2022.]
Here we share a call for papers from Arun Sood, Tara Inniss, and Malica Willie for the edited volume Botanical Islands: Ecologies of Resistance in the Caribbean World. The deadline for submitting abstracts is June 1, 2026. Description: Concern for the environment and an emphasis on the connection between humans and botanical life has long