CANCELLED - Blurry Lines: Race, Botany, and the Anthropocene

While theories about the Anthropocene have helped scholars challenge firm distinctions between human and nonhuman, nature and culture have hardly been binary in discussions of race and indigeneity. Rather, connections between race and nature have rationalized political, social, and economic injustices. This paper analyzes these connections through two botanical commodities: South African rooibos and Australian eucalyptus. I address the complicated cultural politics that link people to place through the botanical world. Settler colonists not only conquered people and territory; they sought to transform geography fundamentally. Upending understandings of place had profound consequences for dispossession in the nineteenth century and continues to have profound consequences for social justice movements today. By historicizing distinctions and connections between the dichotomies of human and nonhuman, I explore the differential ways in which people are “included” in the human world or “relegated” to the nonhuman world. The blurry lines between human and nonhuman, I emphasize, are haunted by violent, racialized histories, as well as by shifting understandings of what comprises the natural environment in the context of unprecedented climate change. In a ‘globalizing’ world fraught with rejuvenated nationalism, violence against perceived others can be easily legitimized and blurry lines rendered intolerable.

Sarah Ives is the author of Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea (Duke University Press, 2017). Her research focuses on environmental anthropology, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, women and gender studies, and southern Africa. Recent publications can be found in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, and Gender, Place and Culture, as well as the SAGE Handbook of Intellectual Property. Sarah continues to be involved in the rooibos-growing region, and has two an ongoing projects: one that focuses on gender bias and sexual harassment in higher education with Ann Bartos (University of Auckland), and another that explores eucalyptus trees as both indigenous and invasive species. Formerly a lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric and Department of Anthropology, she currently teaches at San Francisco City College.