Floating/Travelling Gardens of (Post)colonial Time

Abstract

This essay on travelling gardens of (post)colonial time opens with two iconic images of floating gardens in contemporary postcolonial literature: Will Phantom’s bio-garbage rafter, which saves him in the midst of a cyclone in Carpentaria (2008), by the Aboriginal author Alexis Wright, and Pi’s carnivore island-organism in Life of Pi (2001), which cannot save him from his shipwreck, by Canadian writer Yan Martel. These floating, hybrid gardens of the Anthropocene precede the real travelling gardens of both Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (2011) and Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (2008-2015), two authors who both indirectly and directly tell the story of botanical gardens in Asia, and of plant and seed smuggling and transplantation (“displacement”) also hinting at their historical and economic colonial implications. For, after all, botanical gardens imply a very specific version of care, Cura (Robert Pogue Harrison 2009), while embodying a precise, imperial scientific and economic project (Brockway 2002; Johnson 2011).

DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-64

Bibliography

AA.VV. 1987. La letteratura e i giardini. Firenze: Leo Olschki Editore.

Brockway, Lucile H. 1979. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. American Ethnologist, (August), 449-465.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2011. River of Smoke. London: John Murray.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2015. Flood of Fire. London: John Murray.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Harrison, Robert Pogue. 2009. Gardens. An Essay o the Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Johnson, Nuala C. 2011. Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed. Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens. London: I. B. Tauris.

Martel, Yann. 2001. Life of Pi. Toronto: Random House.

Moretti, Franco. 1994. Opere Mondo. Torino: Einaudi.

Ondaatje, Michael. 2011. The Cat’s Table. London: Jonathan Cape.

Woolf, Virginia. 1991 [1985]. Kew Gardens. In The Complete Shorter Fiction. Susan Dick intr. London: Triad Grafton Books, 90-95.

Wright, Alexis. 2008. Carpentaria. New South Wales: Giramondo.

WEBLIOGRAPHY

http://recycledpark.com/news.html (consulted on 20/06/2017).