Planting Resistance: Botanical Legacies of the African Diaspora

In partnership with the Royal Holloway Centre for the Geohumanities and the British Academy, Kew is proud to host the seventh lecture in the Denis Cosgrove Lecture series: ‘Planting Resistance: Botanical Legacies of the African Diaspora’ by Professor Judith A Carney, UCLA. 

In the 21st century, the expansion of large-scale industrial agriculture across tropical landscapes in the Americas is threatening an Afrodescendant food system that has long prioritized agrobiodiversity and agroecological practices. These practices emerged during the plantation era of transatlantic slavery, when the enslaved leveraged subsistence precarity for the right to food plots, independent production, and partial autonomy over their labour. Historical continuities connect this lowly food system to agricultural practices maintained to this day in many Afrodescendant farming communities. Environments embodied by plants, practical and cultural knowledge, and social memories of these communities can be considered biocultural refugia - extending a concept from European heritage landscapes to tropical ecology in the Americas.

Judith Carney is Distinguished Research Professor of Geography at UCLA. She has authored over 100 research articles and two books. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001) received the Melville Herskovits Book Award; In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, 2009) was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. 

Professor Carney is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Association of American Geographers from whom she has also received its Distinguished Scholarship Honor, the Historical Geography Award, the Netting Award for Geography and Anthropology, and the Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award.