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Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore connections between human and plant absences in the colonial archives of Kew Gardens. Applying literary ecocriticism and plant humanities approaches to volumes about the 19th century Caribbean, I will address these absences, focusing on ackee trees as a symbols of resistance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the connections between human and plant absences in the colonial archives of Kew Gardens in London. Applying literary ecocriticism and plant humanities approaches to volumes relating to the nineteenth century Caribbean, I will demonstrate that close analysis of the language used to describe plants can help to address the absences arising from the colonial origins of these materials.

Using additional sources from travel writing and literary accounts of the Caribbean, this paper will consider the plants and people neglected in the archive, focusing in on provision ground cultivation and ackee trees. A monument to the people enslaved on the grounds of the University of the West Indies campus in Kingston, Jamaica, acknowledges that groves of ackee trees act as ‘botanical markers’ of former slave villages. This use of the ackee tree as a long-term memorial of enslavement exemplifies their role as sites of cultural memory and how ackee became the principal botanical symbol of Jamaican identity. Yet, there is scarcely any discussion of ackee in Kew’s archives. This paper will argue that this absence is the result of ackee’s long association with resistance to colonial exploitation, as a tree bearing a potentially poisonous fruit, growing beyond the colonial spaces of the plantation and botanical garden. The ackee tree thus forms an example of how archival silences can be used to highlight the resistance of marginalised people within and beyond the archive.