Cultivating Caribbean Voices: Multispecies Gardens, Care, and Food Justice in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Kuhelika Ghosh

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow (2024-2025)

Cultivating Caribbean Voices: Multispecies Gardens, Care, and Food Justice in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Bringing postcolonial studies into conversation with ecocritical approaches, “Cultivating Caribbean Voices” explores multispecies gardens in Anglophone Caribbean literature and culture from the 1960s to the present. Through investigations of kitchen gardens, market gardens, flower gardens, and therapeutic gardens, this study demonstrates how human gardening practices and multispecies rhythms relate to postcolonial food politics and responses to empire. The project constellates literary texts, visual culture, little-studied archival materials, and physical gardens to retheorize key problems in cultural study—including voice, rhythm, and spatiality. Ultimately, this analysis of Caribbean gardens develops a politics of postcoloniality that threads together human and other-than-human concerns in ways that bring together multispecies justice and human politics.

Kuhelika Ghosh is a PhD Candidate in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests revolve around postcolonial literatures and cultures, feminist practices of care, and the environmental humanities. Her dissertation explores multispecies gardens and food justice in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean literature and culture. She is a 2024-2025 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow and has published in ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Edge Effects, Environmental History Now, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere.

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