The Postcolonial Garden: Food Justice, Multispecies Kinship, and Literary Expression in the Anglophone Caribbean

Kuhelika Ghosh

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow (2024-2025)

The Postcolonial Garden: Food Justice, Multispecies Kinship, and Literary Expression in the Anglophone Caribbean

This talk explores the feminist, political, and aesthetic potential of domestic gardens cultivated by diasporic women in the Anglophone Caribbean, with a particular focus on Jamaican market gardens. By counterposing the postcolonial garden to the plantation, this presentation highlights the decolonial collectivities that emerge through cross-species relationships between plants and peoples. Drawing on archival research as well as literary analysis of two of Olive Senior’s market gardening works, the talk rethinks the Marxist concept of surplus by focusing on the extra-capitalist goods that emerge from this gardening practice. Ultimately, this presentation integrates Caribbean studies with multispecies approaches, proposing a multiscalar framework for postcolonial food justice.

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.

*Events currently open only to 2024-25 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*