A piece published by Hyphen Journal. Read here
Abstract:
While attending the second trial of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC), as well as two subsequent workshops, I focus my attention on the indigo plant at the centre of the room. The trial details that for more than a century indigo was hyper-cultivated in a nascent system of extractive capitalism that sought to wrest produce, wealth and sovereignty from the Indian people and transfer it to British investors and, later, the British Crown. Underlying this deeply seated system of exploitation of multi-species labour is a reductivist conception of a deadened ‘nature’ so prevalent in neo-Cartesian, capitalist and extractive colonial economies. This article, then, is interested in asking what happens when we not only resist those damaging perspectives in general, but also focus on acknowledging nonhuman intelligence, creativity and agency within the trial itself? Following in the lineage of Val Plumwood, Graham Harvey and other new animists, as well as numerous Indigenous populations, I consider what it means to centre the ‘earth others’ also present at this gathering; one that is concerned with examining the cultivation, transportation and commercialisation of plant and human bodies and labour. Indeed, how can we take indigo’s participation at the CICC as seriously as we will take the prosecutors, historians and scholars speaking on the stage? If indigo is here as a participant, here with its own intelligence and history, and here to witness the proceedings along with the rest of us, then how can we witness the ways in which indigo, itself, is also participating in the act of gathering?
cealck | hc. krempels 