New project launched to recover and celebrate Indigenous knowledge of Caribbean landscapes

The natural history of Caribbean landscapes that were subject to years of colonial sugar plantation-related oppression is to be the focus of a new Transatlantic research project.

Led by the University of Exeter, Plants, Plantations, and the Anglophone Caribbean: Exploring Indigenous and African-descendent knowledge through text, archive, and orality will seek to recover and celebrate ancestral ecological and botanical knowledge and practices.

The two-year study has been funded by a £300,000 grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is being led by Dr Arun Sood, Lecturer in Global Pre-1800 Literatures.

Dr Sood will work with a broad range of community partners in Saint Lucia and Barbados during the project, co-producing multiple and diverse artistic responses.

“The British colonial project vastly altered the ecology of Caribbean island landscapes through agricultural methods which exploited both nature and human bodies,” said Dr Sood, of Exeter’s Department of English and Creative Writing. “In the ‘sugar isles’ of Barbados and Saint Lucia, the production of sugar destroyed biodiversity as plants, forests, animals, and indigenous communities were cleared to facilitate large monocrop cane plantations.

“In spite of this, enslaved and indigenous communities often resisted oppressive conditions through maintaining traditional ecological practices and botanical knowledge during and beyond the period of plantation slavery. Our work, funded by AHRC, will seek to recover some of this Indigenous and African-descendent knowledge.”

Dr Sood will work with partners in the Caribbean community, including those at the University of the West Indies and the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, to develop an approach that will bring together archival methods with oral cultures, sound, and visual art.

During workshops on the Balenbouche Estate in Saint Lucia and The Fresh Milk Art Platform at Walkers Dairy (formerly known as Willoughby Plantation) in Barbados, students, poets, artists, academics and community groups will explore ancestral knowledge and the ways in which the nature of that knowledge was either maintained or severed by coloniality and the plantation economy.

The results, hopes Dr Sood, will be of interest to those working in the environmental humanities and history of science disciplines, and particularly for those with an interest in marginalised knowledge systems. It will also have knowledge transfer potential to assist with the process of regenerating former plantation sites.

“The project aims to reposition the plantation as a site not solely on which colonial ideology was enacted, but also where multiple knowledge systems existed in shaping the landscape in ways that have lasting legacies today,” adds Dr Sood. “Together, we will work to create new readings of botany and natural history, and challenge assumed universal knowledges.”