Vera Keller, University of Oregon: Transplantation and the Colonial Project

Sponsors: Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Endowment, Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Department of History, Amherst College

Abstract: Projects are all around us. It would be difficult to imagine the world today without them. Yet projects are relatively novel. Their history begins in early modern Europe and entangles with modern assemblages of science, technology, labor and power, including colonialism, enslavement, and global development.

This talk focuses on one keyword in the history of projects: transplantation, a critical term in both colonialism and horticulture. The relationship between gardening and colonialism has long been explored through the histories of apparently commonsensical endeavors such as acclimatization and bioprospecting. Early modern transplantation projects, however, often contravened common sense and practical advice. Seventeenth-century projectors attempted to push the edges of possibility through highly theoretical and even magical views of transplantation. They pursued global projects based on the notion that uprooting, moving and manhandling plants, animals and people could tame and transmute them from wild to "civilized."