Plot-Life in Flower City: Transnational Ritual Ecologies in the Wake of Plantations

In this talk, I explore one such place, a busy intersection where the plot-and-plantation reverberates (Wynter 1971). Weekly gatherings of human and more-than-human entities—plants among them—participate in collaborative, co-creative acts that make life more meaningful, bearable, and interesting. This is plot-life, in McKittrick’s (2013) sense, “a creative geography of alternative history practices that has no interest in rehearsing lifelessness.” But to make claims and occupy involves enacting boundaries on different terms. Sweat and blood, soot and smoke, pounding rhythms and dancing feet, firmly emplace rather than merely transcend. Here, the sovereign meets the sensuous, replenishing what modernity drains. 

Shannon A. Novak is a Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University. Her research seeks to understand human bodies as living beings, material substances, and cultural symbols. To do so involves following tissues and traces through shifting landscapes, embodied practices, and historical narratives. Her fieldwork, in turn, takes place in multiples settings, including ethnographic sites, as well as archives, laboratories, and archaeological excavations. Broadly trained in bioarchaeology and social anthropology, Novak’s research is especially concerned with multiple ontologies of the body and “more-than-human” assemblages. In one form or another, her studies have engaged with ruptures that occurred across the long nineteenth-century and whose resonances are experienced in the present: from ethno-religious conflict in the Intermountain West, to rebellious acts of abolitionists in New York City. Her recent research traces the movements of indentured laborers from India to the Caribbean—in particular, British Guiana. Since 2016, she has been conducting ethnographic research with Indo-Guyanese communities in both New York and Toronto.