The Americanist Seminar (CCA) and the Americanist Colloquium present:

Garden, Revolution, Refuge - A Talk by Julie Chun Kim

Gardens typically have been thought of as refuges and retreats from the turmoil of the world. What happens, however, to gardens placed in spaces disturbed by currents of  revolt and revolution? This talk will explore the history of a botanical garden in St. Vincent, a colony in the Caribbean that enslaved and free Africans, indigenous Caribs, and their French allies tried to liberate from British rule in the late eighteenth century. While the naturalists working in the garden were ostensibly unaffected by the war that ensued, the records of their work left behind in the archives suggest a science that was deeply disrupted by--and turned towards--projects of freedom. 

Julie Chun Kim is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. She has published essays on Afro-Caribbean medicine, indigenous land rights, natural history, and early Caribbean plantation economies, and she is currently working on a book entitled "Gardening at the Edge of Empire: Colonial Botany in the Revolutionary Caribbean.”

View the poster here.