Alien Mixtures: Health and Disease in The Sugar-Cane's Biocolonial Ecosystem.
This article argues that James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764) makes botanical management—the selection, transplantation, and regulation of plants—its central technology for naturalizing plantation "health." Reading the poem's transplanted remedies, its sugarcane monoculture, and its footnotes' nat...
| Publicado en: | Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 286 - 312 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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University of Pennsylvania Press
Summer2026
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=196086020&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 196086020 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 15434273 00N jtl: Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal issn: 15434273 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Summer2026 vid: 24 iid: 3 pid: 4636 pub: University of Pennsylvania Press artinfo: ui: 196086020 10.1353/eam.2026.a997609 ppf: 286 ppct: 26 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 388KB tig: atl: Alien Mixtures: Health and Disease in The Sugar-Cane's Biocolonial Ecosystem. aug: au: Rotzokou, Elena affil: Columbia University sug: ab: This article argues that James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764) makes botanical management—the selection, transplantation, and regulation of plants—its central technology for naturalizing plantation "health." Reading the poem's transplanted remedies, its sugarcane monoculture, and its footnotes' natural history together, I show how vegetal life is made to stand as evidence that imperial environmental transformation is both humane and medically necessary, even as the poem's own plant logic repeatedly discloses the coercion and death that underwrite that well -- being. I develop the term biocolonial poetics to name this aesthetic and discursive strategy, in which a rhetoric of cure consolidates control by treating the plantation as an ecosystem to be optimized. Although terms such as ecology and environmental transformation postdate Grainger, I use them as critical heuristics for tracing how the poem conceptualizes relations among people, plants, climate, and land. Attending to the poem's plants clarifies where its georgic order chafes against the violence it must manage—and what its careful botanical attention cannot finally contain. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal is the property of University of Pennsylvania Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal holder: University of Pennsylvania Press dt: @attributes: year: 2026 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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