Cover art by: Annalee Davis, Pray to Flowers - A Plot of Disalienation. Site-specific apothecary installation grown collaboratively with Yoeri Guépin for “Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present”, 2023. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: © Shanavas Jamaluddin
Public Humanities is a new international open-access, cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of humanities scholarship and public life. The journal invites proposals for themed issues that pose urgent questions on contemporary public issues that require rigorous and relevant humanities knowledge.
The journal invites submissions for the upcoming Themed Issue Creole Gardens as Decolonial Practice: Regrowth, Resistance, Recycling and Repair, which will be Guest Edited by Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Rosa Beunel-Fogarty.
The deadline for submissions is 28 February 2025.
Description
The garden is a cultivated outdoor leisure space that mediates between private and public use, horticulture and agriculture, leisure and labour, and aesthetics and utility. (Pre)colonial histories of botanical transfer, interspecies entanglement, technologies of cultivation, and hyperlocal knowledge of natural conditions converge in gardens worldwide today. Consequently, from colonial-era Botanical Gardens to urban regeneration projects and artistic interventions at international biennales, gardens are inviting public explorations of the Anthropocene’s imperial legacies while their aesthetic and nurturing dimensions open decolonial routes for resistance and repair.
This themed issue intervenes within these engagements by focusing on the Creole Garden: small plots of land that enslaved, indentured, and variously unfree people cultivated for fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants. A legacy and antithesis of the plantation economy, they promote biodiversity against monocropping, human subsistence over profit, and sustainable small-scale agricultural practices. A consistent feature of Creole societies, they articulate the relationship between the human and the natural environment enabled through local wisdom that survived transoceanic diasporas and accelerated capitalism. Botany, pharmacy, foodways, and horticulture become tools of resistance, recycling, and memory that create new culture from traumatic displacements and uprooting, and showcase marginalised peoples of African, European, and Asian heritage.
With this themed issue, we want to bring together academics, artists and activists thinking critically and acting creatively about/ around the Creole Garden, as such the Issue welcomes a diversity of perspective and encourages submissions from early career researchers. We invite contributions that explore the Creole garden from different disciplines and approaches in relation to the following (non-exhaustive) topics:
- Decolonial theory/practices
- Histories of colonialism and postcolonialism
- Public reparation
- Histories of enslavement and indenture
- Climate change and sustainability
- Globalisation
- Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
- African, Indian, European, (variously) Creole, and indigenous cultures
- Memory studies and trauma
- Arts and festivals
- Heritage studies
Authors have the option to submit any of the following article types:
| Article type | Length | Abstract required | Description |
| Article | 6,000-8,000 words | Yes | Presents original research findings according to the typical research article format. |
| Case Study | No more than 8,000 words | Yes | An article that provides an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case within a real-world context. |
Submission guidelines Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities. Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style. Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal.
All submissions should be made through the Public Humanities online peer review system. Author should consult the journal’s Author Instructions prior to submission.
All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission. See the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information
Contacts
Guest Editor names: Ananya Kabir and Rosa Beunel-Fogarty
Email addresses: [email protected] and [email protected] ([email protected])
Questions regarding peer review can be sent to the Public Humanities inbox at [email protected].