Foreword

Ann Sherif

In close alignment with the sciences, environmental humanities seeks a place among disciplinary modes of inquiry that will “reveal deep and abiding connections between art and the environment,” as those connections serve as sobering reminders of “our complicity in perpetuating” daunting climate and environmental issues, while also sparking realization of “our capacity to work toward solutions.”1

In Botanical Imagination, Jon L. Pitt demonstrates the fertile workings of a botanical imagination in twentieth-to-twenty-first-century literature and cinema. Pitt employs the approaches of critical plant studies (CPS), a multidisciplinary field overlapping with botany in its focus on plant life, while drawing in multiple disciplinary approaches that have historically foregrounded the interests of human societies and individuals. Through its expansiveness, CPS develops modes of analysis encompassing artistic expression and the dynamic, mutual relationship between botanical life and humans. While environmental humanities may explicate long-standing codification of seasonal change and plant motifs evident in cultural Japan, CPS is grounded in values of reciprocity, humility, and learning systems thinking and ecology.

For Pitt, modern literature and film emerged as fertile ground for rethinking “the human through plant life.” The twentieth-century writer Osaki Midori harnessed botanical imaginaries as a means of political and ethical critiques of “science in an era when technological progress was inseparable from empire building” and of gendered hierarchies. Knowledge of the science of flourishing and flowering of moss, plants, and trees fostered fresh creative outlooks in deeply troubled times. Pitt’s exploration of the works of a diverse set of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists who seek new ways to understand and represent the natural world—including prominent novelist and playwright Abe Kōbō, celebrated poet Itō Hiromi, and award-winning contemporary filmmaker Kawase Naomi, among others—demonstrates that a botanical flourishing in the arts has taken root across media, generations, and genres.

A key insight in Botanical Imagination relates to connections between canonical and dominant codification of seasonal change 四季, landscape 山水, and stylized and richly symbolic plant motifs 桜 in Japan’s classical and popular cultures, on the one hand, and the writers and filmmakers who have fashioned a fresh understanding of plants through engagement with scientific discourses and emergent understandings of the connection between art and politics, on the other. Botanical representations play a major role in the culture of the four seasons, being imbued with talismanic and evoking enchantment. Natural motifs in classical poetry are immanent and sensual rather than transcendent. But does the enchantment simply vanish in the instant the reader stops believing, leaving us with nothing but a “natural . . . dead body lying dead beside the tracks of progress”?2 This shift in the metaphorical landscape and concept of humans’ relation to nature marks not so much a rejection of dominant ways of representing and imagining nature in the arts but rather a broadening of possibilities for knowing nature and imagining a right relation between humans and the natural world. Pitt clears a path for scholarly inquiry by employing analytical and methodological tools for understanding artistic production and aesthetic responses to linguistic and visual cultures and the natural world, entangled with changing historical conditions and ways of knowing worlds made fragile by humans. Environmental humanities scholarship centered on trees and plants, the dominant life-forms on earth, is motivated by resistance to despair, by hope that the arts will contribute to expanding our capacity to act as responsible stewards of this earth.