Plant-people Intimacies: Sugar Canes, Pineapples and the Memory of Migration in Hawai‘i

Abstract

In this article, I use the concept of ‘plant-people intimacies’ for the social-mediated web of cognitions, rituals, affects and embodied memories that connect some human groups and some plant species. I test the concept in the transformed landscapes of plantation Hawai‘i, where sugar canes, pineapples and other crops replaced the traditional taro gardens and displaced their human gardeners while producing a multi-ethnic population with migrant workers-settlers. I will analyse how evocations of special bonds to some crops among diasporic persons express a vegetal nexus with ancestral geographies and act as a code to negotiate social and historical positionalities.

Introduction to Special Collection: Plant-Anthropo-Genesis: The Co-Production of Plant–People Lifeworlds

“…These articles instead use plantations to focus on the uneven acts of co-creation between people, plants, and landscapes. Bastos (2024) explores the notion of plant-people intimacies in settler Hawai'i by analyzing how some diasporic groups claim special bonds to plant species that intersect Hawai'i's plantationscapes and their own ancestral islands: sugar canes for Madeirans and pineapples for Azoreans. She follows those plants' trajectories in and out of Hawaii, Madeira, the Azores, and across the globe, transforming ecological, social, and cultural landscapes while becoming prized commodities, and examines how narratives of historical intimacy with plants help carve a symbolic niche in a settler society of contested positionalities.…”