Weedy Life: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Tropicality

Abstract

Respect for any form of life entails nurturing all the potentialities proper to it, including those that might be unproductive from the human point of view. Are there lessons to be learnt about decolonisation of the tropics from a focus on ‘weeds’? The contributors to this photo-essay collectively consider here the lessons that can be learnt about the relationship between colonisation and decolonisation through a visual focus on life forms that have been defined as weeds and, consequently, subject to a contradictory politics of care, removal, and control – of germinating, blooming, and cutting. The essay demonstrates the continuing colonial tensions between aesthetic and practical evaluations of many plants and other lifeforms regarded as ‘invasive’ or ‘out of place’. It suggests a decolonial overcoming of oppositions. By celebrating alliances of endemics and ‘weeds’ regeneratively living together in patterns of complex diversity, we seek to transcend policies of differentiation, exclusion and even eradication rooted in colonial ontology.

Spatiotemporal interaction of risk‐spreading strategies for a seed‐dimorphic plant

“…This species can grow and reproduce under a wide range of soil moisture and light conditions (Chuauhan & Johnson, 2009;Souza-Filho & Takaki, 2011;Usharani & Solomon Raju, 2018), although it prefers humid and shaded habitats (Holm et al, 1997;Usharani & Solomon Raju, 2018). Synedrella has a short life cycle (120-150 days) and a high reproductive output (maximum 6000 seeds per mother plant) (Henry et al, 2023). As a typical seeddimorphic Asteraceae species, it has ray and disc florets that produce dimorphic cypsela with different morphologies, sizes, and masses.…”