Cartographies of Postcolonial Vegetal Politics: Deleuze, Guattari, and Mathema of Vegetality

Cartographies of Postcolonial Vegetal Politics takes a deep dive into the stratified and rigidly segmented territorialities of Plant Humanities or Critical Plant Studies. It strikes up an epistemic departure from the arboreal structures of ＂plant-thinking＂ and subsequently lays out ＂plant-becoming＂ in terms of ontophytological thinking revised in alignment with rhizomatics so as to critically design the discursive edifices of postcolonial vegetal politics--the differential grammatology of which stands wedded to the production of the ＂new＂ and thus is understood to be able to position vegetality as event-in-(dis)order. Abhisek Ghosal emphasizes the profound importance of Deleuzo-Guattarian grammatologies in pulling up ＂plant-becoming＂ from being subjected to a set of rigidly structured models of vegetality. It is by working out aleatory eventualities of postcolonial haecceities, that the rigid ＂structures＂ of vegetality constituting the intellectual terrain of Critical Plant Studies are tenably discarded to foreground ＂n-1＂ becomings of vegetality--the multiplicities of which can well be sensed by means of reckoning vegetality as deterritorial vector that can facilitate scholars to map the eventual unfolding of postcolonial vegetal politics afresh.

Abhisek Ghosal teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology.