Cultivating Recalcitrance to Endure the Colonial

Dipterocarp (Shorea sp.) winged seed on a tree stump, the wings are coral colored, the seed is bright green.
Dipterocarp (Shorea sp.) winged recalcitrant seed (Bernard DUPONT on Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0)

Pod-Head: Xan Chacko

One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as ‘natural resources’ is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk. I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.” (Le Guin 2017, 16) 

This pod is about resistance but it’s also about pleasure and the naughty joys that are we are denied or we deny ourselves because we imagine that to thrive is to be complacent in the endurance of colonial extraction. We will relish in modes of sticking out and non-cooperation that open up rather than foreclose the possibilities of mind and imagination (Chacko 2023).

Taking inspiration from Le Guin’s call to subjectify, we might consider the ways that our thinking, practices, or creations draw us into kinship relations with each other and our more-than-human companions. Recalcitrance is a noun that means the quality of being stubborn and difficult, or being determined not to do what others want or expect. For me the trait is best exemplified by seeds that refuse to be coopted into the commodification of the seed vault, or of the foreigner who resists acquiescing to the conditions of settler life (Chacko 2022a; 2022b). How are you recalcitrant? Let’s count the ways. 

References

Chacko, Xan Sarah. 2022a. “Invisible Vitality: The Hidden Labours of Seed Banking.” In Invisible Labour in Modern Science, edited by Jenny Bangham, Xan Sarah Chacko, and Judith Kaplan, 217–25. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Chacko, Xan Sarah. 2022b. “Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial ‘Daisy Chain’: From Botanic Garden to Seed Bank.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (1). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35133.

Chacko, Xan Sarah. 2023. “Nothing Comes without Its Story.” American Anthropologist 125 (3): 679–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13860.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 2017. “Deep in Admiration.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, 15–21. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Xan Chako

Headshot of Xan Chako wearing a yellow shirt in front of a blurred book cabinet.

Xan Chacko is Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at Brown University. She is the co-editor with Jenny Bangham and Judy Kaplan of Invisible Labour in Modern Science (Rowman and Littlefield: 2022) and a special issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience on The Domestication of War with Diana Pardo, Astrida Neimanis, and Jenny Terry. Her current book project, The Last Seed: Botanic Futures in Colonial Legacies, demonstrates how concepts like ‘biodiversity’ are evoked to enable the continuation of extractive colonial practices like plant collecting.