On the Persistence of the Organic: The Material Lives of the Robinia pseudoacacia

Abstract

Just as plants confiscated from one part of the world and introduced to another may become naturalized over time, so too may the stories humankind tells about the natural world. Both can have consequences for local and global biocultures. The North American black locust tree (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) offers a case study through which to consider the transmission of early modern environmental and cultural histories. The persistence of a singular specimen planted in Paris in the early seventeenth century stands in contrast to the mutability of histories over time and the divergent modality of narratives about the natural world in different cultures. The many material lives of the plant species—from its propagation and first publication by Europeans to accounts by European colonizers in North America to the tree’s historic and continued use in Indigenous craft practices—can be read through intertwined histories of botany, bioprospecting, settler colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade. Expanding the profundity of the black locust’s history by connecting its prehistories to written narratives reveals the tree to be an entangled organic object whose histories are integral to its materiality.