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.