Being / becoming the "Cape Town flower sellers" The botanical complex, flower selling and floricultures in Cape Town

Magister Artium - MAThis mini-thesis is concerned with histories of flower selling in Cape Town. Since the late 19th century, images and imaginings of the flower sellers in Adderley Street and to a lesser degree in other areas of the city attained an outstanding place in visualisations and descriptions of Cape Town. The flower sellers were thereby characterised in a particularly gendered, racialised and class-specific way as predominantly female, coloured and poor. This characterisation dominated to an extent that it is possible to speak of a discursive figure of the 'Cape Town flower sellers'. In tourism-related media and in personal memoirs, the 'Cape Town flower sellers' often came to represent both the city and the inhabitants of Cape Town. The images and imaginings of the 'Cape Town flower sellers' can partly be traced back to representations of 'flower girls' in fictional stories, paintings, photographs and film in Europe, particularly in Great Britain. In Cape Town, this European discourse about flower selling developed in a specific way within colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid contexts.South Afric

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices is a speculative endeavor asking how we may represent, relay, and read worlds differently by seeing other species as protagonists in their own rights. What other stories are to be invented and told from within those many-tongued chatters of multispecies collectives? Could such stories teach us how to become human otherwise? Often, the human is defined as the sole creature who holds language, and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. And yet, the world is made and remade by ongoing and many-tongued conversations between various organisms reverberating with sound, movement, gestures, hormones, and electrical signals. Everywhere, life is making itself known, heard, and understood in a wide variety of media and modalities. Some of these registers are available to our human senses, while some are not. Facing a not-so-distant future catastrophe, which in many ways and for many of us is already here, it is becoming painstakingly clear that our imaginaries are in dire need of corrections and replacements. How do we cultivate and share other kinds of stories and visions of the world that may hold promises of modest, yet radical hope? If we keep reproducing the same kind of languages, the same kinds of scientific gatekeeping, the same kinds of stories about “our” place in nature, we remain numb in the face of collapse. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices offers steps toward a (self)critical multispecies philosophy which interrogates and qualifies the broad and seemingly neutral concept of humanity utilized in and around conversations grounded within Western science and academia. Artists, activists, writers, and scientists give a myriad of different interpretations of how to tell our worlds using different media – and possibly gives hints as to how to change it, too

A South African social garden: people, plants and multispecies histories in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

Gardens and gardening are widely regarded as apolitical. Accordingly, garden historians have hardly written about politics, and social historians have rarley taken gardens and gardening into consieration. This is also the case with the 1913 established Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in South Africa. The existing literature treats politics primarily as context, but not as something that it was inherently part of. The dissertationargues that contrary to this perception, Kirstenbosch evolved embedded in political, social and economic processes. The perception as apolitical emerged partly as a result of its various political functions. Kirstenbosch and the subsequently establihsed network of regional gardens functioned as sites in which nature an nation were defined in terms of each otehr. A striking continuity existed thereby of the institution's involvement in the production of ideas about nation, citizenship and belonging that stretches from the colonial to the apartheid and post-apartheid era. Following recent developments in critical plant studies, floriography studies and multispecies ethnography, the main question of the dissertation is how Kirstenbosch evolved as a social space. Throughout the dissertation I argue for an understanding of Kirstenbosch as an inherently social space. As a social space, it is shaped by social relationships among and between humans and non-humans, especially plants. Understanding it as a social space allows to critically angage the work of power in it. This understanding can serve as the basis for re-imagining Kirstenbosch as a medium in which multiple epistemologies and ontologies can take root that enable the development of more just and sustainable relationships among and between humans and non-humans. The dissertation is based on extensive archival research, oral history interviews and participant observations. The dissertation was initially supervised by the late Prof. Dr. Patrick Harries. The main supervisor is currently Prof. Dr. Ciraj Rassool (University of the Western Cape) and the second supervisor is Prof. Dr. Julia Tischler (University of Basel)