Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants - cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others - this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or 'understories' - narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

Acknowledgments
Figures

Introduction
Green Power: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics
Lesley Wylie

The Dark Twin: Cacao from Mesoamerican Cosmology to the Contemporary Neotropics
Bruce Dean Willis

"A Good Thing Spring Up": The Breadfruit Story in the Caribbean
Elaine Savory

Ceiba pentandra: Axis of the Mesoamerican World / Mirror of Climate Change in the Caribbean
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

The Politics of Yerba Mate
Nina Gerassi-Navarro

Transgenic Soy in Argentina: Arts of the Toxic Zone
Sebastián Figueroa

"A Home of Cactus and Maguey": Dwelling and Cultural Representation of Succulents of the Americas
Odile Cisneros

From Tropical Pathology to Tropical Plantation: the Hevea brasiliensis, 1839 to 1945
Lesley Wylie

The Vine at the End of the World: Reimagining Kudzu in the U.S. South
Jessica Martell and Zackary Vernon

Bibliography
Contributors