“Weed and Body Entanglements: Plantation Resonances in 20th
and 21st Century Multiethnic American Literature” examines literary representations of human and plant entanglements in contemporary, multiethnic American novels. Bringing together Black, Indigenous, and Latine writers, I position modern agriculture as a permutation of the plantation regime—a material and epistemological structure shaped by industrial agriculture and capitalism which flattens and homogenizes diverse ways of thinking, knowing, and living with the earth. I trace what I call a “weed episteme” or an evolving logic that ensnares human and plant life around beliefs of disposability, ownership, and fungibility. I propose reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1998), and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) as a constellation of narratives that reveal how a global plantation project fractures local ecologies and geographies into sites of extraction and control. I argue that writers of color have imagined solidarities among Brown and Black lived experiences and plants through counter-epistemologies related to plant work, or the intentional crafting of plants into medicine, rituals, or other handiwork. These writers imagine mutually beneficial relationships between humans and plants that resist profit-driven, extractive ones.