Global Gardens: Beyond the Human in Zoë Wicomb's Fiction.

South Africa's Cape has long figured in the colonial imagination as a garden. With the Cape as fulcrum, this essay explores what gardens, both literal and literary, might tell us today about globalization and the global environment. It focuses on representations of "global gardens": gardens that exhibit planetary biodiversity, often by assembling botanicals from the farthest reaches of current and former empires. First, it briefly sketches Cape and global histories of the botanical garden as imperial form and symbol, but also gardening as survival tool of marginalized peoples. It then turns to the novel October (2014) and the short story "In the Botanic Gardens" (1990) by South African writer Zoë Wicomb. Wicomb's characters process identity, globality, and displacement through what Stanley calls "garden-viewing": the reflective procedure of touring gardens and identifying species. Garden-viewing can reiterate an imperial gaze, linked with hegemonic taxonomies and the colonial myth of the Cape as garden. But it can also diagnose and disrupt that viewpoint. Stanley argues that October and "In the Botanic Gardens" model garden-viewing as a way to conjure a multispecies understanding of globalization, oriented by the Cape. As such, these narratives also offer a new answer to debates in the environmental humanities about how to visualize a global environment while attending to power and local difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]