About This Event

Join author Claudia Horn as she presents Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global Plantation. Better known for her revolutionary politics, Rosa Luxemburg was also an avid botanist. Between 1913 and 1918, even while incarcerated in Poland and Germany for her anti-war organizing, Luxemburg collected plants sent to her by friends or found in the prison grounds. With care and expertise, she pressed and annotated close to four hundred varieties of leaves and flowers. This lavishly illustrated study, the first of its kind, brings together pages from Luxemburg’s herbarium, personal letters that richly detail her fascination with nature, and a discussion of her ecological critique of colonial capitalism. Through the lens of the herbarium, Claudia Horn illuminates the connections between the study of flora, the naturalist movement, and the plantation economy, showing that the decolonization of botany and global environmental justice are both possible and necessary.

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