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Beetle Mania! 🐞

Colorful beetles (Order Coleoptera). SciArt from the Edinburgh Journal of Natural History, Vol. 1 (1835-39). View more in Biodiversity Heritage Library (@biodivlibrary) with thanks to the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology for digitizing 🐞

jadafitch

Learn to identify critters while admiring art on your walls. Jada Fitch Illustration Signed Posters

tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva

“Helping the starving the American way”

USSR, 1970s

scificinema

Our aim was to create a plant with a scent that makes its owner happy…

Little Joe (2019) dir. Jessica Hausner

grupobookhunters

“Me duele que a veces tú te olvides de quién soy yo; caramba, si yo soy tú, lo mismo que tú eres yo”

—

Nicolás Guillen

-Efe

dame-de-pique

Photogram of Ferns, England, 1860s

electripipedream

Sun Ra, The Soul Vibrations of Man, 1977

mostly-mojave

Full Moon Over Phelan, California by Walter Grossman

1000drawings

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

nprbooks

George Rodriguez/all images courtesy of Hat & Beard Press

George Rodriguez, now 80, still doesn’t go anywhere without taking pictures.

“People don’t recognize me without my camera,” he tells NPR’s Mandalit Del Barco. “I like to document everything that’s goin’ on.”

For nearly six decades, the photographer has chronicled Los Angeles: Hollywood, the Chicano movement, hip-hop pioneers and beyond. His work is now being celebrated with his first retrospective, at the Lodge Gallery in Los Angeles, and a book called Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez.

Check out Mandalit’s profile of him here.

– Petra

fatehbaz

The case of Haiti provides one of the best-known examples of the relation between the rise of modern plantations and the types of environmental, political, and social changes that we intend to explore. With the development of intensive models of monoculture plantations (sugar, tobacco, coffee, and indigo) starting in the late seventeenth century, Saint Domingue became one of the wealthiest plantation societies of the early modern era. The riches that Saint Domingue produced were only made possible by the voracious consumption of human bodies and arable land, and the development of consumer markets, that characterized the new world of plantations emerging in the early modern Atlantic world.

In Haiti’s hinterland, however, distant from the coastal region where plantations and colonial centers of power prevailed, Black radical agrarian traditions took root. On Haiti’s Central Plateau, where the enslaved planted gardens, and where maroons sought refuge, quite different aggregations of life and value emerged alongside and against the plantation. Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir locates these practices of land and labor struggle within an enduring “counterplantation” system. Forms of counterplantation life have included not only the maroon settlements of colonial and revolutionary Saint-Domingue, but also the guerrilla soldiers, called Cacos, who fought against the U.S. Occupation of the early 20th century, and the peasants’ movements that continue to flourish in Haiti today. As scholars including C.L.R. James, Clyde Woods, and Jean Casimir have pointed out, those who dwell in Haiti’s hinterland have cultivated forms of counterplantation life that continue to resonate across the Afro-Americas today.

Rural social movements like the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP, or the Peasants’ Movement of Papaye) offer one key example of ongoing efforts to cultivate other agrarian futures beyond and against the plantation. In the part of the high Central Plateau where MPP was founded in 1973, cattle and goats graze hillsides that were never planted with sugarcane or coffee like the plains to the West or the North. Working in collective labor formations called gwoupman, peasants put the agroecological methods that MPP’s organizers and trainers teach to use in their small garden plots. As in the provision grounds that sustained enslaved persons at the margins of the plantation, in these gardens, peasants grow maize, vegetables, and fruit for household consumption and the local market. Through movements like MPP, rural dwellers in Haiti’s hinterland struggle to hold onto a mode of agrarian life that affirms economic autonomy, socio-ecological sustainability, and political sovereignty, even as emergent formations of power and capital continue to reproduce plantation worlds.

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Monique Allewaert, Sophie Sapp Moore, Gregg Mitman, and Pablo F. Gomez. “Plantation Legacies.” 2019.