Files
Abstract
At the intersection of media studies and the environmental humanities, “Seed Media” articulates a theory of seeds as texts, mobilizes this framework to assess seeds in both real-world and fictional contexts, and showcases the urgent relevance of humanistic research in the ongoing climate crisis. Especially since the global implementation of American agronomic agendas in the latter half of the 20th century, the agroindustrial complex has prioritized the biological and genetic commodification of seeds over the complex and culturally rich relationships between human, food, and land. Seeds constitute cultural and historical artifacts—stories and lifeworlds in their own right—as evinced in the perspectives and beliefs of Indigenous and non-Western traditions and cosmologies, sustainable farmers and horticulturalists, and land-defenders and activists. This dissertation makes the case for a humanistic approach that harnesses the tools of literary criticism and media theory to consider seeds as media. The first two chapters deploy humanistic theories of archive to position seeds in their historical, cultural, and political contexts. Current archival practices preserve the past to the detriment of the future, as exemplified in the world’s largest seed bank, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Rather than stockpiling seeds in archives, understanding them as archives resists this paradox and animates seeds’ mediative capacities and dynamic chronologies: the recovered seeds of Emily Dickinson both complement and invoke the canonical poet’s oeuvre. Attending to seeds in literary and media contexts supplements incomplete seed archives in a time of climate crisis. The last three chapters take up a constellation of case studies across media forms to demonstrate how representations of seeds come to resemble the media in which they are embedded: seeds are screened, read, and played. George Miller’s Hollywood full-length feature Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Wanuri Kahiu’s independent short Pumzi (2009) deploy the visual and narrative aspects of cinema to cement the formal and phenomenological alignment between media and seeds. Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation (2003) and Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper (2021) explore seeds in the context of food systems both modern and traditional, cultural legacies both colonial and inherited, and stories both personal and (supra-humanly) collective; these contemporary realist novels exemplify and perform the inextricable relationship between seeds and language. Considering seeds in Eric Barone’s independent videogame Stardew Valley (2016) illuminates the game’s status as more than just a farming simulator and showcases how Stardew’s sandbox affordances—its procedural rhetoric and metagame potentialities—find their parallel in seeds themselves. This dissertation is both critical intervention and engaged participation in the phenomenon by which, to borrow from W.J.T. Mitchell, our relationship to both seeds and “media is one of mutual and reciprocal constitution: we create them, and they create us.”