The plantation’s agribiopolitical reorganization of environmental and (enviro-)racial relations has remained a focus of scholarship concerned with the afterlives of its logics. Yet, as Sylvia Wynter has argued, other narrative sites produced by and in dialogue with the plantation, such as the provision grounds, offer a means to think beyond the plantation’s hegemonic, monocultural narrative. In the Caribbean context of Wynter’s work, the provision grounds were found at the edge of the plantation hidden away from the main house, serving as a subsistence refuge for enslaved peoples to cultivate food on Sundays. The provision grounds held a key role as a site of diverse cultivation within a monocultural space and as a source of alternative economies through itinerant sellers and the provision of goods to the main house once the harvest was over. Accordingly, subsistence plots were also sites of tension, providing a space of action in a geography where such action was considered suspicious. A central figure in Wynter’s engagement with the provision grounds as a site of differentiated, non-capitalist agricultural relation and narrative potential within the plantation’s “geography of terror” (see Ylver Mosquera-Vallejo) is the yam. Using the tuber as a potent vegetal symbol of recuperative relations Elizabeth DeLoughrey has, in turn, built upon Wynter’s theorization of the yam in the provision grounds to engage with the imaginative and material acts of Afro-diasporic rooting through the transformation of homo into humus. Within such theoretical negotiations of material and discursive exchange, the provision grounds are not only the “botanical gardens of the dispossessed” but also the “agricultural laboratories of modernity,” and the site for new narrative relations (see Judith Carney and Leida Fernández-Prieto). 

Further underscoring the site’s importance across multiple disciplines is its appearance across varied geographies. From the provision grounds to the subsistence plot, the slave garden, the jardin, the conuco, or the roça, the site’s many names represent discrete instantiations that hint at diverse and overlapping entanglements amongst Afro-diasporic communities, Indigenous Peoples, and multiple non-human actants. In thinking with the narrative potential of this site across geographic and geopolitical space, the symposium aims to delineate a cultural, social, political, literary geography of the provision grounds that turns to the multispecies narratives made visible across the Americas. In approaching the provision grounds as a framework that can help us better attend to its multiple iterations across space and time, proposals are welcomed that engage with this site in transgeographic and transhistorical contexts across the American continent. Particular attention to the multispecies relations (human, plant, animal) made in creating the provision grounds, and how such relations persist, change, are unmade, and move past its borders as (plantation) geographies alter over time are also encouraged. Given the symposium’s interdisciplinary focus, proposals that attend to the site from/across multiple fields and perspectives are especially welcomed, ranging from literary and cultural studies, geography, history, anthropology, archaeology, political science, and so on. Possible themes include, but are not limited to: 

• (Un)making multi-species alliances (towards survival, death..) 
• Mobility, enclosure, and the Africanization of landscapes 
• Legacies of Indigenous and Black knowledges 
• Anticolonial/Decolonial histories of subsistence 
• Heterotopias and agribiopolitics 
• Restorative subsistence practices (and their limits) 
• Provision ground soil ontologies and belonging 
• Other vegetal narratives (rice, corn, grasses, etc.) 
• The afterlife of the provision grounds in racial and national politics 
• Sites connected to, emergent from, or inheritors of the provision grounds’ politics. 
• Comparative provision grounds (transgeographic and transhistorical) 
• Popular culture and the subsistence plot (tourism, music, etc.) 

Organized in association with the journal Plant Perspectives and The University of Cincinnati’s School of Environment and Sustainability and the Dept. of Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures, the symposium will be a collective meeting space to explore connections through roundtables and traditional panels. Participants may also be invited to contribute to a planned edited collection. 

To submit a proposal, please send an abstract (in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French) of 250 words that includes your name, affiliation, contact information and whether you wish to deliver a traditional paper (20 minutes) or participate in a roundtable with a shorter (5 to 10-minute piece) to Niall A. Peach, University of Cincinnati| peachna@ucmail.uc.edu, by October 15th, 2026. Acceptance notifications will be sent at the end of October.