Book Smart

It may surprise you that sugarcane first arrived in Jamaica from Java and the South Pacific in the second half of the 18th century. The plantain and tamarind came from Africa principally to feed slaves.

Eventually, plantation masters set aside special tracts for their slaves’ own use, thus saving the property owner the cost of rations. However, these “slave gardens” also became the means by which slaves developed and sold at market rare transplants. Some of these would find their way back to fashionable gardens in Europe.

Surprises abound in Casid’s first book, awarded a Millard Meiss Award from the College Art Association. In it, she considers the material relations among the development of sugar plantations in the British West Indies and French Antilles, and picturesque landscape gardens in Europe.

“When I began my research I was originally fascinated by the strangeness of a particular type of garden, the ornamented farm, often cited as the genesis of the picturesque landscape garden,” Casid says. “In the process of doing the research, I found that these gardens that in theory were supposed to preserve what was most typical of the place where they were produced, in reality came from a process of transplantation directly related to colonial empire’s uprooting and relocating both plants and people.”

Casid came to see the picturesque l andscape garden as a metaphor for the imperial nation and as a justification for colonization. “Colonial relandscaping in Europe and on sugar plantations became far more than agricultural systems,” she says. “Horticulture also functioned as a means of regulating national and even gender and sexual identities,” she says.

Casid says that what we conceive of as “tropical,” “Caribbean” or even “European” is far from single-source pure.

“Through analyzing the transplantation of vegetation from Asia, Europe, Africa and the East Indies to the West Indies, I saw the 18th century origins of our present idea of a ‘tropical’ landscape: lush, fruit-bearing plants, coconut palms, citrus, banana and breadfruit trees. All of them were imperial transplants to the Caribbean. While I don’t explore current transformations of the Caribbean in this book, you can see analogous principles at work in the creation of artificial tourist villages catering to docking cruise ships and stocked with rugs from Afghanistan, gems from Russia and pearls from Asia and the South Pacific,” she says.

This spring Casid will teach a course on cross-cultural arts around the Pacific Rim and will use “Sowing Empire” as a framework. Her next book, “Shadows of Enlightenment: The Magic Lantern and Technologies of Projection,” will be out next year from the University of Minnesota Press.

Casid will discuss “Sowing Empire” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 15, at Borders Books, 3750 University Ave. She also will speak in connection with the “Starry Transit” installation at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 23, in the Washburn Observatory. Both events are free and open to the public.