Branching Out

Branching Out offers a fresh, groundbreaking perspective on the intertwined botanical and art histories that have shaped narratives of Eurocentric intellectual evolution. Miriam Oesterreich presents a counternarrative, reinterpreting the banana tree as not only a symbol of colonial exploitation but also of artistic resistance. She challenges the tree’s symbolic role in reinforcing linear, European-derived narratives of Modern art, framing the re-appropriation of the ‘tropical’ by artists of the Americas as a profound act of defiance within the emerging discourse of worlding art histories. — Dr. Joseph R. Hartman, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Missouri-Kansas City

This chapbook theorizes artistic networks from the perspective of traditionally non-centered regions. By detailing how western scholars and artists have deployed tree diagrams to present hierarchical classificatory schemes that privilege imperial centers in art and science, Oesterreich challenges the recurrent use such imagery as an apt metaphor for artistic evolution. She discusses the mechanisms through which tropicality has been positioned as an ‘other’ to western civilization, used to designate foreign cultures as menacing, chaotic, and consequently in need of so-called civilizing structures. As an example, the book traces changing representations of the banana plant, the ultimate symbol of the tropical in art, and its frequent association with sexuality and colonialism. Oesterreich argues that these frameworks ignore contextual power structures and instead proposes that notions of the tropical can serve as a form of resistance. She contends that by re-signifying the tropics, artists and scholars can make explicit the history of violence and exploitation that shaped and distorted colonized geographies. Instead of the tree, Oesterreich proposes the rhizome, with its ability to spread in all directions, as a metaphor that could counter the hierarchical organization of art history. This notion of art as both locally situated and entangled with larger ideas allows for the possibility of considering indigenous epistemologies and distinct temporalities, which she examines through a selection of case studies, including Tarsila do Amaral, Helio Oiticia, and Rosana Paulino. Her text presents an important new theoretical model for scholars researching artists from the Global South, allowing them to consider their connectivity to western developments without forever designating their production as behind or derivative, and thereby ‘worlding’ our understanding of modern art. — Michele Greet, Full Professor of Art History and affiliated faculty in Latin American Studies, Honors, and Women's Studies at George Mason University.