Colonial ambitions generated imperial attitudes, theories and practices that remain embedded in botany and all the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, indigenous studies and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how fundamental theories and practices of botany were shaped and reinforced in favour of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how the colonisers erased the deep history of plants to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants as foreign human beings. Subramanian thus focuses on imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany, untethered and decentralised from its origins in histories of racism, slavery and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of scientific and feminist thought to chart a course towards more socially just experimental biology practices.

Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science in relation to experimental biology. She is the author of Ghost Stories for Darwin. The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Holy Science. The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Botany of Empire. Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), his current work focuses on the decolonisation of botany, nativism in plant biology and the relationship between science and religious nationalism in India.

A green thread links the cherry blossoms in Japan to the gum trees of Malaysia, the botanical gardens of Singapore and the destroyed Perfect Brightness - a green thread that defines the anthropocene and the way nature is plundered, for its immediate utility and to create symbolism in step with current ideologies.
In this volume we look at the stories of our times, seen through the petals of flowers chosen to represent a nation, with the desire to bend a small fragrant corolla to ideologies useful to those in government at the time. They are also the stories of how our poetic images clash against our inability to live without destroying what surrounds us. Through the symbolism of flowers and gardens we talk about politics and history, colonialism and ecology, nationalism and authoritarianism, in an anthropocene short-circuit.

Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer, journalist, poet and ceramist, and has lived in Asia since 1988. She completed her studies in Beijing and London, then moved to Tokyo, and later based in Hong Kong - meanwhile spending long periods in Shanghai, Kathmandu and Dakar. She is the author of four books: the first, Il Dio dell'Asia, religione e politica in Oriente (Il Saggiatore, 2006) won the Brice Chatwin Prize for travel literature; Lettere dalla Cina (Una Città, 2011); Beijing 1989 (Una Città, 2019); L'Eclissi di Hong Kong, topografia di una città in tumulto (ADD Editore, 2022). He contributes to numerous newspapers, both Italian and international, including Il Domani, Internazionale, Il Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, and many others, and is a member of the Lettera 22 association of journalists.

Everything that is recounted in these escapes is seen and lost sight of through the mists of history, it is a flap of burning existential truth caught up in the never-to-be-specified web of collective events: the agony of Italy's colonial adventure through the warped lens of a ‘family history’; the trial of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's director, reconstructed in the form of an audition for a play; the rambling confession of the first dissociated terrorist of the German revolutionary left in the 1970s; Russian imperialism repeated in farce in the exploits of an actor called to replace Vladimir Putin on official occasions; the May of ‘68 concentrated and dissolved in the claustrophobic “chamber drama” of a Parisian police station.
In a continuous confusion between background and figure, the individual continues to be, as Georg Büchner said, ‘just foam on the waves’ and the anachronism of the theatre the only place where his scream can still echo.

Attilio Scarpellini, critic, writer and, dramaturg. One of the founders of the Lettera 22 association of journalists and one of the main supporters of the Independent Theatre movement, he has written on the pages of Diario and the online weekly La differenza. He edited the magazine Quaderni del teatro di Roma and collaborated on the theatre column of doppiozero. A dramaturgy tutor at Elvira Frosini and Daniele Timpano's ‘Corpo scritto’ workshop, he has taught at the University of Rome La Sapienza and at the Da.re school of advanced dance training. His writings include L'angelo rovesciato. Quattro saggi sull'11 settembre e la scomparsa della realtà (Idea, 2008), La fortezza vuota. Discorso sulla perdita di senso del teatro (with Massimiliano Civica, Edizioni dell'asino, 2014), Il tempo sospeso delle immagini (Mimesis, 2020) and Figlio di cane (Mimesis, 2024). He talks about images and books at the microphones of Rai Radio 3.

An athlete dies in circumstances that cannot be explained, and reconstructing his life will be his girlfriend Hildi, commissioned by a publishing house to write a mémoire. Hildi thus begins to investigate, trying to shed light on the affair, on her beloved Bálint's colleagues and on the suffocating post-war atmosphere that surrounds them. Against the backdrop of a closed, controlled stadium, much like the Hungarian socialist regime of the time, a group of friends are united by a single, coveted goal: achieving supremacy, in sport and in their own lives, through challenge and self-knowledge. They soon discover that this aspiration will be anything but easy, almost as elusive as truth and death itself.
Finished in 1961, La morte dell’atleta only came out in Hungary in 1966 after having been published in French by Editions du Seuil (1965) and shortly before it was published in German by Hanser Verlag in Munich (1966), which prompted the Hungarian censorship to allow it to be published in Hungary. Since then it has been translated into almost ten languages.

Miklós Mészöly (Szekszárd, 1921 - Budapest, 2001) is one of the most significant Hungarian writers of the second half of the 20th century.
After graduating in law in 1944, he was sent to the front the same year, falling prisoner in Serbia. He worked as a playwright, from 1958 he collaborated with the literary magazine Jelenkor, co-founded the Széchenyi Academy of Arts and Literature, and was among the spokesmen of the Demokratikus Charta. Translated into many languages, he is considered the master of some of the greatest exponents of contemporary Hungarian literature (Nádas, Esterházy, Krasznahorkai). Among his best known works - for reasons of political censorship not many have been published - Magasiskola (1957), Saulus (1968), Pontos történetek, útközben (1970), Film (1976), Megbocsátás (1984), Otthon és világ (1994).

It is a carpet of stories woven on the ground, in Palestine and beyond the borders of identity. Esausti in croce ("Exhausted on the cross"), one of Najwan Darwish's most important collections of poetry, goes into the depths of the recent chronicle, and at the same time inserts it, like the embroidery that is typical of the Palestinian tradition, on a much longer history. It is a real journey in time and space, as well as in the relationships between souls. A physical journey, made up of stages, of reflections on places and cities. Poetry thus becomes the instrument to give substance – finally – to Palestinian invisibility. Invisibility of thought, of life, of women and men, of trees. It is poetry that is precise, sharp, political storytelling.

Najwan Darwish (Jerusalem, 1978) is one of the most important poets in the Arabic language. Palestinian, author of numerous collections of poetry, translated and published worldwide in over twenty languages, Darwish dedicates verses of rare depth and sharpness to his land and the people who are inextricably linked to it. A public intellectual and one of the best-known cultural journalists in the regional press, Darwish represents one of the highest peaks of poetry, not only Arabic, as Raúl Zurita also testified in his preface.

Belma Goralija left suddenly. I didn't have time to meet her in her house or at the café, as I had thought. Nor did I have time to return to Sarajevo, where she lived. Accessory was the pandemic that cancelled the plane ticket I had bought two years ago. Now I regret this lost time and I am shocked at the voracious time of human nature in which our days flow. We will not be able to meet, talk, listen. I will no longer be able to write what I should have written. Then I and anyone else may ask: what to do with the time that remains? Just that time, our time that we have left to live. Before it was the time to run, to write, every day. Of telling others what life daily life disclosed. Today it seems to me the time to grasp the memories of those we have met, because they have something or perhaps a lot to teach. This verb seems beautiful. "The time that remains" pass through their faces, their stories, by what they have taught us. The index of the book will be the letters of their names.

Filippo Landi was born in Rome in 1954. He graduated in Political Science at the University La Sapienza in Rome. In 1978 he participated in the founding of the weekly "Il Sabato". He joined RAI in 1987. Correspondent in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the First Gulf War, then in former Yugoslavia and Sarajevo, during the years of the siege, in Kosovo and Albania. In 2001 he returned to the Middle East, as RAI correspondent in Cairo and from 2003 in Jerusalem, where he remained until 2014. On his experience in Kosovo he wrote Un treno per Blace (La Meridiana, 1999).