{"id":1327,"date":"2026-07-19T12:08:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T12:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rupkatha.com\/books\/?p=1327"},"modified":"2026-07-19T15:19:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T15:19:40","slug":"cfc-vegetal-hauntings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rupkatha.com\/books\/cfc-vegetal-hauntings\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for Book Chapters | Vegetal Hauntings: Plant Horror and the Postcolonial Ecogothic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Call<\/p>\n

An Edited Volume by<\/span>
\nRuchika Hooda<\/strong><\/span>
\nAssistant Professor at Maharishi Markandeshwar (Deemed to be University), Ambala<\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Diksha<\/strong><\/span>
\nAssistant Professor in the Dept. of English at Chandigarh University, Chandigarh<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Concept Note<\/strong><\/span>
\nMichael Marder’s foundational claim in Plant-Thinking (2013) is that vegetal life poses a distinct philosophical problem precisely because it resists every category Western thought has used to grant beings significance. Plants have no discernible interiority, no centralised nervous system, and no intentional relation to the world as animals and humans are assumed to have, and this absence has allowed philosophy to treat plant existence as beneath serious inquiry rather than as an unresolved question in its own right. Plant horror, defined as the enduring cultural fascination with predatory vines, sentient forests, carnivorous gardens, and monstrous bloom, has emerged as a recognisable strand of the ecogothic, yet existing scholarship remains overwhelmingly Euro-American in scope and theoretical orientation. The South Asian, postcolonial, and Global South vegetal imagination remains critically underexplored. This book volume proposes to address this gap by bringing critical plant studies, ecogothic theory, ecofeminism, and postcolonial ecology into sustained conversation with South Asian and world literary and cinematic texts.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most significant scholarly intervention in the field to date, Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga’s Plant Horror<\/em> (2016), mapped the recurring tropes of the genre largely across British and American texts. However, it left the postcolonial vegetal imagination almost entirely unexamined. South Asia offers an exceptionally rich archive for this inquiry. Long before plant horror was named as a genre, regional folk traditions had already populated forests and groves with vegetal beings that blur the line between sacred guardian and predatory threat. The yakshi<\/em> of Kerala’s tree-spirit lore offers the most instructive example of this trajectory: in early Dravidian and Vedic traditions, yakshis<\/em> were revered as benevolent nature deities, symbolising fertility, beauty, and the protective spirit of the sacred grove or Kavu<\/em>. Only under the pressures of later patriarchal and Brahmanical religious shifts was their image inverted, from guardian to predator, from deity to vampiric ghost.<\/span><\/p>\n

Art historians of early Indian religion have long traced this trajectory in the yaksha\/yakshi figures themselves. Ananda Coomaraswamy’s foundational study identified these tree-spirits as pre-Vedic, animist deities of fertility and abundance, later incorporated into Brahmanical cosmology. Stella Kramrisch similarly located their origin in indigenous nature-worship that predates and exceeds the subordinate place later religious orthodoxy would assign them. The formative history of colonial botany was imposed upon this, with the result that the plantation, the botanical garden, and the cash crop contributed to the making of horror architectures. Colonial forced plantations of indigo, tea, rubber, and opium uprooted both ecosystems and communities, and that violence resurfaces in literature and cinema, displaced onto Gothic plant imagery. The argument this volume insists on is that vegetal monstrosity is not a timeless, ahistorical dread but a historically and politically produced category, shaped by caste, gender, colonial extraction, and environmental dispossession.<\/span><\/p>\n

A recurring thread throughout the volume is the persistent gendering of the monstrous plant. Across folklore, fiction, and film, the dangerous plant-being is disproportionately coded as female, seductive, fertile, devouring, and ultimately punished or exorcised at the end of the narrative. Reading the demonisation of these figures as historically produced, configured by caste, gender, and religion rather than arising organically from an \u2018ancient\u2019 fear of nature, is itself a theoretical move the volume insists on.<\/span><\/p>\n

The volume also attempts to situate plant horror as a contemporary mode of climate feeling. As anthropogenic climate change destabilises the boundary between cultivated and wild, plant horror narratives offer one of the few popular vocabularies available for processing the unsettling sense that the vegetal world might no longer remain passive.<\/span><\/p>\n

The volume invites contributions that explore questions such as<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n