Othering Myco-Vision: Fungi in European Modernity

Fungi have long occupied a highly ambivalent position in human imagination, inciting disgust and fear, as well as wonder and fascination. Neither plants, nor animals, they grow up unexpectedly but also in regular lines or circles. Some of them are medicinal and edible, whereas others are toxic or even poisonous. Sometimes they are both. Drawing form this ambivalence and mobilising analytics of transnational eco-feminist inquiry, the talk examines traces that fungi and their metaphors leave in the articulations of nationhood, race, gender, and sexuality within the political imaginary of European colonial modernity.