The Creole Garden across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds: Decolonial Approaches for Public Humanities

Abstract This introduction to the Creole Gardens as Decolonial Practice: Regrowth, Recycling, Resistance and Repair issue of Public Humanities draws on fieldwork undertaken in the gardens of the Seychelles and Guadeloupe in 2024 and 2025, as well as on Edouard Glissant’s definition of the “jardin creole” as resistance to unitary and hegemonic attitudes toward identity, culture, and belonging. Such gardens have been recognized as a long-standing feature of Creole societies past and present. As a legacy and antithesis of the plantation economy, they continue to be mobilized to promote biodiversity against monocropping, human subsistence over profit, and sustainable small-scale agricultural practices. We present the creole garden around four key words—“regrowth,” “recycling,” “resistance,” and “repair”—that have emerged through our fieldwork observations, testimonies from horticultural activists, scholarship and theory on plots and gardens of the Creole world, as well as the recent proliferation of cultural and artistic interventions on gardens that contributors to this issue chronicle and analyze. Our work demonstrates that botany, pharmacy, foodways, and horticulture can be tools of resistance that self-empower marginalized peoples of African, European, and Asian heritage by generating, from displacements and uprooting, new cultures and new solidarities. Indeed, in the garden, the body interacts with the collective and with the land to provide dignity, pleasure, and healing; and the garden itself is as an “archive-repertoire” of the connected Atlantic and Indian Oceans, which activates hidden pasts and futures that our issue explores.