Prof. Melissa Zeiger (Dartmouth College, USA): “Garden Whiteness” 

Thursday, December 17, 2026, 2-4 p.m. (c.t.), U5/00.24 (An der Universität 5)

In the essay "On Seeing England for the First Time," Jamaica Kincaid writes about the foundational British narratives of her colonial education in Antigua, and about her later outraged disillusionment. This process begins in childhood--she is precocious--but develops in a series of encounters with the nation she has previously only read and heard about, full of “wonderful cobbled streets onto which solid front doors opened; and people whose eyes were blue and who had fair skins and who smelled only of lavender, or sometimes sweet pea or primrose. And those flowers with those names: delphiniums, foxgloves, tulips, daffodils, floribunda, peonies; in bloom, a striking display, being cut and placed in large glass bowls, crystal, decorating rooms so large twenty families the size of mine could fit in comfortably but used only for passing through” (p. 35). The book in which this essay is collected, My Garden (Book), forms a decolonizing travelogue focused on flowers. The passage indicates how conscious Jamaica Kincaid is of the not-always-obvious politics of gardening and garden pleasures, and it connects to the repeated attempt in her garden writing to bring those politics into view as colonial, transnational, and global ones. These encounters register at once an aesthetic disappointment and, more powerfully, an understanding of the way a racialized sense of national superiority can become a way of seeing the world.

MELISSA ZEIGER is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College the author of Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (1997). She is a distinguished teacher with a special interest in contemporary poetry, AIDS and Breast Cancer Literature, women's fiction and Feminist Criticism, but has also published on Victorian and Modernist poetry. Her current research projects focus on the garden/gardening in American literature and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.