Eponyms, Heirlooms, Living Memory, and the Planty Memorialization of People

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2025

Abstract

While memorialization often invokes stony landscapes of public art, named buildings, and engraved plaques, living memorials occupy parallel and intersecting memory contexts. Plants ascribe processes of memorialization into their landscapes and broader meanings. This paper explores one subsection of these planty memorializations by highlighting fruits, vegetables, and grains whose names include eponyms, or names derived from other people’s names. We also unpack eponyms themselves and their gendered, politicized, and racialized legacies and the potential for both eponyms and their associated living memorials to perpetuate violence. We connect living memorials, eponyms, and their stone-based or toponymic counterparts to patterns within memorial landscapes and the work of memorial reckoning. While we find many representational similarities across memorial patterns, key differences emerge in how certain living memorials have been and continue to be challenged and changed, particularly in comparison to broader patterns of biologically-rooted eponyms and the memorial reckoning of our toponymic landscapes.

Publication Title

Geohumanities

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