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Plants are edging closer to the center of critical inquiry in the Anthropocene because they are intimately tied to legacies of settler colonialism, forced migration, related practices of extractive capitalism, and their environmental and human harm. Ostensibly sessile, plants travel constantly through their adaptations to ensure their survival and reproduction. In the modern period, this movement was taken to unprecedented scale by humans, triggering massive displacement of people and disruption to ecosystems. Among the many instances of plant movement, the scandalous mobility of invasives unsettles us because it exposes the worst excesses of the Anthropocene. This essay focuses on the practice of multimedia artist Precious Okoyomon, whose installations feature prominently kudzu, the most notorious weed in the US. The highest concentrations of kudzu are found in the former Cotton Belt—Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—making it cotton's unlikely successor. The essay analyzes how Okoyomon's kudzu installations explore the dark side of the landscape, peeling off layers of human and environmental harm while acknowledging the resilience of more-than-human life. But a focus on invasive species also challenges plant theory's celebration of entanglement, showing how the theoretical effort to produce the plant as a generalized concept bumps against the contingencies of its natural history in time and place, its ontological slipperiness, its ethical ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies "interest," as a dominant eighteenth-century model of human nature, to Richardson's "Clarissa"; it proceeds to explore the construction of a new ethics of sexual relationship in the novel by focusing on the homology, between usury and libertinism as two kinds of speculation judged immoral due to absence of risk. Clarissa's economic language reveals her to be an astute exegete of her culture's politics and enables her to redress the sexual imbalance of risk; Lovelace, by contrast, troubles the assumptions of the "interest" paradigm by subscribing to an aristocratic economy of expenditure that is at odds with the economic prudence of the bourgeoisie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]