关键词: 加勒比, 全球南方, 花园美学, 牙买加·金凯德, 花园书写

Abstract: In Western culture, the garden has traditionally been conceived as a utopian space embodying classical mythology and religious ideals. Its aesthetic studies has long revolved around Western ideologies such as theological conceptions, moral principles and national spirit, while overlooking the power dynamics between the Global North and South underlying horticulture featured by landscape control, ecological justice, and the exploitation of plants. As a Caribbean horticulturist and writer, Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid once undertook botanical expeditions to places such as Yunnan in China and Nepal on the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Her non-fiction garden writing, rooted in a Global South perspective, frames garden aesthetics and botanical science as battlegrounds for discourse within the political and intellectual metaphorical spaces of the North-South divide. This article focuses on Kincaid’s garden writing and horticultural practices, revealing in it the historical connection between European garden aesthetic traditions and the colonial history of the Global South by examining how the Caribbean islands become a terrestrial Eden and how their tropical plants start a global diaspora. In response to the systematic exclusion of Southern discourses and the erasure of its knowledge within Western garden culture, Kincaid seeks in her writing to construct a Global South garden aesthetics: a resistant aesthetics rooted in local culture and traditional botanical memory, with the Caribbean serving as its exemplar.

Key words: the Caribbean, Global South, garden aesthetics, Jamaica Kincaid, garden writing