by Oppositional Conversations Editorial Board
Humanities, social sciences, and the “hard” sciences, within and outside the academy, have something to say about land and the myriad interests and knowledges its material realities and their associations generate. Rootedness, rootlessness, land as property, land as homeland, land’s gendering, land as possession, land as dispossession, land as reparations and repair, land as destroyer, stewarding land, owning land, land as memory, land as amnesia, land as resource, land as scarcity.
Land is the history underneath our feet and that surrounds our bodies.
Land as meaning, as mythology, as immaterial concept over which people have long been willing “to fight to the death.” To gain access, to control, to inventory its resources. Land as the real, as that which has been walked and worked and tilled as a means for direct producers to reproduce themselves, their families, and their communities since “time out of mind.” Land as something else entirely, as living subject, as legible and illegible witness from the beginning of time (from before even the tremors of tectonic plates) through to our current moment and into futures that have yet to emerge. Land writ large, contemplated from points of view that include determinations beyond the limits of “humans” as discretionary actors.
What can be said of land is incalculably vast. What is urgent to say/represent/articulate/enable about it in our present moment? Forward your essays, commentary, artistic productions, or literary creations on land to Oppositional Conversations. We want to assemble an issue with which to listen to what lies just beneath our feet.
Deadline for contributions: December 15, 2021