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Friday 21 September 2018, at 15:00 - 17:00

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Moesgaard in Building 4235 Room 133

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Alfred Crosby, in his book Ecological Imperialism, makes a powerful argument that the ways European biotic assemblages were transplanted to colonies was as central part European imperial projects. This is clearly an important part of many histories of landscape change, yet it also simplifies colonial processes. If we take seriously the insights of scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe), Ann Stoler (Race and the Education of Desire; Carnal Knowledges), and Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes) we know that colonization is not merely a movement of pre-formed categories and practices from “the West to the rest,” but that the projects and categories of race, gender, etc. emerge from encounters in the colonies themselves. How do we pull such insights into our understanding of landscapes? Projects of tropical landscape management – and tropical species – often moved from colony to colony, rather than via metropoles. Furthermore, people forcibly enrolled in colonial projects have also engaged in their own landscape-making acts.

A second goal for this set of readings is to explore the diversity of imperial projects and their intersections. Consider island SE Asia, which has been subject to multiple waves of colonialism – including that of the Japanese state, which cannot be seen as wholly Western. How do the different projects and landscape imaginaries of particular imperial projects shape their ecological effects? How do the different landscape projects of various colonial projects accrete in a given place?

The Mastnak et al. text gave us a powerful form through which to think: the American lawn. One of our challenges in the coming weeks will be to think about how such forms are dependent on European colonialism, but also exceed them. The American lawn, for instance, is impossible without the British estate garden, but it is not its repetition. What are the processes through which landscape forms emerge and change?

Readings:

Grove, Richard. 2000. “The Culture of Islands and the History of Environmental Concern.” Online essay presented at the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values.
This short text outlines Grove’s argument that European environmentalism was not made is Europe, but in colonial encounters (and exploitations).

Carney, Judith, and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. 2009. “Chapter 6: The Africanization of Plantation Food Systems.” In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. UC Press.
This chapter argues that, in focusing on temperate zones, Crosby missed the importance of botanical introductions from Africa to the New World. It describes the intertwined roles of Amerindian and African plants in plantation economies.

Ragone, Diane, David H. Lorence, and Timothy Flynn. 2001. “History of Plant Introductions to Pohnpei, Micronesia and the Role of the Pohnpei Agriculture Station.” Economic Botany, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 2001), pp. 290-324.
This article details the history of plant introductions to Pohnpei over successive waves of Spanish, German, Japanese, and American colonial periods. It offers a concrete case from which to consider both how colonialisms come with different landscaping projects and how these come to be layered on top of each other.

Clifford, James. 1997. “Fort Ross Meditation.” Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard UP.
This chapter focuses on the intersection of different indigenous and colonial worlds in California. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone,” it examines how histories of encounter shape a place.

Additional key texts about more-than-human colonialism:

Crosby, Alfred. 1986. Ecological Imperialism. Cambridge. Particularly Chapters 4 and 11.

Anderson, Virginia. 1994. King Philip's Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England. The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Oct., 1994), pp. 601-624. (Attached). See also Anderson’s book, Creatures of Empire (2000).

More than Neo-Europes: Colonial Landscape-making

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