Organizer: Ayşe Çelikkol
Contact the Seminar OrganizersAmidst renewed attention to crop and animal husbandry in the public sphere, this panel seeks to advance our understanding of the connection between farming and fiction. Relations among humans, other species, and the land, which are mediated through money in the age of commercial agriculture, come into sharp focus in the novel, the genre that hinges on relationality perhaps more than any other.
As we confront the perils of monocrop agriculture and factory farming, critical approaches to agriculture have recently proliferated. For Timothy Morton, agriculture as it emerged in the Fertile Crescent twelve thousand years ago is to blame for current crises. The “machination” that he calls “agrilogistics” “reduce[s] things to bland substances that can be manipulated at will without regard to unintended consequences.” By contrast, ecosocialists such as John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore maintain that it is specifically the capitalist mode of agriculture that is unsustainable. Enclosures, the triad of landlord/tenant farmer/farm laborer, the global trade in guano: all have contributed to the exploitation of the soil and the worker alike. Like the ecosocialists, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing maintain that it is not agriculture as such that drives us toward catastrophe. Calling our era the “platationocene,” they investigate the “transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited. . . labor” (Haraway).
While it seems evident that agriculture has either become, or always been, a site where structures of domination take hold, world literatures suggest that experiences of husbandry cannot be reduced to the search for control and profit, even when they occur within hierarchical systems. Novels on farming and farming communities (by Yaşar Kemal, Leo Tolstoy, Na. D'Souza, Willa Cather, Gerbrand Bakker, and Chinua Achebe, among innumerable others) often foreground a sense of attachment to fields, plants, and nonhuman animals, or an awareness of one’s dependence on the nonhuman. Moreover, fictions of farming tend to highlight contingency, with characters at the mercy of weather conditions or the spread of infection. The emphasis on dependence and contingency coexists with these works’ attentiveness to exploitation.
This panel aims to bring together perspectives on fictions of farming from multiple geographical regions, with an eye toward exploring aesthetic, affective, and/or political grounds for cooperation between human communities across borders, in the face of current and looming crises.
Possible topics include but are not limited to
-agrilogistics vs. agriculture as dependence
-dispossession, in its local (enclosure) and global (colonization) varieties
-the novel form in relation to capitalist agriculture and its alternatives.
Papers on any historical period are welcome.
As we confront the perils of monocrop agriculture and factory farming, critical approaches to agriculture have recently proliferated. For Timothy Morton, agriculture as it emerged in the Fertile Crescent twelve thousand years ago is to blame for current crises. The “machination” that he calls “agrilogistics” “reduce[s] things to bland substances that can be manipulated at will without regard to unintended consequences.” By contrast, ecosocialists such as John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore maintain that it is specifically the capitalist mode of agriculture that is unsustainable. Enclosures, the triad of landlord/tenant farmer/farm laborer, the global trade in guano: all have contributed to the exploitation of the soil and the worker alike. Like the ecosocialists, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing maintain that it is not agriculture as such that drives us toward catastrophe. Calling our era the “platationocene,” they investigate the “transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited. . . labor” (Haraway).
While it seems evident that agriculture has either become, or always been, a site where structures of domination take hold, world literatures suggest that experiences of husbandry cannot be reduced to the search for control and profit, even when they occur within hierarchical systems. Novels on farming and farming communities (by Yaşar Kemal, Leo Tolstoy, Na. D'Souza, Willa Cather, Gerbrand Bakker, and Chinua Achebe, among innumerable others) often foreground a sense of attachment to fields, plants, and nonhuman animals, or an awareness of one’s dependence on the nonhuman. Moreover, fictions of farming tend to highlight contingency, with characters at the mercy of weather conditions or the spread of infection. The emphasis on dependence and contingency coexists with these works’ attentiveness to exploitation.
This panel aims to bring together perspectives on fictions of farming from multiple geographical regions, with an eye toward exploring aesthetic, affective, and/or political grounds for cooperation between human communities across borders, in the face of current and looming crises.
Possible topics include but are not limited to
-agrilogistics vs. agriculture as dependence
-dispossession, in its local (enclosure) and global (colonization) varieties
-the novel form in relation to capitalist agriculture and its alternatives.
Papers on any historical period are welcome.