Land and the US Agrarian South

This review essay summarizes and synthesizes three books on Black and Indigenous agrarian struggles in the modern-day territories of the USA. It discusses how they recount the centrality of land, national liberation, self-reliant development, food sovereignty and sustainable forms of agriculture and land management to Black and Indigenous radical struggle. It then suggests parallels and divergences between those struggles and those in the Third World’s agrarian south. It focusses on the anti-systemic dimensions of national liberation struggles in the core, especially those carried out historically by Black and Indigenous movements, and details how those movements historically looked out beyond the US landmass for solidarity and to build internationalist fronts. Finally, it reflects on their role in destabilizing settler-capitalism in the USA.

Transnational Food Law

Transnational food law is a growing field of practice that has emerged with the globalization of food and agricultural systems. This chapter analyzes the role of food and agriculture as a legally constitutive site of struggle. As both a basic need and an economic commodity, food is an object around which struggles over the organization of markets, the authority of legal institutions, and the regulation of powerful actors have consistently fomented. After surveying the role of agrarian struggles in shaping early international law, this chapter analyzes the contentious regulatory space of transnational food security governance. It argues that contemporary governance is shaped by competing paradigms—a “productivist” and “food sovereignty” paradigm—which transnational actors struggle to translate across a variety of regulatory institutions, arenas, and processes. This chapter thereby demonstrates how food and agricultural governance remain a critical space of struggle over the democratic and regulatory possibilities of global governance.

Pedagogies of Feminist Resistance: Agrarian Movements in Africa

In the historical course of agrarian transformation in Africa, the reconstitution and fragmentation of the peasantry along the lines of gender, ethnic, class, and racial divisions which facilitate their exploitation remains a central concern in the analysis of the peasant path, of which the exploitation of gendered labor has been a particularly important concern for feminist agrarian theorizations. In contribution to these debates, this article examines the ways in which feminist concerns have shaped, driven, and defined the social and political parameters of agrarian movements in Africa. Even though agrarian movements articulating gender questions are not generalizable as feminist, their concern with social, political, and economic structures of oppression and their approach to gendered oppression as a political question lends them to characterization as being feminist. Through an examination of the changing forms of women-led agrarian struggles, the article shows how women’s responses to the dominant structures and conditions of colonial and post-colonial capitalist accumulation could be characterized as feminist due to their social and political imperatives behind women’s resistance.

Introduction to symposium ‘Reimagining land: materiality, affect and the uneven trajectories of land transformation’

Over the past decade land has again moved to the centre of resource conflicts, agrarian struggles, and competing visions over the future of food and farming. This renewed interest in land necessitates asking the seemingly simple, but pertinent, question ‘what is land?’ To reach a more profound understanding of the uniqueness of land, and what distinguishes land from other resources, this symposium suggests the notion of ‘land imaginaries’ as a crucial lens in the study of current land transformations. Political-economy, and the particular economic, financial, or political interests of various actors involved in land projects do not directly result in, or translate into, outcomes, such as dispossession and enclosure, increased commodification, financialization, and assetization, or mobilization and resistance. All these processes are informed by different imaginaries of land—the underlying understandings, views, and visions of what land is, can, and should be—and associated visions, hopes, and dreams regarding land. Drawing on a variety of case studies from across the world, crossing Global North/South and East/West, and including contemporary and historical instances of land transformation, this symposium addresses the multifaceted ways in which implicit, explicit, and emergent understandings of land shape current land transformations.

Prismatic Village: The Margin at the Center in the Nepali Maoist Revolution

While the influence of peasant politics and agrarian struggles is growing extraordinarily in Nepal’s political landscape, their historical centrality and leadership in social transformation are undermined. This article demonstrates how the subaltern peasant politics of the 1970s and the subsequent Nepali Maoist revolution of the 1990s inversed the orthodox political imagination of peasants as primitive and pre-political, and argues that villages have always been a locus of political change in Nepal. By exploring the political history of Thabang Village in western Nepal, this article argues for a prismatic approach of studying peasant politics to understand how the structural changes of a particular village can instigate national political transformation. The main argument is that the internal dynamics of a village can enter into an articulated relationship with national political processes, which can swiftly transform the structural importance of the village and its nature of connections to other wider socio-political processes, allowing for unexpected political possibilities such as the Maoist revolution to emerge.