Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship

American Literature, Volume 84, Number 2, June 2012DOI 10.1215/00029831-1587359 © 2012 by Duke University Press

From its inception, the field of American ecocriti-cism has been fixated on the reinhabitation of the local community as a means of simultaneously regenerating ecological sensibility and participatory democracy.1 This vision, often called a “sense of place,” has been expressed in a variety of texts—from works by Henry David Thoreau to contemporary nature writing—that draw on well- established aesthetic modes to express an ideal relationship between nature and culture.2 The idea of America as a democracy constituted by independent small farmers has had a particularly powerful hold on the national imagination. Cultivation of a sense of place through long- term inhabitation and labor is central to the American georgic and to its embrace by the field of American ecocriticism.3 Critiquing this tradition, Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008) has called both early and contemporary ecocriticism to task for its nostal-gic relation to place, demanding a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the local and the global and proposing a renewed politics engaged with the realities of transnational identities, in what Heise terms ecocosmopolitanism. At the same time, the local foods movement—broadly defined to include farmers’ markets and community- supported agriculture, school garden and healthy lunch programs, and food justice organi-zations and urban gardens—has become a national obsession, with powerful advocates ranging from First Lady Michelle Obama to author Michael Pollan. This popular attention to local foods has prompted a renewed focus on food systems in academic discourse and has been seized upon by agrarian advocates as a sign of hope for restructuring

Janet Fiskio

Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship

302 American Literature

not just the food system but the economic and political governance of the United States. However, a lacuna remains between agrarian thought—with its steadfast commitment to place as the basis of ethics, citizenship, and democracy—and emerging social movements for food justice. The agrarian insistence on place implicitly, and some-times explicitly, devalues the experience, epistemology, and ethical agency of migrant and transnational communities. The question then becomes whether the concept of place can be reformulated in ways that are inclusive of communities who travel the borders of the food system and compelling to contemporary ecocriticism. An agrarianism of the margins unsettles the fundamental assumptions of traditional agrarianism and ecocriticism, opening a space for multiple and transi-tory ways of creating food, community, and place.

The New Agrarianism

The belief that agrarian life and labor are the foundation for citizenship and American democracy traces its lineage back to Thomas Jefferson and into the present with the philosophy of the contemporary New Agrarian movement, articulated by a group of farmer- scholar- activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s.4 Foundational texts of the New Agrarianism include Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America (1977) as well as Wes Jackson’s New Roots for Agriculture (1980) and the edited collection Meeting the Expectations of the Land (1984).5 Berry is perhaps the most powerful voice for revaluing agrarian thought and practice in the contemporary period, which includes “intimate care in the use of the land, and political democracy resting upon the indis-pensable foundation of economic democracy.”6 It is difficult to over-estimate Berry’s influence on environmental thinking and on eco-criticism in particular: he has been a voice for the family farm, the rural community, and the nonhuman world for more than forty years.7 Berry offers some of the most prominent and promising conceptual-izations of citizenship and responsibility in current discussions of food politics, particularly in his insistence that citizenship must be under-stood and practiced as more than either nationalism or consumerism. The New Agrarianism, and the agrarian tradition more widely, holds that long- term inhabitation and cultivation of land leads to the cultivation of character, which in turn produces individuals capable of being responsible citizens. The movement participates in what Kim-

Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship 303

berly Smith describes as “a specific political tradition of American democratic agrarianism, characterized by a claim that all its propo-nents have made in some form: that the family farm is the chief reposi-tory of the virtues necessary to the republic” (WB, 15). New Agrarian philosopher and ethicist Paul Thompson calls the belief that “farmers make the best citizens” the “central agrarian tenet.”8 This belief is the foundation of Jefferson’s republican vision, as evidenced in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781): “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” In contrast to the sacred calling of the farmer, Jefferson associates manufacturing with “mobs” in the cities, who “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour.”9 According to Jefferson, manufacturing corrupts by placing industrial workers in a dependent position and by depriving them of contact with the land. An analysis of this Jeffersonian vision of citizenship is critical for understanding the conceptual rupture between the New Agrarian-ism and contemporary movements for food justice by those who inhabit the postindustrial landscape of late transnational capitalism in the United States. The tradition of civic republicanism holds that land ownership is “a central requirement of citizenship,” essential to independence and civic responsibility. As Smith notes, democratic agrarianism holds that land ownership alone is not sufficient to fos-ter citizenship; it is also necessary to engage in the manual labor of farming (WB, 20–21). In contemporary agrarianism, this argument for land ownership is meant to protect the farmer as well as to critique the system of corporate absenteeism (WB, 90–91). However, current patterns of agrarian land ownership are inextricable from the devel-opment of a racialized economy in the United States.10 For example, as Smith observes in her study of black agrarianism, economic poli-cies in the post–Civil War era South deprived freedmen of the oppor-tunity to become landowners, and the Southern Homestead Act’s promise of affordable land evaporated as both concentration of land ownership by corporations and tenancy rates by African Americans rose during Reconstruction.11 Similarly, Frieda Knobloch shows that indigenous peoples were displaced by agricultural colonization and policy, including the Dawes General Allotment Act.12 Berry acknowl-


edges this history in his 1988 afterword to The Hidden Wound, identi-fying the dispossession of African American farmers as attributable in part to “racial prejudice.”13 The New Agrarianism, however, has tended to elide racialized disparities in its analysis of the problems of contemporary agriculture, focusing instead on environmental issues and a more populist critique of economic injustice, such as land con-solidation, without engaging wider questions of food justice.14 Heise notes that “environmental justice activists have often taken issue with the underlying assumptions of race, class, and gender that tend to be taken for granted in the environmental ethics of white, male, middle- class writers, including Berry and Sanders” (SP, 31). In contrast, the food justice movement traces an alternate intellectual and political lin-eage from Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism, one that Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi argue “begins with the struggles that have taken place in the fields and the factories, which have a long and deep his-tory in the United States.”15 As Gottlieb and Joshi describe in their chapter “Growing Justice,” the food justice movement includes orga-nizations for farm and factory workers’ rights and a variety of growers, including immigrant, refugee, and urban farmers (FJ, 123–49). While the New Agrarianism’s philosophy rests on Jefferson’s formulation of the ideal citizen as a rural landowner, food justice activism often takes place in urban settings on public or unclaimed rather than privately owned land.

Wendell Berry’s Agrarian Poetics

Berry’s analysis of American democracy is structured by the funda-mental conflict between the industrial and agricultural mindsets first established by Jefferson. From this founding binary, Berry derives a series of aligned dichotomies, including the opposition between frag-mentation and wholeness articulated in his early essay, “The Body and the Earth” (1977).16 Berry’s enduring defense of communal and eco-logical integrity is not only a political position but also an aesthetic resistance to fragmentation, formed in opposition to a “pattern of dis-integration that is at once cultural and agricultural”: he states that “to be healthy is to be whole” (“Body and the Earth,” AC, 118, 98). For Berry, the foundation of a healthy farm is the household and family established by marriage (“Whole Horse,” CP, 117). Essential to both the farm household and the farm community is the long- term inhabita-tion of a particular place: “If the word community is to mean or amount


to anything, it must refer to a place (in its natural integrity) and its people. It must refer to a placed people” (“Sex, Economy, Freedom, Community” (1992), AC, 178). Berry’s writings express many of the anxieties characteristic of modernism: the destabilization of cultural traditions, conflict in gen-der relations, and geographical dislocation. However, while the aes-thetics of fragmentation became a primary mode for modernist writers of all political persuasions to express this experience and sometimes to create coherence out of multiplicity, Berry’s agrarian poetics resist ecological, cultural, and psychological fragmentation. In his words, “fragmentation is a disease” (“Body and the Earth,” AC, 106). Berry’s prose style is perhaps best characterized as a bioregional realism. The adherence to place manifests in his fiction both thematically and for-mally: in his stories, which are embedded in the landscape and com-munity of the fictional town of Port William, Berry employs a straight-forward prose inflected by local patterns of speech. Consonant with this focus on the significance of place to family and community, Berry’s most consistent protest against the modern world is the displacement that comes with a changing economic and cul-tural situation (SP, 31). Heise points out that this anxiety about Ameri-can mobility is embedded in long- standing cultural traditions rather than an explicitly environmental program (SP, 49). But for Berry, the unsettling of America is a present danger, and he therefore insists on the relationship between long- term inhabitation of place and citizen-ship. This argument is not reactionary or xenophobic; rather, it forms the basis of Berry’s ongoing resistance to dominant forms of national-ism. Berry defines patriotism as loyalty not to the government but to land and people:

I speak from a local, some might say a provincial, point of view. When I try to identify myself to myself I realize that, in my most immediate reasons and affections, I am less than an American, less than a Kentuckian, less even than a Henry Countian, but am a man most involved with and concerned about my family, my neighbors, and the land that is daily under my feet. It is this involvement that defines my citizenship in the larger entities. (“In Distrust of Move-ments” (1998), CP, 43)

This statement articulates a version of what Heise identifies as “the ethic of proximity” (SP, 42), which “relies on the assumption that genuine ethical commitments can only grow out of the lived imme-


diacies of the local that constitute the core of one’s authentic iden-tity” and a “mistrust of the large- scale, abstract, and often invisible networks of authority, expertise, and exchange that structure modern societies” (SP, 42, 35). This resistance to government control and loyalty to land, family, and community is depicted in the short story “Fidelity.”17 “Fidelity” takes place in the present in Port William, the fictional landscape for Berry’s stories. Burley Coulter, a well- known character from the Port William ensemble, is dying of old age, and his relatives take him to a hospital against their better judgment. They soon find that he is trapped there, and they are unable to free him, so that the last days of his life have become a nightmare. Separated from family and place, Burley becomes disoriented and falls into a coma, a state of com-plete disconnection: his daughter- in- law lies awake at night because “she, like the others, was shaken by the remorse of a kind of treason” (“F,” 113). The choice of the word “treason” (rather than, for example, “betrayal”) inflects this ordinary domestic situation with the gravity of patriotism. His son Danny (whom Burley only acknowledged late in life) kidnaps—or liberates—him from the hospital by pretending that Burley is a corpse. After this event, the narrative splits into two main threads, narrated from different points of view. One is Danny’s story, as he helps Burley to die a good death. The other is the story of Danny’s community—his family and attorney friends Henry and Wheeler Catlett—who shield Danny from the governmental forces (figured by the character Detective Bode) that seek to claim Burley. The shifts in point of view are clearly marked by paragraph breaks and white space. Rather than forcing the reader to make sense of a series of voices and to stitch together these fragments into a coherent narrative, “Fidelity” instead leads the readers through a carefully con-structed narrative development, in which the main characters, com-municating wordlessly by virtue of their long intimacy, protect Danny, deprive the government of evidence against him, and allow Burley to die at peace in the woods where he has lived his life. The harmonious cooperation of the community stymies Bode—a “sexually liberated” divorcé with no personal ties or communal attachments—who only slowly recognizes that he is no match for them (“F,” 146). In the final scene, Bode realizes that he “had not been able to see where he was going for some time, and now suddenly he did see, and he saw that they had seen where he was going all along and had got there ahead of


him” (“F,” 179). Our pleasure as readers comes from the fact that we, through our insights into each of the characters, have (unlike Bode) seen the pattern of defense and protection being woven by the commu-nity. When Bode finally confronts Danny, we know that the evidence against him has been eliminated and that Burley is dead and buried, having died peacefully: Burley is now literally a part of his place. “Fidelity” narrates the success of a small town against the imper-sonal forces of corporation and government and the values of commu-nity and belonging against those of individualism and capitalist exploi-tation. Henry Catlett, one member of the community of friends and relatives that surrounds Burley and Danny, makes the stakes of this confrontation clear when he explains to Bode that he will not cooper-ate with the police investigation. Henry states that his reason is

“patriotism—love for your country and your neighbors. There’s a difference, Mr. Bode, between the state, or any other organization, and the country. I’m not going to cooperate with you in this case because I don’t like what you represent in this case. . . . You’re here now to tell us that a person who is sick and unconscious, or even a person who is conscious and well, is ultimately a property of the organizations and the state. . . . Some of us think people belong to each other and to God.” (“F,” 164–66)

However, the story also offers an internal recognition of the slow decline of the community that parallels Burley’s death. The reflec-tions of Hannah Coulter, the wife of Burley’s nephew, make clear the community’s grief and increasing desperation at the loss of their chil-dren: “Each one of these departures had left them with more work to do and, as Hannah sometimes thought, less reason to do it” (“F,” 152). The community members in “Fidelity” are able to accomplish a good death for their uncle and friend, but are not able to envision a future for themselves. Hannah attributes this at least in part to Danny and his influence: “Danny had never belonged much to the modern world. . . . Of them all, Danny most clearly saw that world as his enemy—as their enemy” (“F,” 154). This poignant reflection reveals a more general problem: that a rigid rejection of the modern world leaves no other option than for communities to slowly decline. This inflexibility is apparent in Berry’s statements about place. The insistence on place and its consequent devaluation of the experience of migrant and transnational communities needs to be


rethought in the New Agrarianism. In response to the formation of a national security strategy post- 9/11, Berry writes: “They can-not protect us from what may prove to be the greatest danger of all: the estrangement of our people from one another and from our land. Increasingly, Americans—including, notoriously, their politicians—are not from anywhere. And so they have in this ‘homeland,’ which their government now seeks to make secure on their behalf, no home place that they are strongly moved to know or love or use well or pro-tect” (“A Citizen’s Response to ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’” (2003), CP, 6). The difficulty with this framework is that it reinscribes the margin-alization of migrant, undocumented, tenant, and temporary workers. Berry is correct that the industrial agricultural system ruthlessly exploits these workers and that land consolidation undergirds this system. But an account of agricultural ethics stemming from the experience and perspective of the settled landowner excludes the agency of many who engage in agricultural labor today: Gottlieb and Joshi estimate that one million workers (or one- third of the agricul-tural labor force) is undocumented. These immigrant workers (from Mexico and South and Central America, primarily) are employed not only on farms but also in food processing and food service, reveal-ing the vertical dominance of industrial agribusiness (FJ, 20, 29). Berry’s assessment of the situation of migrant workers is that they are exploited like slaves: “They have no connection to the commu-nities in which they work; they have no hope of owning the land on which they work; they have no social or cultural ties to the people for whom they work. . . . We ought to ask, I suggest, if this is acceptable in a nation still somewhat proud of having freed its slaves” (“Still Stand-ing” (1999), CP, 162). Gottlieb and Joshi confirm this indictment of modern- day slavery through servitude and debt bondage; however, they also focus on struggles for workers’ rights (FJ, 15–18), rather than depicting migrant workers solely in terms of their lack of capaci-ties (“no connection,” “no hope,” “no social or cultural ties”).18 With-out attention to the ways that migrant laborers carve out positions from which to act, ethical agency in agrarian thought is reserved for the settled farmer who practices responsible stewardship. The resis-tance to fragmentation and displacement thus leaves Berry’s poet-ics without the capacity to recognize the subjectivity of those who inhabit the margins of the food system. By defining the ideal citizen


as one who remains in place, and in relation to a place, Berry—and the New Agrarian discourse more widely—overlooks those who know how to travel between places and how to recreate place in transient situations.19 To address this question of ethical agency, I draw on Berry’s own concept of “margins” (the culminating chapter from his landmark book The Unsettling of America). In this chapter Berry argues for revaluing the margins of fields as a source for genetic, ecological, and intellec-tual diversity.20 Berry’s primary focus in this chapter is on farmers and rural farm communities. From a broader perspective, encompassing not only agricultural production but the whole food system, there is another set of actors whose presence needs to be made visible. These are the people on the margins: urban gardeners, migrant workers, gleaners, dumpster- divers, transients, squatters, and food sovereignty and food justice activists. In contrast to Berry’s agrarian poetics, with its aesthetics of wholeness, I suggest the aesthetics of fragmentation and ethics of transience in Helena María Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s documentary film The Garden (2008) as resources for thinking through the questions of agriculture, place, and food justice.

Re- placing Place

The opening of Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus is vivid and dis-orienting.21 The poetics of this text are fragmented—beautiful but jagged, like the accompanying imagery of trees: “Wisps of wind ruffled the orange and avocado and peach trees which rolled and tumbled as far back as the etched horizon of the mountain range. A cluster of amputated trees marked the entrance of the side road” (UFJ, 3). The damaged fruit trees figure the destruction of workers’ lives in Cali-fornia’s Central Valley, the fruit and vegetable basket of the United States. Estrella, a young woman working as a migrant laborer, forms the central point of view in the novel; the fertility and stunted beauty of the fruit trees frame Estrella’s emerging sexuality at the intersec-tion of complex forces of race, class, gender, and nation. We see the landscape through her eyes as her family arrives in their old station wagon: “The barn had burst through a clearing of trees and the cra-tered roof reminded her of the full moon” (UFJ, 3). The full moon, with all its romantic associations, would be a clichéd image for the begin-


ning of a conventional coming of age story, but in Estrella’s world it is used to describe a collapsing barn roof in an industrial agricultural landscape. Through these figures of mobility and fragmentation, Viramontes’s novel destabilizes the agrarian assumptions of settlement and whole-ness as fundamental to character and citizenship. The novel unfolds an understanding of community, family, and place in the lives of workers marginalized by the food system in conjunction with the economic and immigration policies of the United States. The central story is a bildungsroman in which Estrella, during the course of a summer picking season, positions herself as an agent capable of ethical deci-sions and action.22 The social, familial, and aesthetic fragmentation that structures the novel is a source of both trauma and possibility for Estrella as she learns to navigate the terrain of the industrial agricul-tural complex. Place, in this novel, is an amalgam of social location, experiential knowledge formulated through labor, the industrial land-scape of the Central Valley, and alternative family arrangements. Environmental injustice constructs specific kinds of knowledge and experiences of place in the novel. Ironically, in one of the most pro-ductive agricultural landscapes in the world the workers live in a food desert, revealed in the description of a grueling trip to the store.23 In her work Learning from Experience (2002), Paula Moya argues that Under the Feet of Jesus “contests the outsider status typically accorded to migrant farmworkers” by drawing the reader into an “empathic identification with Estrella and her family” through the technique of focalization (LE, 20). This is exemplified by the opening sentence of this journey to the highway market, which establishes an experi-ential epistemology from Estrella’s mother’s perspective (LE, 192): “Petra knew the capricious black lines on a map did little to reveal the hump and tear of the stitched pavement” (UFJ, 103). The figure of the map—the abstract depiction of space utilized as a colonizing tool—is contrasted to the perspective of those who inhabit the actual place, which is described in its sensual particulars: the smothering heat and the shine of oil on the highway they must cross to reach the store.24 Botanical details, a signature device of nature writing, here reveal the social relations that structure the landscape: “The rubber of his shoe stuck with thistle thorns which were planted around the fenceless edges of the orchards to discourage roadside thievery” (UFJ, 103). Inside the store, the produce “hardly resembled the crops harvested


days before. The fruits and vegetables were firm and solid out in the hot fields; but here in the store, only the relics remained: squished old tomatoes spilled over onto the bruised apples and the jalapeños mixed with soft tomatillos and cucumbers peeked from between blotchy oranges” (UFJ, 109–110). Petra’s knowledge is further revealed by her ability to find sound garlic amid the wilting produce and her under-standing of how to use the plant: “These would be good crushed and boiled with milk for stomachache tonics, these would be pickled with a little vinegar and stored in the shade” and would ease the knots of her veins, and these had cloves big enough for dicing and adding to hot chile” (UFJ, 112–13). Petra’s ability to care for her health and to feed her children is based on a culinary tradition no longer tied to its place of origin: a deterritorialized knowledge (SP, 51). The production of scarcity in this landscape of abundance is amelio-rated by the informal gift economy established by the workers. When the teenager Alejo introduces himself to Estrella’s family, he brings a gift of peaches he has gathered from a nearby orchard. Estrella’s mother in turn offers him tortillas and pinto beans from a sack that Perfecto (Petra’s companion) has acquired by bartering labor, tell-ing him to take them to his mother. Alejo explains that his mother is dead, but that he is here with his cousin, and that he has a grand-mother in Texas (UFJ, 44–45). Community and family in this land-scape are more mutable than the settled families of Berry’s “Fidelity,” but they still find ways to accomplish the tasks of care and to help one another negotiate the hostile forces of government and corporate institutions. At the same time, the transient lifestyle of the workers is clearly depicted as the result of oppressive forces, not as a model to be celebrated. Petra, looking at a middle- class driver filling his gas tank outside the store, imagines him “a man who knew his neighbors well, who returned to the same bed, who could tell where the schools and where the stores were, and where the Nescafé coffee jars in the stores were located, and payday always came at the end of the week” (UFJ, 105). Under the Feet of Jesus reveals that being settled is a privilege con-ditioned by class and nation. The sense of place in Under the Feet of Jesus resembles the concept so celebrated in American ecocriticism in its naturalist detail: the sharp smell of garlic and the texture of ripe peaches emerge vividly, as does the crushing heat and thirst of work in the fields. Embodied and local knowledge—another hallmark of ecocritical scholarship—is


central to the experience of landscape,25 which offers mingled plea-sures and poisons: “They headed for the irrigation ditch and halted near the walk bridge. By then their throats were dry and sore and swallowing meant a painful raking. Estrella had heard through the grapevine about the water, and knew Big Mac the Foreman lied about the pesticides not spilling into the ditch; but the water seemed clear and cool and irresistible on such a hot day” (UFJ, 32). The meander-ing stream of the pastoral landscape, and the tilled fields and peasant farmer of the georgic, are here transposed into a polluted ditch and the weary bodies of two young girls. The sense of this place is inextri-cable from networks of social power. Becoming one with the land, the image of final peace for Burley Coulter in Berry’s “Fidelity” becomes a figure of terror in Under the Feet of Jesus in the recurring image of the tar pit. The tar pit first appears in Alejo’s imagination when he is sprayed by pesticides. He imagines “sinking into the tar pits. . . . No fingerprint or history, bone. No lava stone. No story or family, bone” (UFJ, 78). Moya notes that this internal monologue signifies Alejo’s fear of being erased from his-tory: the denial of agency and identity (LE, 202).26 After the poisoning, Alejo shares his fear with Estrella, describing how the oil that runs the farm trucks is derived from the dead bodies accumulated through time on the ocean floor, “bones becoming tar oil,” while noting that he and Estrella (and their fellow migrant laborers) are “stuck, more like it. Stuck” (UFJ, 87, 86). Later, Estrella returns to the image of the tar pits as a way of understanding and resisting the system that consumes the bodies and lives of workers: “She remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and oil made gasoline. The oil was made from their bones. . . . It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map” (UFJ, 148). The images of the tar pits crushing bodies into oil becomes a figure for bodies that fuel the industrial agricultural system as well as the US economy, “the strutting powerlines” that cross the landscape (UFJ, 103). Under the Feet of Jesus thus depicts a disturbing inversion of the environmentalist desire to merge with place in what Heise describes as “epiphanic fusion[]” (SP, 29). Industrial agriculture is instead imag-ined as a sublimated form of cannibalism, and becoming one with the earth means being reduced to raw material in the system of capitalist production.


Place, then, is not a fixed location for Estrella, who lives in an inter-stitial space that is more a process than a stable site.27 She establishes instead a practice of responsibility and care for her community on this shifting ground. Cecelia Lawless writes that the characters in Under the Feet of Jesus inhabit an “in- between space” where “words are like tools used for building places to inhabit with others.”28 In the first chapter the link between words—the capacity to think and speak—and tools for deconstructing the flows of power is made clear in what Moya terms “an expanded notion of literacy that figures ‘reading’ as a skill involving a human agent’s total engagement with the world” (LE, 175). Estrella goes into a silent rage when confronted with Per-fecto’s toolbox: “She had opened the tool chest and all that jumbled steel inside the box, the iron bars and things with handles, the funny- shaped objects, seemed as confusing and foreign as the alphabet she could not decipher” (UFJ, 24). She connects the obscurity of the tools with literacy:

The teachers in the schools did the same, never giving her the infor-mation she wanted. Estrella would ask over and over, So what is this, and point to the diagonal lines written in chalk on the black-board with a dirty fingernail. The script A’s had the curlicue of a pry bar, a hammerhead split like a V. The small i’s resembled nails. So tell me. But some of the teachers were more concerned about the dirt under her fingernails. (UFJ, 24)

Perfecto, recognizing Estrella’s frustration, tries to connect with his partner’s angry daughter by offering her “names that gave meaning to the tools.” Estrella lifts a pry bar and, feeling its weight and texture, “she came to understand how essential it was to know these things. That was when she began to read” (UFJ, 26). In this passage, the ability to read signifies a capacity for meaningful action in the world (LE, 177). The figure of the crowbar reappears after Alejo has been poisoned by pesticides and a nurse at a clinic takes the family’s last dollar while refusing to help him, thus depriving the family of the gas money they need to drive him to the hospital. Estrella connects the gas money to the tar pits and thus to the exploitation of workers within the system, recognizing that “the nurse owed them as much as they owed her” (UFJ, 148). She reenters the clinic with a crowbar and demands the return of their money, smashing a few objects in order to persuade the


nurse. At this moment, words and tools fuse into one event: Estrella reads the rules of the social world and transgresses them to insti-tute justice, creating a new set of meanings; as Christa Grewe- Volpp describes, “Words can be used as tools: to order the world, to put frag-ments together, to construct.” In doing so, Estrella enacts what Chela Sandoval calls “the methodology of the oppressed.”29 Expanding on Fredric Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Sandoval theorizes the fragmented subjectivity of the oppressed as a site from which to enact resistance.30 She expli-cates Jameson’s position that “forms of resistance, oppositional con-sciousness, and social movement are no longer effective under the imperatives of the neocolonizing mode of globalization he calls post-modernism,” but she argues, in opposition to Jameson, that the mar-ginalized subjects of Western imperialism have developed an “oppo-sitional consciousness” that can function as a site of resistance. Sandoval conceptualizes the decentered subjectivity of the colonized as a source of skills, methods, and technologies that can enable nego-tiation of the postmodern terrain.31 Estrella acts in this scene as an ethical agent, one who is capable of breaking unjust laws when her conscience requires with the tools she has gained through experience and from her community. Moya argues that “Viramontes implicitly invites her readers to transcend their own particular perspectives, to complicate their own previous understandings of the world” (LE, 209). In this way the ethical actions of the migrant workers in the novel institute a new, more complicated paradigm for the reader. Viramontes’s depiction of migrant workers’ agency contrasts with Berry’s portrayal of these workers as powerless. Berry’s assessment is echoed by Paul Thompson in his reading of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Thompson articulates the threat to agrarian moral philosophy in the face of displacement:

As the families move west, the practice of establishing reciprocal duties among known individuals erodes. It becomes clear that each member of the family will be in an increasingly weaker position to repay moral debts to others as time goes by. Furthermore, the itin-erant nature of their lives and employment constantly places them among strangers. . . . Agrarianism is an ethic of place, and the Joads are out of place in California.32

In opposition to this assumption that transience will erode moral capacity, Estrella’s family’s care for Alejo (who is not related to them


and is only their neighbor for a short time) demonstrates the capacity of migrant communities to maintain ethical agency. Petra articulates this responsibility clearly: “If we don’t take care of each other, who would take care of us? Petra asked. We have to look out for our own” (UFJ, 96). Further, this relationship of care and love, demarcated in opposition to the dehumanizing conditions of industrial migrant labor, complicates the agrarian ideal of the family: Alejo, who lives with his cousin and speaks of his absent grandmother but not of any parents, is taken in by Estrella’s family—which includes Perfecto, whom Estrella refers to internally as “the man who was not her father” (UFJ, 3).33 In the world of transnational migration and agricultural labor, the meaning of place shifts from the source of stability and rights of citi-zenship accorded by the New Agrarianism. But this does not indicate that place has no meaning. When the family arrives at the cabin where they will spend the picking season, Petra and Estrella enact a ritual of constructing place:

Aquí? Estrella asked, staking the soil right in front of the porch and the mother nodded and Estrella guided the stick and began the demarcation around the house while the mother sang softly. She grated the stick against the rocky soil, dragging the stick to the side and then to the back of the house where the verses of the song were lost in the chorus of crickets until she returned to the point from where she first began then retraced the line again for a deeper, more definite oval. (UFJ, 41–42)

This circle of protection is to prevent scorpions from crossing the line (UFJ, 42). Additionally, the drawing of the line deterritorializes and reterritorializes the cabin.34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their theorems on deterritorialization, write that “home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space.”35 For Deleuze and Guattari, ter-ritorializing movements exceed the functions of survival and become aesthetic, a mode of expression.36 The marking of a line in the soil around the cabin extracts a center from chaos, deterritorializing the cabin from the chaotic forces of global capitalism and reterritorializ-ing it, temporarily and contingently, as a home. This place is not a home by virtue of long- term inhabitation and ownership, but rather because the mother and Estrella hold a set of skills that make pos-sible the continual creation and recreation of place out of space. The aesthetics of fragmentation coalesce in this event into an ethics of


transience, a conferral of meaning through the repetition of a process: what Deleuze and Guattari call a “refrain.”37 The aesthetics of fragmentation and ethics of transience pose chal-lenges to central values of the New Agrarianism. Berry, for example, reads in the history of the United States a “subordinate tendency of settlement, of domestic permanence. This was the ambition of thou-sands of immigrants; it is formulated eloquently in some of the letters of Thomas Jefferson; it was the dream of the freed slaves; it was written into law in the Homestead Act of 1862.”38 This wholly positive reading of agrarian settlement contrasts with the interpretation of the politi-cal significance of the act by Frieda Knobloch, who contends that “the 160- acre homestead, institutionalized by the Homestead Act in 1862 . . . indicates at least two things: the determination on the part of the fed-eral government to recode a ‘wild’ landscape as quickly as possible by creating vast domesticated fields and the commercial nature of west-ern farming.” Knobloch argues that the size of the homestead specified by the act produced both land consolidation and a landless workforce. She reads American agriculture as a mode of colonization and the drive to settlement as enabling state control: “A land mass formerly occu-pied by heterogeneous groups of often migratory people was at least abstractly transformed into property, a preliminary capture of land that allowed the state to supervise and support continental occupation and sedentary settlement by its own subjects.”39 James Scott makes a simi-lar argument in his classic work Seeing Like a State (1998):

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state func-tions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. . . . The organization of the natural world was no exception. Agriculture is, after all, a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to suit man’s goals . . . calculated to make the terrain, its products, and its workforce more legible—and hence manipulable—from above and from the center.40

While Berry sees the independence gained from land ownership as the basis for resistance to governmental abuse of power, the very char-acteristic of permanence, in Knobloch’s and Scott’s readings, makes farming populations more vulnerable to government oversight and control.


Urban gardening collectives have utilized precisely this condition of fluidity to establish claims on vacant lands. The urban farming movement, by deterritorializing public and unclaimed space in cities, challenges government forms of surveillance and power, as well as narratives central to American identity. In his analysis of community- garden stories, Robert Emmett argues that “for the story of land as individual property—root of liberty and engine of economic devel-opment—to continue, a counter- narrative of land as collective iden-tity—root of community and seasonal reproduction—must be sup-pressed.”41 The 2008 documentary film The Garden narrates just such a challenge to prevailing systems—and the government’s response.42 The “garden” refers to a fourteen- acre community farm in the midst of South Central Los Angeles that was established on public land but has been sold out from under the urban farmers at less than market value to a real estate investor. South Central is the site of one of the land-mark victories for environmental justice: in the mid- 1980s, the Con-cerned Citizens of South Central managed to halt the construction of a waste incinerator that would have distributed even more toxic bur-dens (without benefits) to the community.43 The Garden takes place in this historic neighborhood. The South Central farmers’ arguments for their rights are not based on long- term inhabitation and property ownership, but rather on a kind of urban usufruct: their grounds are their ability to feed themselves from the land and the community they have formed in this space. The creation of this urban oasis demonstrates knowledge of how to con-struct place—in this case, knowing how to build soil and grow food. The film’s main focus is the battle the gardeners wage against govern-mental and private interests and the injustice that becomes evident in this process. Although the South Central farmers, with the help of a coalition of allies, manage to raise the money demanded by devel-oper Ralph Horowitz, he refuses to sell the property for reasons that remain obscure in the film. However, in explaining his decision, Horo-witz invokes a xenophobic vocabulary:

Even if they raised a hundred million dollars, this group could not buy this property. [This is] not about money. It’s about I don’t like their cause, and I don’t like their conduct. . . . Is this good for our country, that everybody is owed and nobody is obligated? . . . What they should have said to the taxpayers of Los Angeles, and to me,


is: “This is a gracious country. Thank you very much for letting us have these gardens here. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Both implicitly and explicitly, this statement stages the conflict as one of landless workers against landed taxpayers and of immigrants against citizens (“this group” versus “our country,” “the taxpayers of Los Angeles,” and “me”). According to this logic, the right to grow food is not a human right, but a right derived from property owner-ship; outside of this legal structure, the only thing that immigrant and landless communities should hope for is a charity that is easily (even arbitrarily) revoked.44 In contrast, the South Central farmers argue for a right to the land that derives from their labor. At the first public comment session, Don Eddie holds up his hands and proclaims: “I am a farmer, and here is the proof in my hands! To not allow us to stay on that land that has already been cultivated! For what reason?” This argument recalls the philosophy associated with Emiliano Zapata: “The land belongs to those who work it.” Similarly, Miguel Angel Pérez (a South Central gardener and member of the Brown Berets de Aztlan) reminds the community of the rallying cry of the Mexican revolution: “¡Tierra y Libertad!” (“Land and Freedom!”), and we hear a response: “¡Viva Zapata!” (“Long Live Zapata!”). The community also chants the slogan of the United Farmworkers, “¡Sí, se puede!” (“Yes, we can!”) as a call to action.45 The community’s claiming of usufruct rights is embedded within a political genealogy of revolution for the rights of the dispossessed. It is an argument not only for food access but for food sovereignty: control of the means of production and the ability to provide itself with fresh, affordable, culturally appro-priate foods. Significantly, the South Central Farmers argue not for individual property rights but for the rights of the community to use the land for sustenance—more similar to the institution of the ejido, which grants communal cultivation rights to landless farmers, than to the independent georgic farmer. The South Central Farmers’ challenge to the system of private property rights is met with bulldozers and police in riot gear. The film tracks the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of spaces and the political struggles that underlie these movements. In the first sequence of events, we witness the creation of the garden out of a deserted lot owned by the city. The film frames the struggle for the squatter’s rights with the 1992 LA riots following the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King. Footage from the videotape


of the beating is interspersed with scenes of the riots. One image emerges clearly from the chaos: a young woman looks at the cam-era and shouts “No justice no peace! Shut the city down!” Her hand- lettered sign declares the same slogan. Through stills and stories from the community, we see a garden emerge from the vacant lot. The aerial shots of the fourteen- acre garden in the midst of the industrial landscape are visually and emotionally striking. The film suggests that the reterritorialization of the garden into private property occurs through the collusion of government offi-cials and a private investor. The demolition of the garden recalls the opening images of the Rodney King riots, as police forces surround the urban garden, beating and arresting community members as bull-dozers smash corn stalks, drive over patches of nopales, and rip up mature fruit trees. We witness the garden transformed back into a wasteland.46 The final images of the film, however, focus on the recre-ation of gardens in new spaces. One group of dispossessed farmers has accepted land from the city and begun to rebuild the soil. A farmer explains that the inheritance his parents left him was not money but “working the land.”47 Rufina, one of the main organizers of the resis-tance, states, “We could always grow plants again. I just need to get the land.” She and other gardeners from South Central have begun an eighty- acre market farm in Bakersfield. In both cases, the farmers are able to use their knowledge and community relationships to recreate place. This is the technology of the oppressed: the ability to engage in the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of spaces, over and over again. An agrarianism of the margins requires a reformulation of the ethi-cal assumptions on which agrarianism is based—assumptions that fail to question in a fundamental way the grounds of agency. Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus reveals that agrarian philosophy must theorize the forces of agribusiness, oppressive labor conditions, and national-ism on workers’ lives, requiring us to develop our imagination of both local and global food systems to see those who have been rendered invisible.48 The danger of local foods movements is that they operate within the framework of late transnational capitalism and may con-ceptualize democratic action as mere consumer preference.49 Berry, in contrast, has insisted that food politics needs to be understood not as passive consumerism but as a form of democratic freedom and responsibility.50 Similarly, Vandana Shiva, in her critiques of the


Green and Gene Revolutions, describes a wider concept of food sov-ereignty: control of the means of production, including seeds, by local communities.51 The concept of place in ecocriticism and the New Agrarianism is complicated and intensifed by the experiences of transient commu-nities. In Under the Feet of Jesus and The Garden, the relationship of individuals and communities to places is dynamic and mutable. The ability to create places out of fragments—the circle around the cabin, the deserted lot in the city—offers both agrarianism and ecocriticism a new mode for conceptualizing place as a capacity and practice rather than as a static ideal. The landscape of agriculture is in the midst of transformation in the United States, and the most innovative actors are those from the margins of the food system, communities who are deterritorializing agricultural and urban landscapes and reterritorial-izing these spaces as sites of collective action for food democracy.

Oberlin College

Notes

My thanks to Adrian Bautista, Ted Toadvine, San Maday Travis, and Sandra Zagarell for helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay, and to Adrian Bautista and Michelle Jahnke for their help with translation. Versions of this essay were presented at the International Association for Environmental Phi-losophy annual conference in Montreal (October 2010) and the Food Justice conference in Eugene, Oregon (February 2011). I am grateful to conference participants and my fellow panelists, especially Paul Thompson, for comments made at these gatherings. I would also like to thank the students in my spring 2011 course “American Agricultures” at Oberlin College, who have been my most thoughtful interlocutors on questions of food and justice.1 See Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmen-

tal Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008). Fur-ther references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as SP. See also Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cam-bridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1995) and Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).

2 For an analysis of the persistence of a sense of place in American lit-erature and the field of ecocriticism’s participation in this discourse, see Heise, Sense of Place. I am indebted to Heise’s scholarship through-out this essay, particularly her critique of ecocriticism’s attachment to


place, as well as her suggestion that ecocritics engage with the concept of deterritorialization.

3 The georgic mode celebrates rural life and the cultivation of virtue through agricultural labor. In the US context, this valorization of farmers and rural culture has been inflected with particular political philoso-phies, some more democratic and populist and others more elitist (see Kimberly K. Smith, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace [Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2003]; and James A. Montmar-quet, The Idea of Agrarianism: From Hunter- Gatherer to Agrarian Radical in Western Culture [Moscow: Univ. of Idaho Press, 1989]). In this essay, I focus on what Smith identifies as “democratic agrarianism” (15). Further references to Smith’s Wendell Berry are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as WB. For an argument on the importance of agrarian philosophy to ecocriticism, see William Major, “The Agrarian Vision and Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Envi-ronment 14 (summer 2007): 51–70.

4 The term New Agrarianism generally refers to theorists within an identi-fiable intellectual lineage, often marked as beginning with Liberty Hyde Bailey and the Country Life Movement (see, for example, Allan Carlson, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth- Century America [New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000]; and Montmarquet, “American Agrarianism: The Living Tradition,” in The Idea of Agrarianism, 221–50). Here I use the term to describe contem-porary agrarianism as represented by Berry and his intellectual cohort. For a historical account of the development of agrarian philosophy and Berry’s relationship to and divergence from other thinkers in this tradi-tion, see Smith, Wendell Berry.

5 See Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (New York: Avon, 1977); Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1980); and Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship, ed. Wes Jackson, Wen-dell Berry, and Bruce Colman (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1984).

6 Wendell Berry, “The Whole Horse” (1996), in Citizenship Papers (Wash-ington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003), 117. Further references to the essays in this collection will be cited parenthetically in the text as essay title, CP.

7 Lawrence Buell cites Berry as “one of literary bioregionalism’s leading voices” (Endangered World, 115), and he discusses his influence on eco-criticism at several points in The Environmental Imagination and Writing for an Endangered World. Heise critiques Berry’s participation in the dis-courses of place- based identity in Sense of Place (see 17–67).

8 Paul B. Thompson, The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmen-tal Ethics (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2010), 53.


9 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (1781; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1999), 170, 171.

10 My thanks to Marian Dalke for helping me to articulate the connec-tion among land ownership, race, and equity in US history and the New Agrarianism.

11 See Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foun-dations (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2007), 69–70.

12 Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996), 58.

13 Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound (New York: North Point Press, 1989), 117.

14 There are, of course, exceptions to this critique. For example, Berry’s Hidden Wound addresses the legacy of slavery and ongoing racism in Berry’s life, Southern culture, and US agriculture more generally. Theo-rists Gary Paul Nabhan and Vandana Shiva, whose work is included in New Agrarian anthologies, have consistently engaged with questions of international and environmental justice, arguing for the value of indige-nous scientific knowledge and the importance of cultural diversity and food sovereignty. See, for example, Nabhan, Singing the Turtles to Sea: The Comcáac (Seri) Art and Science of Reptiles (Berkeley and Los Ange-les: Univ. of California Press, 2003); and Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmen-tal Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (Cambridge, UK: South End Press, 2008). In general, however, the New Agrarianism has not made the issues of labor and civil rights central to its analysis.

15 Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, Food Justice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 126. Further references are to this edition and will be cited paren-thetically in the text as FJ.

16 “The Body and the Earth,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2002), 93–134. Further references to the essays in this collection will be cited parenthetically in the text as essay title, AC.

17 Wendell Berry, “Fidelity,” in Fidelity: Five Stories (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 107–89. Further references are to this edition and will be cited par-enthetically in the text as “F.”

18 Ronald Osborn holds that “although Berry has not written directly about questions of international migration and refugee rights,” his concept of place- based citizenship “offers a more compelling conception of political identity” than cosmopolitanism. For Osborn, “refugees and migrants are persons who have been deprived precisely of their right to a place.” This language of deprivation, and of migrants as “victims,” reinscribes the same vocabulary of lack that I question in Berry’s writing (“Seyla Ben-habib, Wendell Berry, and the Question of Migrant and Refugee Rights,” Humanitas 23, no. 1–2 [2010], 118, 138, 128–29, 132).

19 Berry does state in “The Agrarian Standard” (2002) that he does not


“think that being landed necessarily means owning land. It does mean being connected to a home landscape from which one may live by the interactions of a local economy” (Citizenship Papers, 150). This metaphori-cal understanding of being landed still, however, marginalizes migrant and transient perspectives. Berry also acknowledges the growing agency of urban populations in this essay and recognizes that local- food activ-ists are taking on “agricultural responsibilities”; this is because, he notes, they “understand what it means to be landless” (Citizenship Papers, 150).

20 Berry, Unsettling of America, 171–223.21 Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (New York: Plume,

1996). Further references are to this edition and will be cited parentheti-cally in the text as UFJ.

22 Paula M. L. Moya, Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multi-cultural Struggles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2002). Further references are to this edition and will be cited parentheti-cally in the text as LE.

23 My thanks to Marian Dalke for calling this important passage to my attention.

24 For a detailed analysis of the map as colonizing tool in American history, see Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996).

25 See Heise, Sense of Place, 30.26 See also Christa Grewe- Volpp, “The Oil Was Made from Their Bones”:

Environmental (In)Justice in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 12 (win-ter 2005): 69.

27 For interpretations of the role of place as process in Under the Feet of Jesus, see also Cecelia Lawless, “Helena María Viramontes’ Homing Devices in Under the Feet of Jesus,” in Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, ed. Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes (New York: Garland, 1996), 361–82, 363; and Lene Johannessen, Threshold Time: Pas-sage of Crisis in Chicano Literature (New York: Rodopi, 2008), 149.

28 Lawless, “Homing Devices,” 365, 364.29 Grewe- Volpp, “The Oil,” 74; Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed

(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000).30 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capital-

ism,” New Left Review 146 ( July- August 1984): 53–92.31 Sandoval, Methodology, 2, 33, 37.32 Thompson, Agrarian Vision, 103, 104.33 It should be noted that the families of Port William in Berry’s fiction are

also complex, composed not only of nuclear and extended families of bio-logical relations, but also of heirs who are chosen because of their love for and skill at farming (Smith, Wendell Berry, 110–12).

34 Heise argues for the utility of the concept of deterritorialization in requir-


ing “environmentalist thinking . . . to shift the core of its cultural imagi-nation from a sense of place to a less territorial and more systemic sense of planet” (Sense of Place, 56). She defines deterritorialization as “the detachment of social and cultural practices from their ties to place” and reterritorialization as “an attempt to realign culture with place.” Heise’s analysis is based on the interpretation of the terms in the social sciences, rather than from Deleuze and Guattari’s work (Sense of Place, 51, 53, 51). In this essay, I conceptualize de- and reterritorialization, following the later Deleuze and Guattari of A Thousand Plateaus, as processes that have the potential to be captured by either liberatory or reactionary forces. Adrian Parr explains that “deterritorialization can best be understood as a movement producing change” and that “[its] relationship . . . to reterri-torialization must not be construed negatively; it is not the polar oppo-site of territorialization or reterritorialization (when a territory is estab-lished once more)” (“Deterritorialization/Reterritorialization,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005], 66–69, 67). My focus in this essay is on the ways that marginalized communities within the food system deterritorialize places within indus-trial agricultural and postindustrial urban landscapes and reterritorialize them as sites of collective action. There is always the danger, in these movements, that sites can be recaptured by the forces of capitalism, as we will see in the documentary The Garden. For a discussion of the pro-cesses of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in the settlement of the American West based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, see Kno-bloch, Culture of Wilderness, 17–48.

35 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Press, 1987), 311.

36 Ibid., 315–18.37 Ibid., 315, 312, 310.38 Berry, Unsettling of America, 13.39 Knobloch, Culture of Wilderness, 54–55, 19.40 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the

Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 2.41 Robert Emmett, “Community Gardens, Ghetto Pastoral, and Environ-

mental Justice,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18 (winter 2011): 69.

42 The Garden, directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy (New York: Black Val-ley Films, 2008). See also Emmett, “Community Gardens,” 72, 84.

43 For an account of this struggle, see Cynthia Hamilton, “Concerned Citi-zens of South Central Los Angeles,” in Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color, ed. Robert D. Bullard (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1994), 207–19.

44 Emmett notes that “the most significant finding of legal proceedings over


community gardens is that, as public property, they do not provide a legal basis of standing for disputing the loss of gardens as a violation of the civil rights of individual gardeners” (“Community Gardens,” 75).

45 I have quoted the dialogue in this passage from the film’s subtitles.46 As of August 2011, Horowitz is negotiating with a developer who wants

to use the site for a clothing factory. See Kate Linthicum, “South Cen-tral Farmers Object to L.A.’s Change in Park Plans,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2011, articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/04/local/la- me- 0804- south- central- farm- 20110804.

47 Dialogue quoted from film’s subtitles.48 See Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, “Sickness in the System: The Health

Costs of the Harvest,” Journal of Medical Humanities 28, no. 2 (2007): 97–104, 98.

49 See Michael F. Maniates, “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics 1 (August 2001): 31–52.

50 See Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in What Are People For? (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1990), 145–52.

51 Vandana Shiva’s concept of food sovereignty has been developed through-out the whole of her work, from The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics (London: Zed Books, 1991) through Soil Not Oil.

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Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship

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