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ABSTRACT
In this forum essay, I add the idea of “Landships” as a concept to define the sets of relationships between people that are mediated through an undeniable connection to the natural world. I discuss what a practical Landship politics might mean in two aspects of academic life: in research and in building community. I also comment on how the use of “citizenship” in rhetorics of human rights might shift to a conversation around justice and Landships instead. Then, I offer some thoughts on what a Landship politics might mean for people who are invested in making academe a better place.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Tim Waterman, Jane Wolff, & Ed Wall, Landscape Citizenships: Ecological, Watershed and Bioregional Citizenships (New York: Routledge, 2021); Michael Lechuga, “On the Cultural Politics of Landships: De Almeida’s Waste Landscapes,” Landscape Research (forthcoming).
2 Waterman, Wolff, & Wall, Landscape Citizenships, 2.
3 Catherine De Almeida, “Unearthing Citizenships in Waste Landscapes,” in Landscape Citizenships: Ecological, Watershed and Bioregional Citizenships, eds. Tim Waterman, Jane Wolff, & Ed Wall (New York: Routledge, 2021), 22–39.
4 Ibid, 25.
5 Arturo Escobar, “Transiciones: A Space for Research and Design for Transitions to the Pluriverse.” Design Philosophy Papers 13, no. 1 (2015): 13–23.
6 Ibid.
7 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place’.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 5.
8 Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021): 7; Liboiron continues by suggesting “When land is not capitalized, I am referring to the concept from a colonial worldview whereby landscapes are common, universal, and everywhere” (p. 7). This notion supports Na’Puti’s critique of the way land (lowercase l) is often used in rhetoric and communication studies.
9 Nina Pacari, “La Participación Política de la mMujer Indígena en el Parlamento Ecuatoriano: Una tarea pendiente,” International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, July 17, 2013, https://www.iknowpolitics.org/sites/default/files/chapter_01a-cs-ecuador.pdf.
10 Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez, “Possessing Land, Wind and Water in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca.” Australian Feminist Studies 35, no. 106 (2020): 321–35.
11 Ibid, 321.
12 Arturo Escobar, “Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South.” Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11, no. 1 (2016): 16.
13 Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone (Dissident Acts) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 9–10.
14 Ibid, 10.
15 Joanne Barker, “Confluence: Water as an Analytic of Indigenous Feminisms.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 43, no. 3 (2019): 18.
16 Escobar, “Thinking-feeling with the Earth,” 26. The “rights of nature” have also been widely debated in the field of Communication Studies that centers around whether the move to assert the rights of nature is largely a political practice in the geoglobal West that reduces nature to economic and legal discourses. For more on this debate, see Patrick D. Murphy and José Castro-Sotomayor, “From Limits to Ecocentric Rights and Responsibility: Communication, Globalization, and the Politics of Environmental Transition.” Communication Theory 31, no. 4 (2021): 978–1001.
17 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics (abbreviated version).” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 413.
18 For more on social movements and publics in Rhetoric Studies, see Noor Ghazal Aswad & Michael Lechuga, “Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs (forthcoming).
19 Glenn Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
20 Diane Marie Keeling, Ariel E. Seay-Howard, & Bethany O’Shea, “Memorializing with and for the Undercommons: Black Study and Unsettling Grounds.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2023): 343.
21 See Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric's Historical Narrative.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72; Josue David Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 1 (2011): 26–49; Susan Zaeske, “Signatures of Citizenship: The Rhetoric of Women's Antislavery Petitions.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 2 (2002); V. Jo Hsu, “Voting Rights, Anti-intersectionality, and Citizenship as Containment.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 3 (2020): 269–76; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women's Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 107–32; Robert Asen; “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2 (2004): 188–211; Charles E. Morris III, “Context's Critic, Invisible Traditions, and Queering Rhetorical History.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 , no. 1 (2015): 225–43.
22 For more on the Indigenous sciences and the possibilities of intellectual communities built in relation to Land, see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2015) and Jessica Hernandez, Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022).
23 Again, a capital “L” Land in this describes how toxicity permeates beyond just the geological features of land, but pollutes non-human and human biological materials connected to them.
24 Many in the field of rhetoric are already pushing us to think this way, even if they are not using the language of “Landships,” per se. See, for example, see Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric”; Catalina M. de Onís, Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 2021); Chris Ingraham, John Ackerman, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, Bridie McGreavy, Candice Rai, & Nathan Stormer, Rhetorical Climatology: By A Reading Group (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2023); and Danielle Endres, Nuclear Decolonization. Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2023).
25 My caution against reducing concepts like this to metaphor echo what others have said (namely Tuck and Yang) who suggest that when we only rely on metaphor to conceptualize general political/institutional struggle, we often vacate responsibility to Land and the Indigenous ways of knowing that are connected to specific relations to Land. See Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
26 Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 22.
27 For more on the national debate in the U.S., see Zeeshan Aleem, “The GOP Just Conflated Antisemitism with Anti-Zionism. That’s problematic,” MSNBC (December 7, 2023), https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/antisemitism-resolution-antizionism-republicans-rcna128348.