(some possibilities of) Rural Belongings

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Notes on contributors

Daniella Rose King (b. London, UK) is a curator, writer, and producer who lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. King is the 2017–19 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania where she recently curated The Last Place They Thought Of.

Jade Montserrat (b. London, UK) works at the intersection of performance, drawing, and writing, often embarking on interdisciplinary projects. She is the Stuart Hall Foundation PhD fellow at The Institute for Black Atlantic Research at The University of Central Lancashire. Montserrat lives and works in Scarborough, UK.

Notes

1 This protest is largely recognized as the beginning of the environmental justice movement. Environment and land-based racism and injustices were rampant before this, of course, but did not capture the imagination and attention of the country in the same way:

In 1982, a small, predominantly African-American community was designated to host a hazardous waste landfill. This landfill would accept PCB-contaminated soil that resulted from illegal dumping of toxic waste along roadways. After removing the contaminated soil, the state of North Carolina considered a number of potential sites to host the landfill, but ultimately settled on this small African-American community. In response to the state's decision, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others staged a massive protest. More than 500 protesters were arrested, including Dr Benjamin F, Chavis, Jr., from the United Church of Christ, and Delegate Walter Fauntroy, then a member of the United States House of Representatives from the District of Columbia. While the Warren County protest failed to prevent the siting of the disposal facility, it did provide a national start to the environmental justice movement. (“Environmental Justice History”)

2 This normal way of life is rooted in racial condemnation; it is spatially evident in the sites of toxicity, environmental decay, pollution, and militarized action that are inhabited by impoverished communities – geographies described as battlegrounds or as burned, horrific, occupied, sieged, unhealthy, incarcerated, extinct, starved, torn, endangered. (McKittrick 2013, 7)

3 See Hall et al. (1978), Policing the Crisis for more on the conflation of criminality, race, and class in the 1970s and how it heralded a new era of policing in the UK, and the parallels with the US.

4 Montserrat’s mother still lives in the extant family home, the surrounding land of which is in rapid decline owing to no coherent land management objectives, land misuse and degradation.

5 It would seem that this man was given the deer stalking rights by his landowning employer as a gift. Often the case, either working class men or a very young monied men are momentarily favoured, thrown a bit of autonomy, aimlessly, and granted the run of the land to shoot on by the landowner, part management, mostly recreation. Deer, of course, must be managed, their population kept low, otherwise they can get sick: “Management should aim to maintain healthy deer populations in balance with their environment.” (https://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/fcpn6.pdf/$FILE/fcpn6.pdf) Ideally, a person employed by the landowner, a contractor, or the landowner themselves, would manage the deer, keeping numbers low, in tandem with a comprehensive, tailored management plan, observant and respectful of nature’s seasonal care needs. In this case, the deer stalking gig was arguably a benevolent gesture, risk assessments neglected in terms of the stalker’s experience and qualifications, knowledge of land management or legal requirements (he shot downhill aiming for Montserrat mistaking her for a deer, where she was walking on a public road, at dusk on a Sunday – each factor presenting illegal practices). In the third instance, a deer stalker may earn their name and privilege as such through buying the right to shoot the deer as a formal let. This person is shooting deer as recreation, and will be upwardly middle class. (For more on deer rights and best practice in England: http://www.thedeerinitiative.co.uk/uploads/guides/194.pdf) Montserrat insists on an intersectional argument here when thinking about how to report potential dangers and criminality and who to report them to. In terms of race, gender, and class, the assumptions made that socially-mobile racialized white bodies are at the same time tethered to and burdened by the North York rural landscape, perpetuate the erasures and silencing that reinforce constructions of raced and gendered identities. Authority and policing in this area adopt white patriarchal sensibilities, of a Victorian mould wedded to a Protestant work ethic, and Montserrat fears ruptures between her truth and possible interpretations of such traumas as hysteria; adding to existing mental health issues, a consequence of the structural racism that maintains the neoliberal capitalist patriarchal white supremacist paradigm, accounts like this can be co-opted for oppressive means — weaponizing mental health issues against victims, tailoring absolution for abusive activity.

6 The work is borne out of a previous performance titled No Need for Clothing where Montserrat would produce a wall drawing as a performance, naked, in front of an audience.

7 Thanks to Professor Alan Rice for making this suggestion.

8 Toni Morrison in “The Site of Memory” quotes Zora Neale Hurston: “Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.” (Morrison 1995, 92).

9 Loss of the power of self-narration is central to the traumatic experience since language is not simply an abstract tool of communication; its origins are corporeal and the means by which the body “speaks” its instinctual drives. To shatter the body is also to fragment the power of speech. (Fisher 2008, 193)