Author: Amrita Vinod
Figure 1. A Digital Artwork Blending Different Photographs of Landscapes. Amrita Vinod, “Landscape Collage,” 2024.
When Narendra asked, “Where is your home?” she held their hands wide open and turned around, pointing to the landscape, and that was their answer to the question. Narendra writes in his book Bastar Dispatches: A Passage Through the Wilds. In this conversation, the landscape is referred to as home; it highlights one among the many different attitudes that are instrumental in forming varied landscape perceptions in societies across the world. My interest in the diverse sense of place is the motivation behind putting together three concepts related to the idea of the landscape I encountered in my learning journey investigating different cultural attitudes that define ways of knowing space or place: wastelands, emptiness, and marron geographies. In the way that Figure 1 shows a collage of places or landscapes, the following writing reads as a collage of the three different concepts related to landscapes. Here, I refer to two books, Vittoria Di Palma’s Wasteland: A History, Samia Henni's book, Deserts are Not Empty, and the article, The Morphology of Marronage, by Willie Jamaal Wright.
Vittoria Di Palma, in the introduction book Wasteland: A History, notes that the term wasteland “conjures up visions of wild and remote landscapes like deserts, mountains, steppes, and ice caps, and at the very same time, derelict and abandoned landscapes like former military bases, boarded-up mines, and shuttered industrial plants” (Di Palma 2014, 3). Di Palma finds wasteland as a category of land, a category united not by consisted physical qualities, but rather by their absence—which is to say that “wasteland is defined not by what it has, but what it lacks” (Di Palma 2014, 3). Lack of water, lack of food, lack of people, lack of cities, lack of buildings, and so on. The book argues that the convergence of beliefs, technologies, institutions, and individuals in eighteenth-century England contributed to the formation of cultural perspectives that continue to shape our evaluation of the landscape today.
Emptiness is the core characteristic of the wasteland, and it allows the term wasteland to be abstract and malleable or like a vacant shell ready to include places identified primarily by what they are not—Di Palma argues. Samia Henni's book, "Deserts are Not Empty," exposes the colonial regime of Emptiness, which declares lands empty to mask or erase ongoing colonial violence. By pointing to the French colonial governments' appropriation of Algerian deserts for atomic bomb firing activities between 1960 and 1966, Henni shows the colonial thirst for filling, occupying, extracting, producing, and accumulating in the 'empty' places to maintain colonial power and serve colonial needs. Reading through both books, I understand that the confluence of such classifications of landscapes and the cultural attitudes underpinning them are rooted in colonial toxicity and violence.
In the Space-Place constellatation seminar in Spring 2024, I learned about marronage and marron geographies, which, for me, were in conversation with landscape taxonomies such as wastelands or empty lands. Marronage, the act of escaping from enslavement and forming communities, appropriated and used the toxic colonial taxonomies for maroon communities' resistance as well as work against the institution of slavery. Maroon geographies were frequently founded in hard-to-reach regions like forests, mountains, or swamps, enabling them to avoid capture and maintain a degree of autonomy. Willie Jamaal Wright, in The Morphology of Marronage, suggests that endeavors to attain freedom through fugitivity frequently depend on the geographical and geological characteristics of natural landscapes and argues that the capacity of specific fugitive groups to achieve spatial independence depends on their capability to search for, discover, and establish settlements in challenging and apparently uninhabitable landscapes. While the two terms wasteland and the regime of emptiness show cultural attitudes rooted in coloniality, marron geographies show the resistance against slavery and the structurally damaged toxic colonial systems.