SPECIAL ESSAY BRIDGING SOCIAL AND POLITICAL LANDSCAPES: American Landscapes Under Siege: A Provocation

Conflicts over public health, in the face of COVID-19, and the older but no less lethal pandemic of white supremacy and police brutality against people of color are indicative of the central place that landscape plays within the struggle to create a more just and sustainable society. These realities raise a key question for scholars and practitioners of landscape studies: To what purpose can an understanding of the landscape, of its revelatory power and meaning, play in exposing for critical scrutiny the realities of poverty and racism of violence and militarism, the conditions of sexism and patriarchy that characterize life and death in the United States? We suggest that landscape studies must address and expose tensions and inequalities while simultaneously conducting a sustained critique of the social and political work embodied within the landscape. In making this argument, we draw upon the grassroots, everyday social theory of 1960 SNCC activists such as Charles Sherrod and argue for confronting the “black box” of community relations and their landscapes, understanding exactly how racism and other forms of exclusion and subjugation envelop people and place and come to define the lives and destinies of millions. The study and understanding of landscape must be at the forefront of a broader political project of exposing the realities and structures of inequality that constitute the black box of community. Important in examining these oppressive structures is recognizing the power of the landscape itself to naturalize social injustices and its role in contributing to the opaqueness of community power relations and historical geographies of oppression. Finally, we suggest that confronting and exposing this black box requires a different landscape heuristic, one, that in the words of Edward Said, carries out a contrapuntal reading and intervention. A contrapuntal approach—which for us values both critical analysis and engaged intervention by scholars—considers how the processes of oppression and resistance both can be read, heard, and experienced through landscapes. Contrapuntality prioritizes making room for and recovering those social groups, histories, and subjectivities that were once forcibly excluded and which continue to be marginalized within American landscape understandings.