PALGRAVE STUDIES IN GLOBALISATION, CULTURE & SOCIETY

# Planetary Hinterlands Extraction, Abandonment and Care

*Edited by* Pamila Gupta · Sarah Nuttall Esther Peeren · Hanneke Stuit

### Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society

Series Editors Jeroen de Kloet Centre for Globalisation Studies University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Esther Peeren University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences to critically explore the cultural and social dimensions of contemporary globalization processes. This entails looking at the way globalization unfolds through and within cultural and social practices, and identifying and understanding how it effects cultural and social change across the world. The series asks what, in its different guises and unequal diffusion, globalization is taken to be and do in and across specifc locations, and what social, political and cultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders obsolete. A particular focus is the vital contribution made by different forms of the imagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception, experience and critique of contemporary globalization. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society is committed to addressing globalization across cultural contexts (western and non-western) through interdisciplinary, theoretically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded in detailed case studies and close analyses. Within the scope outlined above, we invite junior and senior scholars to submit proposals for monographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave Pivot format. Please contact the series editors for more information: b.j.dekloet<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Pamila Gupta • Sarah Nuttall Esther Peeren • Hanneke Stuit Editors

# Planetary Hinterlands

Extraction, Abandonment and Care

*Editors* Pamila Gupta University of the Free State Bloemfontein, South Africa

Esther Peeren University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Sarah Nuttall University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

Hanneke Stuit University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ISSN 2730-9282 ISSN 2730-9290 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society ISBN 978-3-031-24242-7 ISBN 978-3-031-24243-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24243-4

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### Acknowledgment

This publication emerged, in part, from the project "Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World" (RURALIMAGINATIONS, 2018–2023), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 772436).

The editors are grateful to the ERC for making Open Access possible, and also wish to thank the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.

### Contents

#### **Index** 319

### Notes on Contributors

**Luciano Concheiro San Vicente** is researcher at the Unidad de Investigación sobre Representaciones Culturales y Sociales (UDIR) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

**Pamila Gupta** is research professor at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, affliated with the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS). She has published widely on a range of topics at the intersection of South Asia and Southern African studies.

**Luregn Lenggenhager** is a researcher and lecturer at the Centre for African Studies Basel and associated researcher at the University of Namibia. He coordinated an interdisciplinary research project on the Lower !Garib region. His felds of research further include history of nature conservation, environmental history and humanities, historical geography, and borderlands in Southern Africa.

**Catherine Lord** is a scholar and Lecturer in Literature and Media Studies, with tenure at Literature and Cultural Analysis, and Media Studies, the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in environmental humanities, literature, and cinema. Her current concern is eco-psychoanalysis, and she is working on a book project about environmental mourning.

**Sindi-Leigh McBride** is a writer from Johannesburg, and a PhD candidate at the Centre for African Studies, University of Basel. Her research looks at the politics and poetics of climate change in South Africa and Nigeria. She holds an MA in International Relations from the University of the Witwatersrand and an MA in Political Communication from the University of Cape Town, and has worked in the private and nonproft and public sectors in South Africa.

**Giorgio Miescher** is the Carl Schlettwein Foundation Senior Lecturer and Researcher for Namibian and Southern African Studies at the Centre for African Studies in Basel. He is also an associated researcher with the University of Namibia. He has widely published on Namibian history, historical geography, and visual history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on railway infrastructure and the constitution of the South African imperial realm on the subcontinent.

**Rila Mukherjee** taught history at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and the University of Hyderabad, from where she retired in October 2022. She is the author of *India in the Indian Ocean World* (Springer Nature, 2022) and Editor-in-Chief of the Brill journal *Asian Review of World Histories*. Based in Kolkata, she travels extensively.

**Emily Ng** is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she was Postdoctoral Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She is the author of A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (2020).

**Xavier Nueno Guitart** is Scientifc Assistant at the Laboratory for History and Theories of Architecture, Technology and Media of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

**Sarah Nuttall** is a professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WISER at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author and editor of many books, and her work is widely cited across disciplines. Most recently, she is co-editor, with Charne Lavery, of *Reading from the South: African Print Cultures and Oceanic Turns in Isabel Hofmeyr's Work* and, with Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery, of *Reading for Water: Materiality and Method*.

**Tjalling Valdés Olmos** is a lecturer in the department of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His PhD project examined the role of genre and affect in representations of the globalized US rural. Paying specifc attention to the persisting legacies of settler colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, the project also engages disruptive rural imaginations, like the queer rural, the black rural, and the indigenous rural. Olmos is affliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), and has previously taught and studied at the Ohio State University and Utrecht University.

**Marrigje Paijmans** is Assistant Professor of Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She explores the intersection of colonialism and environmental degradation in early modern texts, and its resonance in present-day culture. She has recently published on this in *Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies* and *Cultural History*.

**Esther Peeren** is Professor of Cultural Analysis at the University Amsterdam and academic director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Currently, she directs the ERC-funded project "Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World" (2018–2024). She is the author of, among others, *The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility* (Palgrave, 2014).

**Murray Pratt** is Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include research on text and image in English and French, and recently on Chinese speculative fction in translation. He is currently working on representations of humans on the verge of the Anthropocene.

**Ruth Sacks** is a visual artist and academic who is a member of faculty at the University of Johannesburg's Visual Art Department. She completed a PhD at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (2017). Her recent exhibitions and publications focus on the postcolonial African city in the Anthropocene.

**Hanneke Stuit** is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, with research interests in carcerality and the countryside. She is the author of *Ubuntu Strategies: Constructing Spaces of Belonging in Contemporary South African Culture* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of *Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Spaces, Mobilities, Aesthetics* (2016).

**Andrew van der Vlies** is a professor at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Books include *South African Textual Cultures* (2007), *Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing* (2017), and, as co-editor, *South African Writing in Transition* (2019).

**Becca Voelcker** is a flm historian and writer. She has published widely on feminist flmmaking, East Asian cinema, artist moving image, and flms about landscapes, extractive capitalism, and social justice. She obtained her PhD at Harvard University, writing a global history of ecopolitical flm.

**Jennifer Wenzel** is Professor of Postcolonial Theory and Environmental and Environmental Humanities, jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her books include *Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond* (2009) and *Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment* (co-edited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger; 2017).

**Kate Woodward** is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University. Among her research interests are Welsh screen fctions, landscape and flm, Welsh language music videos, and cultural policy in Wales since devolution.

**Maarten Zwiers** is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and History at the University of Groningen. He is the author of *Senator James Eastland: Mississippi's Jim Crow Democrat*. His research project "Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation" received a three-year ERC grant. He specializes in rural studies and US southern studies.

### List of Figures

#### xvi List of Figures

### Materialities: Extraction, Logistics

### Introduction: Conceptualizing Hinterlands

*Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Sarah Nuttall, and Pamila Gupta*

In March 2021, the Ever Given, one of the largest container ships in the world, blocked the Suez Canal for seven days, causing severe delays in global supply chains, constituting a major disruption to China's Belt and Road Initiative, and leading to an estimated \$54 billion in trading losses (Lee and Wong 2021). This event exposed the hinterland as much more

H. Stuit Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
S. Nuttall WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
P. Gupta Centre for Gender and Africa Studies, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2024 P. Gupta et al. (eds.), *Planetary Hinterlands*, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24243-4\_1

E. Peeren (\*)

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
than it is commonly taken to be: "a mere backstage 'ghost acreage' that supports the putatively front-stage operations of large population centres" (Brenner 2016, 123). The Suez Canal, ever important but usually taken for granted, suddenly—hauntingly—became hypervisible in its capacity to disrupt the world economy.1

Developed by French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps and opened in 1869, the Suez Canal was, from its inception, a deeply colonial project, designed to enhance the effcacy and hence the proftability of global trade. Until its nationalization by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956, it was operated by a concessionary company with mainly British and French shareholders. As one of the major transport nodes of the world, through which 13.5% of global trade passes (Lee and Wong 2021), it exemplifes both how "logistics maps the form of contemporary imperialism" (Cowen 2014, 8) and how this mapping often still follows colonial routes. The Ever Given, its name perhaps ftting to the thematics of colonialism, capitalism, and climate this volume explores in relation to hinterland thinking, in its turn embodies how global inequalities enshrined by late capitalism's neocolonial thrust take shape in the present: the ship is owned by a Japanese company, operated by a Taiwanese shipping company, managed by a German company, and manned by a fully Indian crew (Lee and Wong 2021), the latter remaining invisible and largely unconsidered as events unfolded.

Attention was focused on the hinterland's key role in keeping global supply chains moving by the globally mediated spectacle of the enormous ship, carrying countless containers full of consumer goods, stuck astride the Canal with a growing queue of stalled ships behind it as frantic attempts were made to refoat it (using machines made to look like toys by the scale of the Ever Given). Most mainstream media reports were solely concerned with the economic effects of the blockage, while some activist media explored the global shipping industry's environmental impact and

1The importance of the Suez Canal for the global economy is underlined by Notteboom: "The global container shipping network now primarily relies on the equatorial route in which the Suez Canal is a key maritime passage. 6852 container vessels transited the Suez Canal in 2010, an increase of 46% compared to 2001. … About 646 million tons of cargo passed via the Canal in 2010. … Total container volumes reached an estimated 33 million TEU in 2010 compared to 20 million in 2004. Nearly 93% of these container fows are related to the Europe–Asia trade routes. North America (East Coast)–Asia trade represents about 5.3% (fgures Boston Consulting and Suez Canal Authority)" (2012, 165). Notteboom also notes the Suez Canal's "single-lane character" as an important vulnerability (2012, 175).

exploitative working conditions.2 However, there was not much interest in looking closely at the specifc geography of the Suez hinterland, which comprises not only the waterway itself but also the mix of rural and urban settlements bordering it. Nor did people consider how its materialities, people, and life forms would be affected by the refoating effort, which was led by the Suez Canal Authority and a Dutch salvage company, and involved the removal of "more than 20,000 tons of sand and mud" (Lee and Wong 2021, 7).3 This affrms Neil Brenner and Nikos Katsikis's assertion that, despite the hinterland's status as a crucial support for global capitalism, "the hinterland itself has remained something of a 'black box'" (2020, 26). In the end, even as the global capitalist system's fundamental vulnerability to disruption in and from the hinterland was briefy exposed by the Ever Given, the successful and relatively speedy unblocking operation allowed the idea that the hinterland is meant to serve the capitalist center at any cost and, as such, needs to be looked at only *from* the presumed center through the lens of that center's interests to persist.

### Defining the Hinterland

This instrumentalist, outside-in view of the hinterland pervades the academic feld that has most consistently engaged with it. Taking up George G. Chisholm's use of "hinderland" as referring "to the backcountry of a port or coastal settlement" in the 1888 *Handbook of Commercial Geography*, 4 transport geography made the hinterland an integral part of analyses geared toward understanding how ports function and compete,

2 See, for example, https://www.corpwatch.org/article/suez-canal-aftermath-time-question-environmental-and-social-impacts-our-megaship-mania and https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/04/01/took-suez-canal-crisis-highlight-scale-polluting-shippingsector/. The degree of oil and heavy metal pollution in the Suez Canal has been documented by, among others, Abou El-Megd et al. (2020) and Sharaf and Shehata (2015).

3Niroumand-Jadidi and Bovolo (2021) show how "the blockage of the Suez Canal and subsequent dredging caused an abrupt increment (+400%) in the concentration of TSM moving north from the ship's location." Total Suspended Matter affects light penetration, which, in turn, can change the underwater ecosystem. Although the increment in this case was temporary, longer blockages or structural increases in dredging to prevent further blockages could have consequences for water quality and the fshing and tourism industries along the Suez Canal.

4 https://www.britannica.com/science/hinterland.

and how their effciency may be increased.5 Over the course of the twentieth century, different kinds of port-hinterlands were distinguished and questions of delimitation (of where a port-hinterland ended and on what basis—geographical or functional—this should be determined) and of overlapping (of hinterlands serving multiple ports) were much-debated (Sdoukopoulos and Boile 2020). The 1960s saw the advent of containerization, which enabled "spatial de-concentration" and brought about "the transition towards network and corridor-shaped hinterlands" (Sdoukopoulos and Boile 2020, 4). The ensuing logistics revolution has meant that port-hinterlands have become more extended, more discontinuous, and more varied, and relations between ports and inland regions more complex and multi-sided. Despite this, most transport geographers still do not consider hinterlands relevant beyond the ways in which, by their defnition and function, they impact port development and competition. They are not interested in doing what this volume seeks to do: thinking and looking *from* the hinterland to its landscapes, life forms, and livelihoods. What they also miss is that the port-hinterland extends not just over land but also, increasingly far and deep, into the sea. As Isabel Hofmeyr so aptly puts it in *Dockside Reading*, "port cities aim to pave the ocean and assert sovereignty over the conjuncture of land and sea" (2021, 4).

In this book, we consider the concept of the hinterland as crucial for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defned by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. We offer it as a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness, or nature, and to foreground the human and more than human lively processes that go on even in sites defned by capitalist ruin and political abandonment (Tsing 2015; Neel 2018).

But what exactly does the hinterland (derived from German *Hinterland*, "the land behind/to the back of"6) entail? The main defnition of "hinterland" in the *Oxford English Dictionary*, like that of Chisholm, frst and foremost binds it to water but then broadens its geographical reach: "The

5Transport geography is "a sub-discipline of geography concerned about the mobility of people, freight, and information and its spatial organization. It includes attributes and constraints related to the origin, destination, extent, nature, and purpose of mobility" (Rodrigue 2020).

6For an overview of how the term was used in German from the 1840s, see Brahm and Rosenhaft (2016, 4).

district behind that lying along the coast (or along the shore of a river); the 'back country'. Also applied spec[ifcally] to the area lying behind a port, and to the fringe areas of a town or city." That the relation between the coast, river, port, town, or city and the hinterland has never been one of mere spatial distribution on a local scale, as we implied earlier, is signaled by the quotes used to illustrate the term's meanings and usage. These quotes, the earliest of which is from 1880, almost all evoke capitalist trade (with the hinterland providing resources, products, labor, or consumers), colonialism (with the hinterland exemplifying its appropriative and extractive reach across continents), and climate concerns (given land's dependence on rain, sun, and water to be suitable for growing crops). The hinterland's intimate connection to all three Cs—capitalism, colonialism, and climate—appears most plainly in a *Daily News* quote from 1891 that reads: "Lord Salisbury even recognizes … the very modern doctrine of the Hinterland, which he expounds as meaning that 'those who possess the coast also possess the plain which is watered by the rivers that run to the coast.'"7

Godfrey N. Uzoigwe contends that the doctrine of the hinterland not only was crucial to the late nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa, but also played an important role in the earlier colonization of North America in the form of the "principle of contiguity or continuity or 'manifest destiny'" (1976, 194). He emphasizes the indefniteness of the hinterland's scope, which meant that whole swathes of the African continent could be claimed as the hinterland of a single port settlement. Similarly, Louisiana's hinterland was taken to extend as far as Oregon. All solutions proposed during and after the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference to the problem of competing colonial powers claiming the same areas as *their* hinterland proved ineffective. This underlines how the hinterland was not in fact limited by the reach of a river's fertilizing waters and thus not at all a "'natural' sphere of interest" (Brahm and Rosenhaft 2016, 5). In theory, it could be stretched out to match colonialism's boundless greed; in practice, in an era of ferce colonial competition, it almost always needed to be inscribed on the land and its multiple life forms through "effective occupation" (Uzoigwe 1976, 196).

7As Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury (1830–1903) pursued British colonial expansion during the initial phase of the Scramble for Africa (1881–1914).

### Colonial and Postcolonial Hinterlands

The demarcation of the hinterland was a bone of colonial contention between Britain and Germany especially. Matthew Unangst describes how, originally, the hinterland doctrine held that a colonizer's "territory should extend into the interior of the continent along the same lines of latitude or longitude as its coastal possessions" up to where a natural border was encountered (2022, 496). Upon this view, propagated by the English jurist Travers Twiss, the interior was regarded as *terra nullius* or empty land that could be claimed before it was explored or even laid eyes on. As a new colonial power, Germany challenged this physical delineation of the hinterland and sought instead to circumscribe it based on the inland reach of economic and military activity, which would limit the territory of more established colonizers like Britain and invalidate claims to sovereignty by African rulers lacking (extensive) coastal possessions.

This new defnition of the hinterland, which allowed colonial powers to "justify territorial expansion as merely turning an existing economic region into a political one" (Unangst 2022, 508) won out and more generally shaped not just the colonial but also the postcolonial world order. As Unangst explains, the economic hinterland was taken up in the late twentieth century by newly independent nations to assert themselves as an alternative geopolitical force. At the 1970 meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Lusaka, "a union of the 'littoral and hinterland States of the Indian Ocean'" was established, linking Africa and Asia across the ocean as a "cosmopolitan space pre-dating European expansion" capable of challenging Portuguese and British control over these waterways (Unangst 2022, 497, 498). That this union, despite defning hinterlands as "States whose main access to the sea is the Indian Ocean," included China, which has no such access, makes clear that the hinterland easily lends itself to political uses (of various kinds, including colonial, postcolonial, capitalist, and communist) by laying equal claim to spaces of both land and water on the basis of ambiguous, shifting principles that allow these spaces to be strategically expanded and constricted (Unangst 2022, 512).

In other cases, wherein the concept of the hinterland is invoked in an indistinct manner, bordering on the metaphorical, crucial aspects of particular hinterlands and their politics can become invisible, and the hinterland may end up too tightly bound to particular geographies. This is the case in Gerhard Ens's *Homeland to Hinterland: The Changing Worlds of*  *the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century*. The book's main title seeks to express how the 1870 Manitoba Act led the Metis—people of mixed Indigenous and European descent whose involvement in the fur trade made them part of "the world of European mercantile capitalism" (Ens 1996, 5)—to no longer consider the Red River area (now part of Canada) as their homeland. Forced to return to subsistence agriculture after losing their "occupational niche in the fur trade," the Metis, according to Ens, found themselves facing failed harvests and high mortality rates, leading many to move elsewhere (1996, 175).

Ens uses "hinterland" only in the title of his book and that of one of its chapters. The term is never defned but rather suggested to denote the falling fortunes of the Metis. This brings about a twofold obfuscation. First, it clouds how the Metis "homeland" was already a colonial hinterland, initially expropriated from Indigenous peoples by the Hudson's Bay Company. Second, it obscures how the Manitoba Act consolidated this hinterland status by facilitating "the rapid infux of Canadian settlers" from Ontario and "the introduction of large-scale commercial agriculture to the West" (Ens 1996, 175, 158). Thus, while the position of the Metis did indeed change signifcantly after 1870, this change occurred *within* a persisting hinterland: for the Metis, from a hinterland experienced as a homeland, Red River became a hinterland of abandonment. In other words, hinterlands and homelands always hold within them complex relations. This is obfuscated when Ens links the hinterland to the "repastoralization" of the Metis after a period of "proto-industrialization" that folded them into the capitalist world market, thus placing it outside or before colonialism, capitalism, and climate change (1996, 173). What his own research clearly shows, however, is that the dispossession of the Metis after the Manitoba Act was in fact due to the *intensifcation* of capitalism-colonialism in the Red River area that the Act facilitated. In this volume, Luregn Lenggenhager and Giorgio Miescher discuss the Lower Orange River/!Garib area that straddles the border between South Africa and Namibia, between the eighteenth century and the present, as variously experienced as central and peripheral in relation to multiple, shifting centers, while Rila Mukherjee traces the changing contours and cultures of the far and near hinterlands of Kolkata, during and after colonialism. As such, these contributions underline the need to specify in what way(s) and for whom a certain area is or was a hinterland, and of what kind.

### Contemporary Hinterlands

In relation to contemporary hinterlands, too, it is important to carefully parse their specifc characteristics, functions, and potentialities, and to recognize both what links them to historical hinterlands and what sets them apart. Most insistently, contemporary hinterlands seem to materialize as increasingly widespread and densely layered "sacrifce zones" for capital (Brenner and Katsikis 2020, 28) and of the climatic, with clear (neo)colonial overtones. The ever more generalized system of extractivism that characterizes today's global capitalism operates through "imperial networks (or platforms)" that "not only *link* already-existing spaces of poverty and richness; they also *create* new spaces or instances of poverty" (Ye et al. 2020, 164–165, emphasis in original). In other words, these networks, which comprise industries like mining and intensive agriculture, but also logistical infrastructures crucial to sustaining and speeding up global trade including data farms, distribution centers, and waste processing plants, produce further hinterlands to be exploited and, upon exhaustion, abandoned in a state of "barrenness" (Ye et al. 2020, 157).

In their 2020 article "Operational Landscapes: Hinterlands of the Capitalocene," Brenner and Katsikis point out that 70% of the earth's surface is now "used area" and that hinterlands should therefore be taken far more seriously in thinking about "the contemporary urban problematique" (2020, 24). For us, truly taking hinterlands seriously means contesting the urban bias that pervades much of even the most innovative work on hinterlands. Brenner and Katsikis themselves, for instance, tellingly restrict the hinterland to "the diverse non-city landscapes that support urban life" (2020, 24).8 As Eugene Van Cleef already made clear in his 1941 article "Hinterland and Umland," the trade center served by a hinterland does not have to be a city or town, but can also be a village (1941, 308). Looking to present-day hinterlands, moreover, Phil A. Neel (2018) stresses that they may very well be found in or near cities: protracted industrial areas, slums, sprawl, and rust belts full of ghost towns proliferate across urban, rural, and wilderness spaces. What contemporary hinterlands support, then, is less an exclusively urban life than a form of globalization that includes what both Neel and Monika Krause (2013)

8 See also the collection *The City's Hinterland: Dynamism and Divergence in Europe's Peri-Urban Territories* (Hoggart 2016), which makes the urban bias explicit in its title.

have termed *ruralization*, where the hinterland does not peripherally serve as a "metabolic input" for a given city (Brenner and Katsikis 2020, 25) but functions as a central process in its own right. Neel, referring to "places like northern Wisconsin—once imagined to be a great industrial complex, now reduced to an essentially rural existence" (2018, 112), links ruralization to extreme decline, in a way that resonates with Ens's description of the Metis's journey from homeland to hinterland as a regressive one from proto-industrialization to re-pastoralization. Krause, however, recognizes ruralization as a potentially (re)generative force, for example, in the form of urban farming—discussed in this volume as an ambiguous hinterland practice by Ruth Sacks (in relation to a community project in Johannesburg) and Becca Voelcker (in Agnes Denes's 1982 artwork *Wheatfeld*, which saw a feld of wheat grown in central Manhattan, New York City).

As we indicated earlier, such processes of ruralization remain largely invisible in discussions of the hinterland. Despite wanting to challenge the "urban-age metanarrative," Brenner, for instance, ends up making the rural disappear altogether in his proposal for "an urban theory *without an outside*" (2016, 120, 124, emphasis in original). He also maintains a rigid distinction between *hinterlands*, defned as "historically inherited [spaces] in which various 'free gifts' of nature embedded in the land (materials, energy, labour, food, water) are appropriated to produce primary commodities," and *operational landscapes* "consolidated through the active production of colossal urban-industrial spatial confgurations that have been refexively designed to accelerate and intensify the accumulation of capital on the world market" (Brenner 2016, 125–126). We instead argue that the two cannot be so easily distinguished and that a new conceptualization of the hinterland is needed that allows for rural and urban realms and the processes of urbanization and ruralization unfolding across them—to be theorized as entangled (Nuttall 2009), as emergent in their difference from a dynamic process of intra-action (Barad 2007). In doing so, we emphasize the continuities between the hinterlands inherited from the (colonial) past and the operational landscapes of today by calling both hinterlands, as for the cases of South Africa's fading ostrich industry and border-crossing energy companies described in, respectively, Pamila Gupta's and Sindy-Leigh McBride's chapters.

### Looking *from* the Hinterland

There are critical perspectives that recognize the importance of looking *from* the hinterland and reading *for* the affectivities of the hinterland, both those associated with the destructive demands that Anthropogenic capitalism-colonialism places on it and those afforded by the hinterland despite and in excess of these demands. Such perspectives examine the contemporary hinterland's historical intertwinement with warfare and imperialism, as well as the dispossessing effects on the hinterland of the way contemporary logistics "suture[es] a form of calculative reason premised on system-wide optimization to the reconfguration of physical and social landscapes" by means of a "universalizing logic of rational fow" (Chua et al. 2018, 618, 617; see also Tsing 2009, Cowen 2014, and Danyluk 2018). Moreover, they recognize that this fow, even if carefully calibrated and securitized, remains susceptible to interruptions, both accidental, like the Suez Canal blockage, and deliberate, like the strikes, protests, and forms of sabotage that have unfolded in hinterlands across the world, including around the newly planned Mexico City airport, as explored in this volume by Luciano Concheiro San Vicente and Xavier Nueno Guitart. Such interruptions mark hinterlands as "sites of vulnerability and potential emancipation" (Chua et al. 2018, 623), where reclamations may—literally—gain ground.

The individual chapters of the book seek to map where contemporary hinterlands are located, how and by whom they are contested, and how they challenge rusted notions of the urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness as easily distinguishable both geographically and in terms of the functions they are assigned by colonialism, capitalism, and climatic conditions. While interventions like Neel's *Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Confict* (2018) and Milica Topalović, Martin Knüsel, Marcel Jäggi, and Stefani Krautzig's *Architecture of Territory—Hinterland: Singapore, Johor, Riau* (2013) have been crucial to our own thinking, they have also tended to concentrate on hinterlands in a single defned regional context. What we offer is a multi-sited and multifaceted engagement where new light is shed on the escalation of necropolitics (Mbembe 2019) into a regime of brutalism that, across divergent spaces, functions as "a vast enterprise of occupation of territories, capture of bodies and imaginaries, disassembly, disconnection and demolition" (Mbembe 2020, 14, our translation9). An important recent consideration by Jennifer Wenzel has recognized the hinterland as a prime terrain for brutalist experimentation where "waste lands are transformed into wasted lands and wasted lives—lands and lives *laid waste*" (2019, 142).10 In our book, building on this, a conceptual architecture of the present is made visible by thinking together hinterlands across the Global North and South—and hinterlands that traverse social spaces, cultural imaginations, and more-than-human worlds—from a range of theoretical and (inter)disciplinary perspectives across the humanities and social sciences.

Our central premise is that in order to understand how hinterlands, while functioning as sites for brutalist experimentation and active laying waste (sometimes quite literally, as in the case of the plastic waste industry in Chinese hinterlands examined by Emily Ng), are also characterized by survival, endurance, refusal, fugitivity, and even resistance, the conceptual, aesthetic, and affective registers and forms in which hinterlands are generally conceived need to be reworked. An important starting point for this theoretical and cultural work lies in recognizing how the hinterland's meaning as denoting any space—whether fgurative or literal—"lying beyond what is visible or known" (OED) tends to overwrite the hinterland with the assumption that it is unmapped, backward, and therefore not worth knowing about, or safely beyond the reach of even surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). Taking our cue from Wenzel's abovementioned work on the role of the cultural imaginary in how climate change is thought and attended to emotionally, we ask how the hinterland has "*become* unimaginable, beyond the capacity to be imagined" except in very restricted ways: "What representational processes, through which images are framed and stories get told, shape and limit the capacity to imagine" the hinterland (Wenzel 2019, 18, emphasis in original)?

Perhaps the most important limit on the capacity to imagine the hinterland in all its facets is the idea of the hinterland as an untouched "back country" that is assumed to wholly feature traditional rural ways of life. In Ens's study, this idea appears as a projection negatively associated with regression, but it is more widespread in a positively valuated form that is

9French original: "Une vaste entreprise d'occupation de territoires, d'emprise sur les corps et les imaginaires, de désassemblage, de déliaison et de demolition."

10Wenzel's defnition of wastelands as "the original raw material of capitalism and colonialism awaiting transformation into arable, cultivated, revenue-producing land" (2019, 142) identifes them as what this volume calls hinterlands.

akin to the rural idyll, where the hinterland promises an escape from the pressures of globalization. A characteristic example is Gestalten's 2016 coffee-table book *The Hinterland: Cabins, Love Shacks and Other Hide-Outs*, which, according to the publisher's cover blurb, "explores architecture and design approaches to creating the refuges that refresh and revitalize amidst the beauty of nature." The hinterland as sanctuary also surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw many in the Global North, at least initially, exchange cities for places such as "Croatia's hinterland," which were perceived as safer, as offering refuge from contagion and contamination.11

Like the material and ideological risk of idyllic renditions geared toward offering urban audiences escapist fantasies (Peeren 2018), there is also a clear risk in the idealization of the hinterland's material, discursive, and social ruination (Stoler 2013). Certain genres like the gothic lend themselves to bringing out the ways in which landscapes in "the hinterland remember death," especially in relation to the plights of frst nation people under settler colonial regimes (Blackadder quoted in Doolan 2022; see also Doolan 2019). However, when such genres overly romanticize abandonment and decay in the hinterland, they can run the risk of glorifying what is actually a structural setting of imperial ruination (Stoler 2013). Kate Woodward's contribution to this volume, in taking up the drowned hinterland of Capel Celyn in Wales, makes clear that gothic elements can encourage the remembrance of the (socially) dead of the past and reconfgure nationalist imaginaries in ways that are more inclusive, generative, and globalized. In turn, Catherine Lord's reading of Patrick Keiller's experimental flm *Robinson in Ruins* shows how a biophilia that refuses to indulge in nostalgia but seeks to re-operationalize anti-capitalist rebellions from the past in the present may be conjured in the hinterland by infrastructural markers and life forms like lichens that are not generally deemed aesthetically appealing.

11 See https://www.dw.com/en/croatias-hinterland-a-dream-destination-in-the-pandemic/av-59130581. Of course, as the pandemic progressed it became clear that hinterlands were not immune to the virus and harbored population concentrations (in, e.g., prisons and meat processing plants) particularly prone to spreading it while lacking health services and especially intensive care beds. In addition, the origins of Covid-19 are likely to lie precisely in the "sources of capital and economic geographies" that are part of China's so-called hinterlands (Wallace 2020, 79).

### Part I—Materialities: Extraction, Logistics

As a counterpoint to the fattening out of the hinterland's multivalent material and affective charge by idealizing or romanticizing imaginations, we highlight, especially in the frst part of this volume, how, from the nineteenth century to the present, what has primarily characterized the hinterland is precisely its function as a catalyst for the global spread of the capitalist-colonialist-climatic assemblage.12 The continuing expansion of this assemblage means that the hinterland can encompass areas belonging to and running across vastly different geographical and conceptual typologies inclusive of the urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness, and of multispecies co-habitation. Breaking free of the rigid boundaries often put between these categories, we emphasize how hinterlands may, in fact, be situated on land, water or ice, during sun, rain or wind, and warm or cold temperatures, in the air, or even in outer space. That the hinterland underwrites and *sustains* the capitalist-colonialist-climatic assemblage, moreover, indicates that it should be considered as central rather than peripheral to this system and can in no way be considered as separate, as an outside where one can retreat from global modernity.13

12Arguably, this role of the hinterland goes back as far as the formation of the early Mesopotamian states in the Tigris-Euphrates region from roughly 3100 BCE. In *Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States* (2017), James C. Scott engages the hinterland (a term he only uses once) through the notion of "the barbarian zone," where "barbarian" is a tongue-in-cheek way to highlight the ecological and cultural diversity and complexity that existed outside the "agro-ecology of the State" (33). Whereas the State is structured by the confnes of the domus complex, where people crowd together within enclosures and work on monotonous tasks "strapped […] to the metronome of a major cereal grain" (20), the barbarian zone features "hunting, slash-and-burn cultivation, shellfsh collection, foraging, pastoralism, roots and tubers, and few if any standing crops. It is a zone of physical mobility, mixed and shifting subsistence strategies: in a word 'illegible' production" (33). The contrast, as Scott himself admits, is exaggerated and tends to romanticize pre-pastoral communities, but we fnd it nonetheless helpful for thinking the ecological specifcity and agency of the hinterland in a dynamics of state regulation and economic regimentation.

13The hinterland, then, is not equivalent to the periphery of world systems theory. Whereas "the periphery is the backwater of the world system" (Klak 2013, 101), a zone of exploitation "in which are concentrated low-proft, low-technology, low-wage, less diversifed production" (Wallerstein 1976, 462), and from which surplus value fows unidirectionally to the core, hinterlands "may take an active part in global relations" (Epple quoted in Brahm and Rosenhaft 2016, 5). Hinterlands may be located in what for world systems theory are core countries and are increasingly likely to feature high-tech and high-wage jobs (for example in the offshore oil industry, but also in agribusiness).

Part I focuses on how past and present hinterlands may be designated for but should not be taken as fully exhausted by processes of extraction and the logistics revolution. In the opening chapter, Emily Ng discusses Wang Jiuliang's 2016 documentary flm *Plastic China*, which follows two families working in a small-scale plastic processing factory in Shandong province in north-east China. Viewers travel with the incoming plastic waste (mostly from Western countries) from ship to port to a small processing factory in the hinterland. In Chinese, hinterland is "belly land," Ng tells us, connoting "not only a storage space but also themes of digestion, the vulnerability of the viscera and an inner centrality." The chapter refects on how, in the offcial cut of the flm, "ecocritical momentum" is produced through an aesthetics of the "toxic sublime," yet Ng also comments on what is deemed an "undigested scene" within a "global capitalist metabolic system": in the hinterland of the recycling factory, the way the camera frames children playing in mounds of toxic waste plays up to the notion of the white western savior and risks "reproducing developmentalisthumanitarian chronotopes, geontological divides, and Sinophobic tropes." An alternative cut of the flm, Ng contends, makes clear that this hinterland, and the lives lived within it, can be read through other, more enabling affective and political registers.

Like Ng, Becca Voelcker focuses on an artwork that has been received as a critique of capitalism's reliance on extractive hinterlands. She takes as her focal point the spectral *Wheatfeld: A Confrontation*, produced by artist Agnes Denes in the year 1982, when she and a team of agriculturalists planted and harvested two acres of wheat in a then landfll (now Battery Park) adjacent to Manhattan's Wall Street over a four-month period. The work has been consistently celebrated as "environmentalist" by Denes and art critics alike, both then and now, some 40 years later. Yet, as an artwork it contains the seeds of its own ambivalence, asserts Voelcker. As bringing a hinterland into the "citadel" of New York City (Denes's word), it works not only as a confrontation, exposing the metropole for all its extractive imperialism, but also as a "pleasure" (Voelcker's word) in that the wheatfeld's pastoral beauty possibly bolsters the very patriarchal capitalism that it purports to expose, including essentialist notions of nature and femininity. Voelcker's ecofeminist study is guided by hinterland diagramming, as enabling a looking at the artwork's behind-the-scenes production. In this way, she arrives at a more careful assessment of the artwork, taking in both *Wheatfeld*'s achievements in exposing the hinterland as *of the city*, essential to its functioning, and its complicities in affrming the hinterland as a classed and gendered escape from the metropole.

Not only can hinterland materialities be invested with multiple, contrasting meanings and affects, as Ng and Voelcker make clear, they are also subject to constant change as a result of ever-new extractive processes, developments in global capitalism (from the logistics revolution to fnancialization), and advancing climate change. A river acting as a dividing line between Namibia and South Africa becomes the focal point for connecting and complicating hinterlands in a chapter by Luregn Lenggenhager and Giorgio Miescher. The Lower Orange River (or Lower !Garib) region has been the site of marginalization, extraction, and displacement (of the Khoi and San specifcally) over the longue durée of colonialism (both British and German), apartheid, and postcolonial governmentalities. The river's layered history of occupation is one of alternating remoteness and centrality as it featured agricultural small farming, settler-owned farmland of game and livestock, a hardened colonial border, a strategic military base, commercial sheep and irrigation farming, a diamond deposit and industrial mining, and, fnally, annexed territory. Showing the Lower Orange River to be a simultaneous space of inclusion and exclusion with characteristics of both center and periphery, the authors map out a nuanced historical geography of the Southern African region from the perspective of its riverine past, present, and future.

Hinterlands are becoming "increasingly unstable" as land reclaims the sea for development purposes and becomes ever more "amphibious," Rila Mukherjee argues in her contribution. Kolkota, once a port city, is now a megacity with 15 million people. Parts of the Sundarbans mangrove swamps and many islands have become part of Kolkota's municipalities. The "up" and "down" islands of the Sundarbans are its near and far hinterlands, featuring different ecologies and infrastructures, but also distinct forms of religious syncretism, as the "up" islands become more intimately connected to the urban center, while the "down" islands are more and more abandoned. The management and transformation of Calcutta in the nineteenth century into a "concrete space" is, moreover, increasingly challenged by massive cyclones, storm surges, and extreme fooding, also written about by Amitav Ghosh. Mukherjee describes the impact on especially the far hinterlands of Kolkota of the sweeping away of land bridges and other infrastructures of connection thus: "as the far hinterland's economy sinks into obscurity, and as embankments collapse time and again, its people will live as they have always done, with ever present danger."

Luciano Concheiro San Vicente and Xavier Nueno Guitart take up this concern for how turning hinterlands into logistics spaces affects hinterland communities in their discussion of the construction of a new airport for Mexico City in the lakebed of Texcoco, for which planning began in the early 2000s. The idea was to build the airport on reclaimed land and thus to expand the city into its wet hinterlands. The airport construction was meant to invent a new kind of (dried-out) hinterland which would also be an "architectural emblem of global Mexico," the authors argue. But this "global Mexico" was to stand on muddy and unstable ground. When communities who lived on the land contested the construction vigorously, it was decided to build the Texcoco Ecological Park instead. What locals consistently argued was needed, however, was neither an airport nor a park, but a lake. The chapter asks: if the accumulation of wealth generates dispossession in the hinterlands, how do the hinterlands push back? Not just local communities but the lakebed itself, and thus the reclaimed land, is shown to resist rapid appropriation by economic interests.

Historic and enduring hinterlands of colonial forestry and extractive mining industries (of gold and diamonds) in the Cape Colony of South Africa lie at the heart of the chapter by Sindy-Leigh McBride, which closes the frst part of the volume. Here, the magisterial yet oxidized statue of Cecil Rhodes that stands today in the Company Gardens in Cape Town becomes a starting point to expose the twining of colonialism and climate always and the broken afterlives of imperial dreaming in South Africa today. The metaphorical and material hinterland are mutually reinforced in the body of this chapter: the frst half refects on the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow during the month of November 2021 to expose the hypocrisy of fossil fuel corporations thinking with Anthropogenic social responsibility; as both bankrollers of climate-concern conferences and drivers of climate change, they engage in a form of greenwashing that renders the destruction and abandonment of hinterlands invisible. The second half of the chapter focuses on how coalfre power production is creating new hinterlands destined for barrenness by way of a case study of two South African energy companies (Sasol and Eskom) in operation today across Southern Africa. In the end, McBride asserts, the colonial dream to control climate gestured by the Rhodes statue stands as an ongoing hermeneutic injustice reliant on the notion that hinterlands are there to lay waste to and blind to the fact that this laying waste will ultimately also ruin the center.

### Part II—Affectivities: Abandonment, Dreaming

In the second part of this book, the entangled materialities that make up contemporary hinterlands—their molecular substances, infrastructures, and their human, animal, and vegetative bodies—are linked to affectivities. One way to do this is by taking recourse to what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, in her study of West Virginia's coal-mining hinterland, refers to as "the space on the side of the road," which "emerges in imagination when 'things happen' to interrupt the expected and naturalized, and people fnd themselves surrounded by a place and caught in a haunting doubled epistemology of being in the midst of things and impacted by them and yet making something of things" (1996, 4). Focusing on this space moves the concept of the hinterland beyond the analysis of situations of discursive, economic, material, and political disavowal that utilize either an existing or fabricated spatial remove to effect a demarcation of certain places from what counts as civilization. Rather, this section of the book asks "what happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects of distant systems, but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force felds…?" (Stewart 2011, 446). The lived affects that circulate in the hinterland worlds discussed in the chapters in this section range from desperation, exhaustion, indignation, and hatred to defance, hope, and joy. This indicates that, despite its assigned function as a realm of extraction, a wasteland to be wasted, the hinterland is capable of exceeding (if never fully escaping) its instrumentalization by the capitalist-colonialist-climatic assemblage. At the same time, the chapters in this part show that the politics circulated through the affective economies of the hinterland range widely and are not guaranteed to be progressive or without their own blind spots.

Pamila Gupta explores "hinterland thinking" in relation to the small town and the township in South Africa, as refracted through Rob Nixon's *Dreambirds* (1999) and Jacob Dlamini's *Native Nostalgia* (2009), both memoirs and fragments of political becoming via visual, sensorial, and sonic recollections of childhood. Hinterland as an act of writing, a "contiguous folding" of the material and the metaphorical not so easily demarcated into rural and urban, is also explored here, as is the idea that each memoir may be the hinterland of the other. Places like Oudtshoorn, which Nixon writes about, are spaces of "pivot globalizations," in Gupta's term, home to feeting industries such as ostrich farming and to feeing migrants, as well as imaginative oases linking to bigger worlds. As Nixon writes: "South Africa's hinterland abounded in such towns." These are stories "of extraction and dreaming both," Gupta elaborates. Dlamini's Katlehong, a township that was poor but not poor in life, is read for its sociability, its connectedness to elsewhere, its informality, and its radio stations. It is in these registers that Dlamini parses this hinterland's geographical adjacency to the big city as productive of enabling affects, dreams, and political and writerly consciousness.

The swampy hinterlands of Louisiana are where Maarten Zwiers locates his chapter. The Deep South is shown to be a neglected site for looking at the rootedness of larger American political machinations, one where wetlands and authoritarian politics come together through a connected history of white supremacy with oil drilling. One early twentieth-century masculinist fgure stands out: plantation family man, segregationist strongman, and rightwing political campaigner Leander "Judge" Perez, who was in control of Plaquemines Parish, a site of oil and natural gas extraction. He managed to keep this "watery empire afoat" (Zwiers's words) over a long political career that spanned 40 years (1920s–1960s), to the detriment of this bayou's natural environment and inhabitants, both human and non-human. Although the wetlands were also a site of refuge, for runaway slaves and, later, the Underground Right to Vote Movement and Black fshermen, the idea of a marshland given to extraction twined with corrupt and racialized politics remained dominant. It eventually traveled North to become the blueprint for the now infamous Republican jingoist cry of "drain the swamp" that heralded Republican Donald Trump's presidential bid in 2016. Here, the hinterland, turned toxic by economic and political machinations, functions, materially and affectively, as a harbinger of things to come—environmental disaster and far-right populist insurrection.

Tjalling Valdés Olmos refects on ways of responding to capitalist ruination and abandonment in the far hinterlands of the American West via a reading of Neel's *Hinterland* and Chloe Zhao's 2020 flm *Nomadland*. If Neel tends to rely on modes of resistance such as riots, rebellion, or class war, as well as on binaries of far and near which reify the rural-urban binary and privilege the more recognizable modes of resistance of the peri-urban, Valdés Olmos suggests that *Nomadland* portrays more ambivalent forms of resistance—and repetition—that draw upon affective sensoria and economies. Neel, he argues, "vacates the far hinterland politically," at least for the left, but if one turns to the interruptions and "glitches" that Lauren Berlant identifes, one can read Zhao's flm as interrupting the frontier narratives of the classic Western. While referencing this genre's tropes, the flm also questions the capitalist, heteronormative, and settler colonialist fantasies it conjures, Valdés Olmos argues. And yet, ultimately, *Nomadland* does repeat the ideals of rugged individuality and "strenuous subjectivity" this terrain offers to white people, here a woman, Fern. Black and Indigenous modes of communal survival, world-making, and resistance in this hinterland, which rely on very different imaginations of its materialities and affective affordances, thus remain invisible to the flm's purpose.

If hinterlands are often read for stasis and political impasse, then we can re-evaluate these assumptions via the fction of South African-born writers Alex La Guma and Zoë Wicomb, Andrew van der Vlies suggests. Both writers create protagonists who fnd in the hinterlands, particularly far ones, latent "energies of revolt" that can be turned into forms of active resistance to the apartheid status quo, personal and collective. In La Guma's *In the Fog of the Seasons' End*, the urban-peripheral spaces or near hinterlands of Cape Town are sites of apathy, while the novel's ending and dedication, in Van der Vlies's words, propose "a revalorization of the hinterland not as sleepy rural station-sidings … but sites of future resistance … and political (and personal) actualization." Similarly, he argues, Wicomb's female protagonist in *You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town* (1987) fnds in the "far fringes of the far hinterland" a connection with place that is "neither circumscribed by nor has its signifcance prescribed by" apartheid or whiteness. In fact, the latter carries the potential for her to become a writer, including via the materiality of the hinterland—the fynbos and proteas of the Gifberge—itself. Van der Vlies thus urges that we consider the reanimating energies to be glimpsed in or behind the "stasis" so often foregrounded in depleted hinterlands and overly economistic readings, in order to revalorize this stasis as potential.

The disruptive local, national, and transnational ghosts emerging from a "lost" hinterland, in the form of a village that was purposely submerged under water to make way for a reservoir, are the focus of Kate Woodward's chapter. She looks at how three recent flmic and televisual representations of the 1965 fooding of Capel Celyn in Wales portray it as a hydropolitical event that remains in the Welsh consciousness. Despite mass objections at the time, the Tryweryn River was dammed, fooding the small village and its surrounding farmland to produce a reservoir to service nearby Liverpool and the Wirral. This patterned act of fooding in (colonial) Wales was equally one of displacement and destruction, affecting 48 people, 12 houses and farms, the post offce, the school, a chapel, and a cemetery. That this drenched village was one of the last Welsh-speaking areas in Wales is the reason that its cultural memory and landscape as a national icon endures and is powerfully etched in art, music, literature, television, and flm. The fate of Capel Celyn showcases how a sodden and mythic Wales functions as a hinterland in the larger geography of the United Kingdom—alongside Patagonia in Argentina, where Welsh nineteenthcentury migrants were sent on the promise of a new homeland, thus becoming colonizers themselves (as explored in one of the flmic representations under discussion). While the sacrifce of this peripheralized agricultural village to ensure the smooth fow of water to urban settlements could not be stopped at the time, the television series and flms, in Woodward's reading, envision the material and emotional disruption it caused as pressing upon the present in the form of water-born ghosts that refuse to let the interconnected "drowned postcolonial haunted hinterlands" of Wales and Argentina be forgotten.

The potential for cultural imaginaries to use particular aesthetic and affective registers to draw attention to forgotten histories of not just hinterland losses but also hinterland rebellions, and to envision new hinterland futures, is also addressed by Catherine Lord. She looks closely at an experimental political flm that centers on a radical main character named Robinson (after Defoe's famous protagonist), who fghts against capitalist extraction in London's hinterland at the time of the global fnancial crisis of 2008. Patrick Keiller's wondrous *Robinson in Ruins* (2010) is read for its portrayal of still very active British post-industrial wastelands, including cement mines, ruined churches, and sixteenth-century country estates such as that of Hampton Gay, with its history of worker rebellion. What also appears in this flmic far hinterland, lingered upon by the camera for minutes at the time, are lichens, fowers, fences, and government gas markers (GPSS). Often overlooked as they "hide in plain sight," they mark the hinterland, Lord argues, as a place where organic and non-organic matter works in symbiosis with humans (including displaced agricultural workers, the underpaid, and the poor) and the land itself (in particular, resilient lichens and fourishing fowers). Keiller's hinterlands are, on the one hand, places of derelict ruins, abandoned military bases, class oppression, and accelerating global warming. On the other, they are sites of wildness, of potentiality to dismantle late capitalism and forge a socialist community agenda that involves building eco-homes and a commons under public ownership. Cinematic biophilia as an affective modus operandi is achieved through the attention drawn by the wandering character of Robinson—a cameraman, landscape photographer, and stand-in for Keiller, the flmmaker—to the sightly and unsightly elements that symbiotically give form to the hinterland and that suggest ways of life beyond capitalist enclosure.

### Part III—Ecologies: Care, Transformation

The chapters in the third and fnal part of the book point to the alternative ways of living together and new forms of care, including for non-human life forms and the planet, that may if not altogether fourish then at least persist or be imagined as persisting in hinterlands, literally by the road, to recall Stewart, or in other unlikely, seemingly inhospitable places, as well as under trying conditions of drought, fooding, raging winds, or pestilence. Such ways of living need not be progressive, as Part II also demonstrates. The fragile, tentative forms of care, for self and others, located in the hinterland often emerge from strategic mobilizations of the tension between the hinterland's status as an accessible space harboring resources whose availability for exploitation is taken for granted and its association with that which lies beyond what is visible or known. This part also emphasizes how hinterland ecologies are lived differently by their human, animal, vegetal, mineral, and other (including cyborg) constituents and how these differences may offer terrains, however fragile, for imagining hinterlands beyond the capitalist-colonialist-climatic assemblage.

Hinterland ecologies are not necessarily landbound, Esther Peeren shows, in her analysis of Ben Smith's 2019 novel *Doggerland*. The story is set on a deteriorating windfarm on the North Sea, maintained by a "boy" and an "old man" in a dystopian future where both capitalism and climate are depleted. Besides setting the hinterland literally at sea, the novel also identifes it as a desolate "milieu that leaves its human inhabitants reduced to necessary but interchangeable labor, affectively at sea," Peeren writes. Animal life does not fare any better, as no birds or fsh remain in this "faltering" logistics space. Yet, there are fssures in the "capitalist-colonialist net" that allow the men to care for each other and fnd beauty in the polluted sea and that cause certain species (jellyfsh) to thrive. In addition, by invoking water's "endurance through deep time" the novel seeks to "summon a beyond-the-hinterland," a future after capitalism-colonialism and after the human. Here, though, Peeren argues, the novel's vision of water's resilience risks "underplaying the hinterland's destructive force," for water, at the molecular level, "does not persist unaffected by the hinterland at sea."

Sarah Nuttall re-reads J. M. Coetzee's novel *The Life and Times of Michael K* for its conditions of pluviality (rain that causes fooding) and dryness, showing how they are crucial to the novel's registers of extraction, abandonment, and care in its looped hinterlands from the port city of Cape Town to the uplands of the Karoo. In the near and far hinterlands, Michael K is an exposed and largely abandoned subject reduced to the labor he can provide. Yet the novel explores, too, the possibility of living outside (or, in a more complex vein, within) these hinterland regimes beyond the terms of "camp life" in a "time of war." Crucial to the undoing of the terms of K's multiple confnements as a raced, classed, and disabled subject, however, are questions of water, wetness, and dryness, pluviality and deep drought, in which rain or the lack of it can save or destroy life as well as the smallest project of personal freedom, Nuttall shows. Thus, it is in the colonial-apartheid matrix of power that the looped hinterland becomes a site of extraction and small abundance, with Coetzee incorporating registers of both in K's quest for "self-possession, subsistence, and regeneration."

In her chapter, Marrigje Paijmans explores such diffcult tensions between extraction, abuse, self-possession, and the imagination as a line of fight in the context of animal husbandry in Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's 2020 novel *My Heavenly Favorite*. The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products, after the United States. While the presence of large-scale livestock farms remains almost invisible in the Dutch countryside, Paijmans draws forward this obscured space as a hinterland of extractive capital. Rijneveld's novel, much like the ones explored by Peeren and Nuttall, explores the interstices of the extractive hinterland by focusing on how it fosters a girl character "becoming animal" in Deleuze's sense. By taking imaginative fight, via physical proximity to farm animals and via pop culture, the girl takes to the animal hinterland of the village she lives in to escape the predatory gaze and actions of a pedophiliac vet. This is not an unambiguously anthropomorphic novel, as animal agency is drawn in at the level of affect: the "forces and feelings" that "connect and divide bodies within sensual experience" allow the animal hinterland, on Paijmans's reading, to emerge as "neglected and exploited, yet at the same time morbidly attractive and regenerative." She explores, via the novel, how a society which routinely harms animals produces harmful relations among humans as well and how this entanglement, foregrounded in the novel, is what opens the animal hinterland to analysis.

The hinterland as "a necessary, if unseemly, supplement to named 'lands'" invites the compound focalization approach taken by Murray Pratt in his chapter on literary hinterlands and the planetary. Writings from Amitav Ghosh and Achille Mbembe are summoned with a sense of urgency as forms of reparation and renegotiation with Earth, and as a way forward, a method for anthropogenic thinking and working with three contemporary novelistic vignettes of hinterlands in three distinct locations: a fctional conglomerate Indian city in Deepa Anappara's *Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line* (2020); the Glaswegian suburb of Pithead, featuring an "abandoned mining heap," in Douglas Stuart's *Shuggie Bain* (2020); and a dystopic fantastical future Chinese waste-sorting settlement named Silicon Isle in Chen Qiufan's *Waste Tide* (2013). A defning characteristic of hinterlands, "their salvage punk proclivity for juxtaposition and *bricolage*," is mobilized to offer a new reading of neglected and disadvantaged lives set amongst fractured fctional terrains imbued with exhaustion and exploitation. Yet these subaltern lives—human and, in Chen's science fction, cyborg—are also afforded agency by these three novelists, by way of focalizations that highlight how linguistic inventiveness; the power of storytelling, poetry, and dance; and the repurposing of dwellings and environments (of body and mind) to make sense of one's worldview are able to unsettle dominant logics, attain affective value, avert disaster, and bring forth planetary justice. Hinterlands are thus productively seen as both the "bruise left by brutalizing capital" and the "promise of recalibrated relations with the world that sustains us," in Pratt's words.

Forms of care suggesting potentialities for the transformation of the hinterland beyond the extractions and abandonments inficted upon it by the capitalist-colonialist-climatic assemblage are not only envisioned in literary texts. Ruth Sacks discusses Johannesburg's inner-city hinterlands in terms of planting and plant histories in contexts of growing food shortages. She highlights two edible plants, blackjack and maize, as instances of small-scale growing and piecemeal farming in and around the city. A plantoriented reading offers us a clearer understanding of the grown food system, she suggests, and assists in working out what "better food futures" might look like. The Greenhouse Project in central Johannesburg, the focus of her analysis, points to the blurring of hinterland and city as inequality and climate change escalate. The exploitation of "captured soils" in the city's desiccated hinterlands historically produced ecological upheaval and hunger, but now offers a "potential salve to uneven food distribution." A reframing of colonial categories of "botanical value and class-based sustainability" points to the future gains of "slower, smaller, and healthier loci of growing, harvesting, and living."

In the fnal chapter, Jennifer Wenzel discusses the "hinterland underground," specifcally the economic and ecological hinterland metabolisms constituted by "dynamic subterranean fows and stocks of matter and energy whose effects profoundly shape what might seem like stable ground." She turns our attention to the "sub-surface," and specifcally the subsoil, also known as the "overburden"—the layers of soil, rock, vegetation, and water that must be excavated in order for mining operations to get to the ore and minerals below. The subsoil is offered as a subtle subverticality, a crucial material membrane, just under what we see when we look horizontally. Wenzel shows that the search for subterranean fossil fuel energy "broke with the territorial as broad surface" as it shifted downward via the shaft of mining extraction. Do hinterlands, Wenzel speculates, become "forgotten backwaters" particularly when the loci of supply "shift underground"? How are horizontal and vertical hinterlands related materially and metaphorically? Linking histories of mining and agriculture questioning long-standing associations of agriculture with improvement and horizontality and of mining with extraction and verticality—Wenzel shows how both "mined" (disturbed and radically transformed) the subsoil, so that when farmers used steel plows to pull up the grasslands in what became the Dust Bowl on the North American Great Plains, the subsoil, so crucial to the ecological sustainability of the region, dried up and blew east in massive dust storms. Wenzel reads the subsoil-turneddust as Mary Douglas's "matter out of place," as the hinterland arrives as portend and warning in the cities of the east, and situates subsoil as a site of care going forward.

\* \* \*

Together, the three parts of the book draw on a multiplicity of genres, disciplines (sociology, history, anthropology, literary studies, art history), and locations across the Global North and South (United States, England, Wales, Scotland, Netherlands, South Africa, China, India, Mexico), as well as being attuned to both land and water, the terrestrial and the oceanic, and human/plant/animal relations. Collectively and cumulatively, they make clear how a focus on hinterlands reveals anew the impasses fowing from the entanglement of the haunting afterlives of colonialism, the changing infrastructures of global capitalism, and the impending threat of environmental collapse. In doing so, the book aligns with Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021), who argues that our analyses must necessarily now explore their terrains from two perspectives: the global and the planetary. The two, he notes, have for a very long time been addressed separately. If the globe is a human-centric construction, a planetary perspective irrefutably draws in non-human worlds, linking human histories to the planet as such. To echo a term used by Jennifer Wenzel in her chapter, the earth can no longer be taken as "stable ground" on which to project human-engineered purpose. Nigel Clark notices how scientifc facts can never entirely displace the "visceral trust in earth, sky, life and water" (quoted in Chakrabarty 2018, 5) that humans have come to possess, yet observes that all four terms are under duress today. The "uneven histories" of extraction (as well as combustion and emission) shape the present and future in material form, writes Wenzel, and so it is that "one cannot tell this expanded story of globalization without acknowledging the environment as its condition of possibility and its product" (2019, 5). The formerly colonized world is thus "indispensable, not marginal, to this history," and the task for those writing now is to decipher how capitalism, colonialism, and the climatic function through "continuity and rupture" (Wenzel 2019, 5–6).

If a "rescaling of attention" (Wenzel 2019, 4) is needed, the question of the planetary must attend to complex questions of time.14 In Chakrabarty's sense, this involves a calibration of our critical attention to include shifts in the earth as system and not only changes to "the extent we are recognizing human infuence" (2018, 9) on that system. Or, in other words, what both Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003) and Debjani Ganguly (2020) have referred to as an alter-global conceptualization.15 The planetary is not just a matter of reach or scale alone but suggests itself

14For Chakrabarty, we need to factor in geological timescales that are registered across millions of years and in which "human history" makes a mark, but ultimately a small one. Thus, we cannot focus only on "the extent we are recognizing human infuence on the planet"—even where the latter is acknowledged as the "impact that ushered in a new period in the planet's history" (2018, 9). Climate justice scholars emphasize the uneven distribution of "human" infuence on the planet while focusing less on geological time scales or Earth system geo-alterities.

15 Spivak wrote that "the planet is in the species of alterity" (2003, 72) and Ganguly has referred in her work on planetary realism to "geoalterity" (2020, 445).

as a mode of being and thinking. Crucial to the planetary then is learning to apprehend, write, and live differently in a world "that isn't quite what we thought" (Wenzel 2019, 20). It is for all these encompassing reasons that we title this book *Planetary Hinterlands*, as we explore the conditions of extraction, abandonment, and care in multi-sited hinterlands of vulnerability, harm, and re-constitution today.

**Acknowledgment** The contributions of Esther Peeren and Hanneke Stuit to this chapter emerged from the project "Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World" (RURALIMAGINATIONS, 2018–2023), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 772436).

### References

Sites in Suez Canal, Egypt and Histopathological Effects. *Journal of Environmental Health Science & Engineering* 13 (1): 1–8.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# Belly of the World: Toxicity, Innocence, and Indigestibility in *Plastic China*

### *Emily Ng*

In January 2018, on the eve of the Trump administration's trade war against China, the Xi administration began halting the import of 24 categories of solid waste from foreign countries, including most plastics, citing environmental and health concerns. Within the span of a year, plastic imports dropped by over 90 percent in the People's Republic of China (PRC), causing a seismic shift in the international waste markets (Staub 2019). Prior to this waste import ban—offcially known as Operation National Sword—the PRC processed around half of the world's discarded plastic and was the top destination for plastic waste from the US, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere (Wen et al. 2021). Following the ban, countries across the globe rushed to fnd new destinations for their refuse, with some municipalities halting recycling programs altogether (Javorsky 2019).

Released a year before the Chinese state's initial discussions of National Sword—and rumored to have been an impetus for it—Wang Jiuliang's 2016 documentary flm *Plastic China* follows two families working in a small-scale plastic processing factory in Shandong province in northeast

E. Ng (\*)

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

© The Author(s) 2024

P. Gupta et al. (eds.), *Planetary Hinterlands*, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24243-4\_2

China. The flm's setting feels neither urban nor rural in a classic sense. After an opening shot of a toddler playing in a cave of plastic, the flm moves to the industrial loading docks of Qingdao (Tsingtao) Harbor. The camera follows the slow, smooth movement of a cargo ship as it enters the port (Fig. 2.1a). Echoing the Germanic etymology and original defnition of hinterland as that which is *behind* the (often colonial) port (the city and harbor of Qingdao were built as a concession to German forces in 1898, during the European "scramble for concessions" in China), viewers are invited to travel with the containers as they are lowered onto truck beds and move beyond the dock, through small market towns and villages (Fig. 2.1b–c). The containers soon shed their shells, revealing sacks of waste as they move against the backdrop of idyllic sun-lit wheat felds (Fig. 2.1d). The pairing of radiant green and gold felds with the industrial aesthetics of container trucks and global garbage sets the scene for a sense of matter out of place and, if we follow Bakhtin (1981), also out of time the cyclical, repetitive temporality evoked by the rural idyll, in which human rhythms and natural rhythms move in harmony, is intruded upon by capitalist modes of abstraction and mechanized labor. At last, one of the trucks arrives at its destination: the small family-owned plastic waste processing factory where most of the flm will take place.

**Fig. 2.1 a–d** Screenshots from *Plastic China*

Extending port-centered defnitions of hinterland and agriculturecentered ones of rurality, recent scholarship approaches the hinterlands of today as spaces—both peri-urban and rural—intimately connected with global trade, housing not only classic forms of non-urban production but also logistical processes from data farms to garbage disposals to renewable energy generation (Neel 2018; Introduction to this volume). While both the countryside and hinterlands may be considered sites of material resource provision (agricultural and otherwise), their spectralization in urban-centered imaginaries—including the sense of their incompatibility with global capitalism—casts them as peripheral, justifying their devaluation and obscuring their inextricability with the city (Spivak 2000; Williams 1975).

While "hinterland" evokes remoteness, emptiness, and marginality in fgurative Anglophone usages, in modern Chinese, hinterland has been translated as *fudi*, lit. "belly land," connoting not only a storage space, but also themes of digestion, the vulnerability of the viscera, and an inner centrality.1 A term related to *fudi* is *neidi*, lit. "inner land," which carries similar connotations of remoteness and marginality to the English hinterland, but is associated with landlocked rural and provincial geographies rather than with port-adjacent hinterlands. In Chinese economic and geographic scholarship, hinterlands—not unlike in the technical Anglophone usage are framed as crucial for the growth and sustenance of urban regions: "[The] hinterland supplies resources for the economic activities of central cities, so the range and the quality of hinterland are very important to a city's development" (Pan et al. 2008, 635). Approaching *Plastic China* as a cinematic portrayal of hinterlands in multiple potential senses, this chapter considers how the flm deploys an aesthetics of the toxic sublime and a temporality of stagnation by the measures of progressive time. When juxtaposed with themes of childhood innocence and potentiality, these produce an ecocritical momentum driven by a moralized sense of disgust, pointing to what is deemed an indigestible scene within a global capitalist metabolic system.2

1Thanks to Tong Wu for the refection on vulnerability. Thanks to Shola Adenekan for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

2 See Schneider and McMichael's (2010) critical rethinking of Marx's rending of capitalism and/as metabolic rift.

### Eating Time: Plastics Between Post/socialism and Global Capitalism

In her essay "Life and Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic," Heather Davis (2015) describes plastic use as "tempophagy" time-eating—where the compressed bodies of very old plants and animals (in the crude oil from which plastic's synthetic polymers are derived) are re-consumed through the very short consumerist lifespans of the singleuse take-out container. Plastic, as she puts it, "can be considered the substrata of advanced capitalism" (Davis 349).3 Meanwhile, in *Synthetic Socialism*, Eli Rubin describes mainstream perceptions of plastic in 1950s–1970s East Germany, where it signaled a nearly inverted set of values to those it was assigned in capitalist imaginaries and usages. In the former German Democratic Republic, plastic was considered a "precious collective resource, to be cherished and not disposed of," in stark contrast with the notions of inferiority and disposability assigned to plastic by West Germans and others outside of the Soviet sphere (Rubin 2008, 11). Bauhaus-inspired industrial designers in East Germany emphasized the functionalist, anti-capitalist qualities of their plastic creations. Between the fast, throwaway, distinction-making consumerism of capitalism and the slow, built-to-last, equality-focused consumption of socialism, plastic reveals itself to be polysemous, capable of hosting contrasting politicaleconomic temporalities.

Unlike in East Germany, plastic was not a prominent material, physically or symbolically, in Maoist China. Food tended to be transferred in paper, beer was stored in returnable glass bottles, and parcels were often sent in cotton bags; the boom of plastic arrived only after the death of Mao and the "opening" of the Chinese economy to global markets in the late 1970s. The explosion of demand for plastic, owing to China's new role as factory of the world (due to the comparatively low costs of labor), soon outpaced the country's capacity to produce it, and the Chinese state came up with a solution: to import waste plastic from wealthier countries that were "both more addicted to plastic use and increasingly concerned about the state of their environment" (Hilton 2020, 131). The same

3A far cry from the pleasurable amazement associated with plastic's capacities for "infnite transformation" described by Barthes in the 1950s (1972, 97), plastic has come to signal a fatal and indeed stubbornly unchangeable substance, part and parcel of the Anthropocene and its movement toward planetary doom (Carrington 2016).

shipping containers that carried exports to the world would now return, flled with the remains of what had been consumed. With the massive rise of waste import, small, informal enterprises for hand-sorting imported plastic waste multiplied, often on the outskirts of cities and in rural areas. By the 1990s, "China had gone from a country that produced and consumed almost no plastic to be the world's biggest producer," and plastic grew to be ever-present, not only for the export markets, but also for new items of domestic consumption—and waste—within China itself (Hilton 2020, 130–131; Wen et al. 2021).

Prior to the recent hypervisibility of Chinese plastic waste import and processing, what sustained the mass import of global plastic waste in China, aside from the economic dimensions of low-paid labor and low cost of shipping (thus allowing the avoidance of expensive processing at home), was precisely the rendering-invisible of plastic waste to global consumers and regulators. Media coverage of *Plastic China* and the dramatic "cutting" of foreign waste imports by Operation National Sword have brought this previously low-profle state of affairs into the global limelight, making plastic waste a visual signifer of a political battleground between capitalist and post/socialist worlds. The chronotopic projection of an ever-advancing, ever-accelerating, smooth-fowing, border-free capitalism meets a dramatic "blockage" to the global digestive system of plastic consumption. Approaching waste as matter out of perceived "use-time," with recycling being a case of potential transformation from waste-time back into use-time (Viney 2014), the post/socialist hinterland of the plastic reprocessing factory might be considered a purgatorial zone previously out of sight for many global consumers, where waste acquires another life. The now-visible specter of the family-run processing plant, flled with young children, comes to haunt transnational audiences through their exposure to previously unseen bowels of plastic consumption and murky underworlds where a portion of plastic was quietly reincarnated. Not unlike ritual separations of purity and pollution in other places and times (Douglas 1966), plastic seems to undergo a transnational ritual of purifcation in a zone now demarcated and distanced as wasteland and waste-time, in spite of the central role of such spaces in plastic's return to global consumer markets in its purifed version: "made from recycled plastic."4 Such waste and waste-times are not exclusive to capitalist or post/socialist

4Thanks to Naor Ben-Yehoyada for the conversation on ritual purifcation and to the Kinship and Semiotics group at Columbia for the discussion of an early version of the chapter.

worlds but pose the question of a reluctantly shared body, as stubbornly indigestible materials move through the intimate organs of the global digestive system, oscillating between "use" and "waste." Here, I return to *Plastic China* to explore aesthetic themes of toxicity and indigestibility, as well as the question of fnitude and potentiality posed by the flm's juxtaposition of plastic and humans—especially children.

### The Ends of Life: Toxicity and Inertia

After establishing the initial contrast between industrial containers and idyllic agricultural landscapes, the flm deploys a particular aesthetics of toxicity, juxtaposing the inorganic inertia of plastic with the potentiality of childhood. Such imagery evokes—as online commentaries attest to—visceral affects of disgust and indignation, in an era when climate concerns and sustainable food movements have grown increasingly prominent globally. Initial shots of the family-run processing plant show Kun, the factory owner, pushing a massive roll of plastic waste, alongside an alreadypresent mountain of plastic rising above his height (Fig. 2.2a). The child protagonist, Yi Jie—eldest daughter in the family employed by Kun—and the other children of the two families are shown working and playing near, on, or in these heaps of plastic (Fig. 2.2b–d).

**Fig. 2.2 a–d** Screenshots from *Plastic China*

In her work on geontopower, Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) describes the distinction between life and nonlife—in addition to the more commonly critiqued distinction between human and nonhuman—as foundational to Western philosophies of being, extending into late liberal forms of governance. In these renderings, that which separates animate beings flled with potentiality from inanimate objects lacking such potentiality is the temporal limit of fnitude: that which cannot die holds no potential. Inertia is contrasted with cycles of birth and death, marked by growth, change, and decay in the interim. The human child, in this sense, epitomizes such imaginaries of potentiality. To repeatedly juxtapose children with plastic an ultimate symbol of "lifeless" substance infamous for its incapacity to biodegrade—thus tugs at the heart of the geontological split. By existing outside of life and death, plastic "represents the fundamental logic of fnitude, carrying the horrifying implications of the inability to decompose, to enter back into systems of decay and regrowth" (Davis 2015, 353).

This uncanny pairing of life and inertia intensifes its affective force through images of ingestion and, more specifcally, of what might be called a toxic consubstantiality. In a scene that garnered much online commentary, the young Yi Jie dips her comb in the water where some of the white plastic fragments are being washed and runs it through her hair—"…brushing her hair with toxic water!" as one online commentator exclaims. The disgust mobilized by the combination of wetness and plastic's evocation of toxicity is heightened with images of gray sludge (Fig. 2.3a) produced amid the nonbiological "digestive" process of plastics, in transition from their discarded forms as waste into recycled pellets for further use. Paired with such colors and textures, olfactory signals enter the scene—close-ups of burning plastic, plumes of thick gray and black smoke, the wrinkled nose of Yi Jie (Fig. 2.3b) and commentary from adult employees on the "disgusting" smells of the garbage. The disturbing proximity between the processing of indigestible plastics and the life-sustaining processes of human digestion culminates in shots of the families eating food cooked with the fames of burning plastic, which includes dead fsh scooped from the nearby plastic-flled river (Fig. 2.3c–d).

### Innocence and the Toxic Sublime

At the same time, and not external to this theme of toxicity and the threat to life, a sense of aesthetic awe is evoked by the texture and selective coloration of plastic waste—heaps awash in white (Fig. 2.2a–c)—the

**Fig. 2.3 a–d** Screenshots from *Plastic China*

gleaming, semi-translucent visuality and crunch of which seem to counterpose itself to the green and brown organicity associated with nature and with rurality. Indeed, in shots that focus on the children living at the family factory, the composition is such that the whiteness of the plastic begins overwhelming the children in visual proportions, nearing the top edge of the frame or exceeding the frame altogether—a sea of plastic with seemingly no end (Figs. 2.2b–d and 2.4a–b). This sense of grandeur, paired with concerns over environmental pollution, is described by Jennifer Peeples (2011) in terms of the "toxic sublime" in her analysis of post-1970s ecological photography in the US, especially that of Edward Burtynsky. Drawing on Kant's and Edmund Burke's characterizations of the sublime as that which is vast, magnifcent, infnite, and unfathomable and *moves* the mind toward a form of negative contemplation, Peeples points to the simultaneous sense of revulsion and awe captured by the toxic sublime, whose contemplation can offer impetus for change.

This sense of the toxic sublime, with caveats I will turn to in a moment, is also present in *Plastic China*, particularly through the visual immersion of the viewer in its mountains and seas of white trash: white—a paradoxical color of modern cleanliness when paired with waste, a Western color of the angelic and of childhood innocence, and in China, a color of death, worn historically and today at funerary ceremonies. The symbolic

**Fig. 2.4 a–b** Screenshots from *Plastic China*

multiplicity of white as color and the common sensibility toward plastic as inorganic and never-decomposing together conjure a time out of time, an inertness that points at once to human fnitude and a plastic eternity—all while evoking both innocence and mourning. Such paradoxes of aesthetic attraction and aversion are precisely what Peeples describes in the potential effect of the toxic sublime, which aims to produce a moment of hesitation and contemplation, specifcally of one's own complicity with the state of affairs.5

While Peeples emphasizes works such as Burtynsky's, which she argues deliberately exclude humans from their depictions of toxic landscapes, thus leaving the viewer in ethical suspension by interrupting their impulse to seek out subjects for pity and blame, the sublime aesthetics of *Plastic China* are paired with character-driven shots and plotlines that return the viewers to a search for usual suspects. By centering on Yi Jie as the child protagonist caught between two adult masculine fgures, the flm foregrounds a modern dissonance between a backward rural paternalism and an implicit forward-moving good of modern schooling and access to capitalist consumption. The former is embodied by Peng, Yi Jie's father, who

5 See also the collection of Somatosphere essays on "Toxicity, Waste, Detritus" (Gupta and Hecht 2017).

is shown to spend his money on alcohol (a "bad" use of time and capital) and who refuses to let Yi Jie go to school (Fig. 2.4c), in contrast to the hardworking, pro-education factory owner Kun (Fig. 2.4d), who labors toward his dream of owning a brand-new car, so that he may get rid of what his mother calls his "crappy" old van. While the irony of the "good" of furthering cycles of consumption and waste is likely not lost on the flmmaker or viewers, the flm's reliance on character tropes of forwardness and backwardness plotted against the rubric of modern progressive time is hard to ignore. Moreover, this developmentalist temporality is spatialized onto a humanist dissonance between waste(land) and (childhood) purity.

### Waste: Between Consubstantiation and Localization

In an ambitious effort to identify four elementary modes of human relationality—communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing—anthropologist Alan Fiske (2004) describes *consubstantial assimilation* as formative of what he calls communal sharing relations. The sharing of food and other comestible substances—including those some deem toxic such as tobacco and drugs—Fiske suggests, draws an equivalence between material bodies and provides the foundation for a certain style of human relationality centered on likeness; for him, kinship is the prototype of such a relation. In *Plastic China*, plays and alternations of sympathy and disgust—the relatability of the laughing children and the deplorability of their illiberal parents; the ethics of an any-work-necessary stance amid poverty; and a how-could-they sensibility toward a plasticinfused life—mirror a tension between a sharing of toxic consumption as condition for global kinship and an implicit denial of consubstantiation through the localization of toxicity to a plastic *China*.

The spatialization of the issue speaks, of course, to the geography of waste export and the flm's aim to expose a previously obscured issue: certain modes of life, perceived as tainted, built out of the debris of perceived purity on the other side of consumption—imaginations of recycling as a "clean," ethical act of regeneration. Early in the flm, close-ups of discarded materials from far-fung sources signal the transnational origins of the waste: a Science Plan dog food bag from US-based Hill's pet foods, wrapping materials from Italy's Magro paper products, a crushed margarine lid from UK-based Flora ProActiv. The day-to-day denial of one's own toxicity is capacitated by the smooth shipping of (here Western) waste abroad. Yet this reminder of shared digestion within the global capitalist system—from "mouth" to "belly"—quickly recedes, and much of the flm homes in on the localized peculiarities of toxicity, on the one hand, and Chinese fantasies of the foreign through its material goods, on the other.6 Yi Jie is shown carefully cutting out and arranging images of pink shoes and clothes from foreign magazines, and the children are shown playing with discarded foreign toys. While many qualities can be evoked by these scenes (creativity, resourcefulness, or the possibility of circular economies, for instance), Anglophone online commentary tends to be centered on pity.7 Between the affective affordances of the flm and this dominant angle of reception, the hinterland of the recycling factory is fgured as a space of foregone childhood, in which the West is positioned as both the origin of a stunted life and the means of exiting it. The foreign-waste-land is posited as a land of coercion and stagnation (reinforced by the local patriarch), with Western-style education and consumption positioned as the apparent escape.

Here, it is useful to contrast the 82-minute offcial cut of *Plastic China* that circulated globally—frst through flm festivals (Sundance, Full Frame, IDFA, and more) and then through major online streaming services (Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, and others)—and the 26-minute cut that gained widespread attention in China prior to the offcial cut. In the shorter cut of the flm—what Wang Jiuliang refers to as the "media version"—some themes and aesthetics distinct from the offcial cut are put into play. Thematically, the ethical implications of *foreign* waste and *local* toxicity stay front and center in the shorter cut, through the flming locations, interviewees, and conversation content. Rather than at Qingdao Harbor, for instance, the flm begins at a recycling center in Berkeley, California, and shows US employees sorting through piles of plastic waste, with a visuality not far from their Chinese counterparts to come, albeit using a conveyer belt and wearing gloves (Fig. 2.5a). While not so pointed in its staging of proportional overwhelm and disgust, there is a similar sense of dirt, manual labor, and a certain haphazardness at the heart of recycling, far from, say, an aesthetics of purity and cleanliness (Fig. 2.5b). Many of the workers shown appear to be BIPOC, including the recycling director interviewed; they speak of their lack of full

6Thanks to Nomonde Gwebu for the reminder on the "mouth."

7 See Jennifer Wenzel (2017) on waste as "Alpha and Omega: the beckoning origin of development and its troublesome end product."

**Fig. 2.5 a–d** Screenshots from *Plastic China* (media version); top two images set in the US (California) and bottom two images set in China (Shandong)

knowledge about what will happen with the materials they sort after they are shipped off to China.

Aside from the US-based recycling staff, the China-based characters are also more wide-ranging. Rather than centering on the two families and the question of Yi Jie's education, an array of villagers—plastic waste processing staff from various facilities as well as other residents who share the local landscape—are shown debating the ethics and legality of waste import and unoffcial processing factories, including the conundrum of harm to health and environmental versus economic necessity. The local effects of plastic waste processing are highlighted through interviews with villagers: the polluting of local groundwater leading to the need to purchase bottled spring water, the diffculty of harvesting wheat covered in plastic debris, a sense of increasing rates of cancer even among the young, and more.

Notably missing in this shorter cut are the centralization of the character and storyline of Yi Jie and the intensifed aesthetics of innocence of the offcial version. While Yi Jie, Peng, Yi Jie's mother, and Kun and his children all appear in the shorter cut, the cast of characters is more widely scattered, centering on questions of community, conundrum, and a critique of state and economic power rather than on the character development of the child and the two patriarchs. The aesthetics of this cut also differ from those of the globally circulated version. Although still flled with ruinous landscapes of plastic waste, the color palettes of the plastic vary widely across shots—a mishmash of blues, yellows, pinks, browns, blacks, and whites (Fig. 2.5c–d). The implication of the party-state is also emphasized more: multiple images featuring Chinese Communist Party slogans and fags pepper the scenes (these are also present in offcial cut, but they only appear once and, unlike in the short version, are left without subtitling, thus likely to be missed by Anglophone viewers).

Compared to the cut frst shared with audiences in the PRC, the version circulated on the global stage appeals distinctly to the abhorrence of a spoiled childhood, with the central promotional image for the flm being one of Yi Jie holding her infant sister, swallowed by a sea of white (Fig. 2.6).

Unlike this appeal to a humanitarian aesthetics, the media cut focused on the deplorable fow and transformation of foreign waste into local toxicity—and, unlike in the offcial cut, both Japanese and Western origins of waste (through the words visible on discarded packaging) are highlighted. Moreover, the media cut implicitly mobilizes viewers to attribute responsibility to the (Chinese) state, with its repeated references to Chinese Communist Party emblems and slogans. This discrepancy is not lost on the flmmaker and likely gestures toward a multiplicity of strategies for evoking responses from distinct viewerships. In an interview with media scholar Jin Liu, for instance, Wang Jiuliang responds to a question on audience reaction:

Audiences abroad and at home are angry. For the foreign audience, they're angry and want to know why their trash ended up going to China. They also feel guilty over the alternative lifestyle of these two families and start to refect upon their own consumption styles. For the Chinese audience [after watching the 26-minute media version], they were angry about the terrible impact of foreign waste on the environment and people in China. (Wang 2020, bracketed comment in original)

While both centered on the production of righteous anger and disgust as moral-political affects (see Ngai 2005), the two cuts offer distinct stagings of the conundrum: one that evokes the guilt in the face of the innocent other (paired with a disgust toward toxicity and illiberal backwardness) and one that evokes indignation in face of the injustice of the dominant foreign other (and also disgust, but centered on the foreign source of internal toxicity). The former, while not unlikely to be effective in its

**Fig. 2.6** *Plastic China* DVD cover

production of affects, simultaneously reproduces an image of China as a site of unfreedom and authoritarian paternalism—reminiscent of Cold War imagery of lost childhood on the other side of the iron curtain, deployed by both sides (Peacock 2014). This is not an accusation of Wang with relation to directorial intentions or of the capacity of the flm to propel social action. Rather, it is to attend to the aesthetics of ecocritical affect production that accompanies cultural imaginaries of hinterlands, wherein China is staged through a curious mix of pity and disgust (both political and bodily), recapitulating historical Western depictions of China as lacking in both hygiene and liberty, and, more broadly, humanitarian imagery as producing an object of concern through which an imagined "international community" constitutes itself (Heinrich 2008; Ko 2005; Malkki 1996). Indeed, this mix of pity and disgust is evoked in recent articulations of hinterlands as a conceptual geography—Phil Neel's *Hinterland* (2018) calls for a global unity beyond politics of blood and nation while opening with a vignette that reproduces familiar Sinophobic tropes: the stench of Chinese bodies to a Western nose sitting on an overpopulated train.

### Closing

As this volume makes apparent, hinterlands can open up new conceptual spaces for critical inquiry when distinctions such as rural and urban face what Lauren Berlant calls a "waning of genre" (2011, 6)—when conventions of relating to fantasy grow out of sync with the historical present. In the case of *Plastic China*, the oft-forgotten global dimension of rural spaces is usefully foregrounded with the maritime arrival of transnational waste. Distinct symbolic-affective constellations are evoked across different cuts of the flm to bring attention to uneven distributions of waste and the troubled conditions of life they afford and to mobilize ethical-political responses from distinct viewers. While this might prove effective, such aesthetic strategies also risk reproducing developmentalist-humanitarian chronotopes, geontological divides, and Sinophobic tropes.

The offcial cut of the flm, explored in this chapter, risks slotting certain forms of life back into a split between deplorable, life-strangling Chinese particularities and an enlightened, life-giving cycle of modern education and material wealth. These divides locate futurity and potentiality outside the spatial imaginary of the hinterlands and back into that of global middle-class modes of life—ones which rely on the consumerismcentered visions of the good life (new toys, new cars) that intensifed plastic production and waste in the frst place. To cite two Anglophone online comments, which echo the sentiments of many others: "My heart aches for the poor children… They have aspirations, hopes and dreams. I wish some day they'll get the opportunity to escape this dreaded place"; "It'll be hard not to look away… The poverty level… is something to make you cry and count your blessings at the same time."8

In the case of plastic waste, themes of use and waste, inertia, and fnitude also enter the scene. Such waste-times, marked by moments of fow and blockage between purported centers and peripheries, gesture toward acts of shared tempophagy (time-eating) and tempopepsia (timedigestion), wherein multiple "mouths" and "guts"—the post/socialist and late/capitalist—together consume and attempt to digest the indigestible.

**Acknowledgment** This chapter emerged from the project "Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World" (RURALIMAGINATIONS, 2018–2023), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 772436).

### References

8Comments from "Plastic China," *YouTube*, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ovvujut-p6g, Accessed 24 July 2022. A full comparison with Chinese online commentaries is beyond the scope of this chapter, but one response to the same YouTube video written in Chinese and markedly different in its focal point—is telling: "拍的挺好的,推动 了社会的进步。。现在洋垃圾正式全面禁止了。" ("[The flm] is shot quite well, promoting society's progress… now foreign garbage is formally fully banned").

Abstract Symbolism. In *Relational Models Theory*, ed. Nick Haslam. Abingdon: Routledge.

Wang, Jiuliang. 2016. *Plastic China* [塑料王国]. CNEX Foundation.

———. 2020. *A Cinematic Presentation of Trash: An Interview with Wang Jiuliang Interview by Jin Liu*. MCLC Resource Center Publication.

Wen, Zongguo, Yiling Xie, Muhan Chen, and Christian Doh Dinga. 2021. China's Plastic Import Ban Increases Prospects of Environmental Impact Mitigation of Plastic Waste Trade Flow Worldwide. *Nature Communications* 12 (1): 1–9.

Wenzel, Jennifer. 2017. Waste. *Somatosphere* (blog), October 23.

Williams, Raymond. 1975. *The Country and the City*. New York: Oxford University Press.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Cultivating Hinterland: What Lies Behind Agnes Denes' *Wheatfeld*?

*Becca Voelcker*

### Planting Ideas

In 1982, the artist Agnes Denes and a team of agriculturalists and volunteers planted and harvested two acres of wheat in a landfll site in lower Manhattan, a short distance from Wall Street and facing the Statue of Liberty. Volunteers cleared the ground of rocks and waste, 200 truckloads of earth were brought on site, and 285 furrows were dug for planting the wheat kernels. Volunteers maintained the wheatfeld for four months, cleaning it of wheat smut, weeding, fertilizing, and spraying it against mildew fungus, and installing an irrigation system. On 16 August, they harvested the crop and gained 1000 pounds of wheat. The kernels were sent to art galleries in 28 cities around the world (Denes 2019, 41).

Denes titled the project *Wheatfeld: A Confrontation*. She described it as representing "food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological

B. Voelcker (\*)

Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2024

P. Gupta et al. (eds.), *Planetary Hinterlands*, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24243-4\_3

concerns" ("Agnes Denes"). Denes was photographed standing in the feld of swaying, golden grains, holding a staff in her hand.1 The World Trade Centers towered in the background. Some likened her image to that of a goddess ("Agnes Denes" 1982). Others compared her work with art historical traditions that celebrate American agrarianism and extol its wheatfelds as the nation's breadbasket (Jones 2019, 225). Others still celebrated her environmentalist politics ("Agnes Denes"). Denes encouraged these different interpretations, describing *Wheatfeld* as both "an intrusion into the Citadel, a confrontation of High Civilization," and "Shangri-La, a small paradise, one's childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures" (Hartz 1992, 118).

*Wheatfeld* has consistently been celebrated as "environmentalist" by Denes and by critics then and today. But how does Denes' idea of nature as a set of "forgotten values" conceal asymmetries of power? What industrial, classed, racialized, and gendered conditions are obscured by *Wheatfeld*'s spectacular impact? Denes was driven by undeniably ecoethical intentions, hoping to confront North America's economic locus of power with a reminder of the agricultural hinterlands upon which its wealth is founded. A city's history is also the history of the hinterlands upon which it depends for extracting natural resources and labor (Cronon 1992, 19). *Wheatfeld* represents hinterland as it confronts the metropolis and exposes how class confict lies behind the artifcial separation of urban and rural space—that is, how capital extracts from the hinterland and focuses on the metropole, thus alienating a huge number of people and depleting landscapes of their biodiversity (Neel 2018, 13, 17).

But *Wheatfeld*'s position as an artwork is ambivalent. Its lovely presence on a then-underdeveloped piece of land risked bolstering the very "Citadel" it purported to criticize. Denes' choice of the word "citadel" indicates her association of New York City with imperial power. The word renders the metropolis a privatized space for affuent people, which *Wheatfeld* apparently confronted. But *Wheatfeld* also risked contributing to the public imagination a marketable image that perpetuated an oppositional narrative of nature-hinterland/culture-metropolis (Curtis and Rajaram 2002). With this came a related, essentialist association of nature and femininity. *Wheatfeld*'s pastoral beauty is an aesthetic so aligned with

1For the photograph, see Agnes Denes' website: http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/ works7.html.

classist and gendered norms that it risks being reincorporated by, rather than confronting, patriarchal and capitalist power structures. Given these complications, how should we understand *Wheatfeld* today?

By studying *Wheatfeld* as a diagram of entanglements between various stakeholders involved in its production, this chapter nuances understandings of Denes' aims and achievements. To do this, the notion of hinterland—literally, what is "behind" a city, providing it with natural resources and labor power—guides this chapter as I ask who and what lay behind *Wheatfeld*'s cultivation. Hinterland helps me envision a diagram of power and infuence into which *Wheatfeld* inserted itself as both a "confrontation" and a "simple pleasure." Diagramming *Wheatfeld* in this way sheds light on art's potential for disrupting ecologically and socially unjust systems and cultivating alternatives—as well as its potential of falling into positions of compromise or complicity. Though planted 40 years ago, *Wheatfeld* yields important questions for art and spatial practice today, as polarizations between urban and rural contexts are exacerbated by the climate emergency.

Denes was keenly aware of the crisis facing the climate. She described *Wheatfeld* in heroic terms as a political effrontery to the environmentally and socially damaging capitalist "system" and its "machinery." It called "people's attention to having to rethink their priorities," she said (Denes 2019, 283). Yet her use of wheat as "a universal concept" to criticize intensive agriculture and food shortages is perhaps short-sighted (Denes 2019, 283). The Hard Red Spring variety of wheat she used is specifcally suited to America's cooler northern states and is prized for bread baking (Curtis and Rajaram 2002). A "universal" concept might equally or more accurately deal with soy or rice. But Denes knew her audiences. Wheat's centrality to a species of American pastoralism rooted in founding myths of economic and territorial expansion underpins the project and accentuates its provocation. "Look," *Wheatfeld* seemed to say, "if this is what Wall Street's wealth is built upon, why are agriculture and its hinterland locations exploited and ignored?" But *Wheatfeld* itself ignored an exploited people, being planted on the land of the Lenape people, which Dutch colonists claimed in the seventeenth century. Wall Street is named after a wall the Dutch built that came to exclude the Lenape. The Lenape grew mixed crops and kept animals on this land—they did not cultivate large areas of wheat there. Denes' choice of crop refers to white settler colonists' industrialized monoculture techniques, and its aesthetic whether seen as beautiful or confrontational, or both—should therefore be understood as an aesthetic grown directly from colonial and industrialagrarian roots.

Denes' harnessing of agrarianism to progress her politics points to her larger strategy of working with contradictions and her ability to maneuver between different audiences and cultural markets. In a statement about her use of Venn diagrams in 1971, Denes discusses her interest in cultivating seemingly contradictory interpretations. "While a work of art may be subject to misunderstandings," she reasoned, "it does exist independently of them" (Denes 2019, 76). *Wheatfeld*, then, constituted a kind of Venn diagram of interpretations. It existed "independently" as two acres of wheat and accrued different and sometimes contradictory readings. In so doing, it offered less the "confrontation" its title and artist promised, and more a materialization of the tangle of agriculture and business interests, of nature and capital, that characterizes the planet's increasingly globalized and urbanized environments (Rawes 2013, 40; Jones 2019, 225). This was a tangle of agrilogistics (Morton 2013, 42). It was also a tangle of idealized nature and its (disavowed) exploitation. Denes' installation of a fock of sheep in the gardens of the American Academy in Rome (1998–2002) attempted a similar diagramming of complex interests. Again, the piece combined agrarian nostalgia with agribusiness, this time cultivating associations with cloning—Dolly the sheep had been born two years earlier (Denes 2019, 275).

### Unearthing Extractivism

*Wheatfeld*, then, like the sheep in Rome, diagrams a socio-economic power structure of hinterland and metropolis. The wheat and sheep "intrude" upon the "Citadel" as reminders of their vital yet disavowed roles in infrastructures of food transportation, preparation, storage, consumption, and disposal (Jones 2019, 225). Extractivism comes in different guises, and *Wheatfeld* encourages consideration of several. First, it critiques extractivist approaches to land and labor, whereby the soil becomes depleted, and people exhausted, by intensive production (Marx 1992, 283). Its material components—soil and wheat—become means of recognizing the tangle of socio-political and material constituents that determine planetary boundary conditions and, when pushed out of balance, indicate the need for ethical renegotiation in a kind of eco-politics (Salazar et al. 2020, 5).

Second, *Wheatfeld*'s adjacency to Wall Street urges consideration of other, more abstract but equally extractivist economic techniques well underway by 1982, such as real-estate and market speculation (Brenner and Katsikis 2020, 30). Just a decade earlier, the US stopped converting dollars to gold at a fxed rate. This increased possibilities for fnancial speculation, including the trading of future stock values of grain. Planting a real wheatfeld outside banks' headquarters, Denes inserted a reminder of the material basis upon which their profts once relied. Location was crucial for this—it is harder to ignore something when it is on your doorstep. Indeed, *Wheatfeld*'s location beside the Financial District underlines the fact that extractivist capitalism depends upon a spatial arrangement whereby an operational center controls the fow of extracted products transported from (rarely seen) places of poverty to places of wealth where high prices are obtained for them (Ye et al. 2020).

Wheat and other cereals are foundational commodities in the New York Stock Exchange's history. The marble pediment on its façade at 18 Broad Street depicts commerce and industry. Beside a strong woman representing Integrity stand fgures of Science, Industry, and Invention on one side, and Agriculture and Mining on the other. This latter sector is symbolized by a man carrying a sack of grain and a woman in a scarf leading a sheep. She holds a staff remarkably like the one Denes holds in her photograph in *Wheatfeld*. In the background of this section is a relief of wheat sheaths. Beyond the farmer couple, two men inspect a piece of mined rock. These fgures are industriously extracting resources from the earth. A marble sea laps on either end of the pediment, symbolizing global trade. This is a celebration of nineteenth-century capitalism. Resources are depicted in abundance, and workers in good health.

Denes' *Wheatfeld* is harder to interpret. She wanted it to confront capitalism. But her golden crop is beautiful. Like the carving, it shows nothing of the reality of hinterland extractivism—none of its destruction of biodiversity, its widespread pollution, its depletion of human and animal energies, and its displacement of indigenous peoples. Without priming on Denes' political intentions, audiences of *Wheatfeld* might be forgiven for viewing it as a real-life extension of the celebratory Stock Exchange carving, with Denes herself representing Integrity. Like her feld of sheep, *Wheatfeld* therefore constitutes a double bind in its uneasy combination of spectacle and politics (Jones 2019). These artworks make powerful critiques and picturesque postcards.

Denes selected *Wheatfeld*'s location in Battery Park, a former landfll site squeezed between the Financial District and the Hudson River, to achieve this tension between the political and the picturesque. She negotiated this location with the New York Public Art Fund, a non-proft organization that part-fnanced *Wheatfeld*. The arts activist Doris C. Freedman, whose own father was a New York architect and property developer, founded the fund in 1977. Freedman was keen to support art that reached audiences who would not normally be exposed to it in their everyday life and that could thus improve civic cohesion (Cascone 2017). On the one hand, *Wheatfeld* did just this, blowing in the summer breeze, far from the confnes of museums and galleries. On the other, it was mainly visited by bankers during their lunchbreaks, art enthusiasts, and tourists. If a family from Queens or from wheat farming country in North Dakota had wanted to visit *Wheatfeld*, they would have faced signifcant travel times and expenses.

For precisely this reason, the Public Art Fund recommended other sites, including Wards Island, a piece of land sandwiched between the lower-income and more racially diverse boroughs of Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens. This location would have been more geographically and economically accessible for many New Yorkers (few people lived near Battery Park at the time). It would also have chimed with Wards Island's longstanding use for social facilities including hospitals and recreation grounds. But Denes wanted confrontation and spectacle. She envisioned an audience of bankers, fnancial lawyers, and bureaucrats as targets. Whether they felt confronted, or soothed, by the swaying feld remains unclear. Denes boasted that some were moved to tears when the feld was harvested (Denes 1993, 390). Again, it is unclear whether this had anything to do with *Wheatfeld*'s political implications. Just as likely, *Wheatfeld*'s banker neighbors were moved at witnessing something so aesthetically pleasing in a space that was previously a no-man's-land where waste was dumped, people occasionally walked dogs, and sporadic art projects took place.2 It was surely inspiring to see a poor patch of land turn golden and upsetting to see it turned back into a wasteland with the harvesting.

If man has dominion "over all the earth" as the Bible promises, and as nineteenth-century industrialists zealously enacted, then crops and