The Urban Gardens of Havana
Seeking Revolutionary Plants in Ideologized Spaces
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Beschreibung
This book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo, a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions, they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate are not ‘thick descriptions,’ linked to larger political issues, but rather rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans within the nature-culture debate. Using these experiences, the authors argue that ‘the political’ reaches beyond the affairs of state and governance and should be seen as an all-encompassing part of life. The authors thereby invite the social sciences to focus on the microscopic and the day-to-day to illuminate how the political affairs of lives can be imagined differently.
This book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo, a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions, they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate are not ‘thick descriptions,’ linked to larger political issues, but rather rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans within the nature-culture debate. Using these experiences, the authors argue that ‘the political’ reaches beyond the affairs of state and governance and should be seen as an all-encompassing part of life. The authors thereby invite the social sciences to focus on the microscopic and the day-to-day to illuminate how the political affairs of lives can be imagined differently.
Combines bottom-up, actor-network, and green-continuum methodologies to provide creative insights into contemporary Cuba
Examines the constant dialogue between Cuban urban gardeners and the State and gardeners and their plants
Develops the idea that urban gardens are an amalgamation of simultaneities that reveal the skewed foundations of the Anthropocene
Autor*in
Ola Plonska
Themen in »The Urban Gardens of Havana«
Actor-Network theory Cuban agriculture Foucault Latin America cultural anthropology everyday life heterotopias lived experiences moments of freedom social control state control
Stimmen zu »The Urban Gardens of Havana«
“The Urban Gardens of Havana offers an insightful, detailed, theoretically rigorous and imaginative account of the relationships between urban farmers, the state and nonhuman entities in Cuba … .” (Sahib Singh, LSE Review of Books, blogs.lse.ac.uk, November 8, 2019)
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