Cultures of Monoculture
Virtual Session
Description
Monocultural farming practices are indissociable from the transformations that characterize life in the 21st century: climate change, urbanization and the dematerialization of labor are but a few phenomena with links to this particular form of land use. Defined as a mode of agriculture in which a single crop is farmed intensively to be sold as a commodity, monoculture has a modern history that intertwines the rise of racialized capitalism in the 17th and 18th centuries, of western empires in the 19th, and of forms of petrochemical neocolonialism invented in the 20th. Despite this importance, much remains unseen and unsaid about monoculture’s influence on cultural expression. This panel will explore multiple valences of the term “monoculture” to invite reflections upon how agriculture under capitalism has intersected with cultural production in the past and present. Placing intensive agricultural processes in dialogue with monoculture’s second meaning—a collective desire for totalizing narrative (Michaels 2011)—we are especially interested in contributions that complicate the often oversimplified schema through which monocultures are presented in both academia and the media.
“Wheat! Wheat! Wheat!” So goes the refrain of Frank Norris’s The Pit, aesthetically registering the monocultural cash crop as the object of sociocultural obsession. Approaching monoculture from their unique historical standpoints, authors as disparate as Patrice Nganang (La Terre du café, coffee), Mongo Beti (Ville Cruelle, cocoa), William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, banana) and Narayan Surve (In That Mill, cotton) have had recourse to formal innovation to capture monoculture’s transformation of landscapes, its effects on communities and its reorganization of global power. This panel invites papers treating a corpus of similar literature, film and performance art (as well as objects of everyday life) that have their source in monoculture.
Be they the plantations of the Americas’ slave economies or the chemicalized farmlands of the modern countryside, the matrices of monoculture have often been difficult to access for outside observers. That monoculture’s long-term effects are diffuse in both space and time only aggravates these challenges to representation. Even the term “monoculture” when invoked as a epistemic category risks obscuring a vast array of practices: from the large-scale sugar cane plantation to smallholding banana farms, the collectivized wheat field to the peanuts cultivated on untenured land, “monoculture" encompasses a broad spectrum of spaces and practices emerging within differing forms of agricultural development, geographic regions and societies. This panel will seek to comprehend this diversity, drawing scholars of different disciplines and historical periods into a comparative conversation of the many cultures of monoculture.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ben Beitler studies the treatment of environmental conflict in contemporary French film and literature. He is currently finishing a dissertation on the representation of pesticides in France since 1945. He is also working on a project based on the development of ecocritical conceptualizations of everyday life. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paragraph, Continuum and The Trouble, as well as the collective publication Living with Precariousness.
Speaker Bio
Abigail Fields is a doctoral candidate in the French Department at Yale University. They are interested in representations of agriculture in French literature and popular media from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Their dissertation, “The Literary Field: Agriculture and the Ecological Imaginary in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel,” traces development of the modern meanings of land, the farmer, and agriculture in the nineteenth century, re-centering land, rural labor, and the changing faces of "Nature" as key anxieties of this period.
Speaker Bio
David Squires is an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He teaches American literature and is currently at work on a project to reassess humanist investments in the fiction of Ernest J. Gaines.
Speaker Bio
Peter Erickson is a tenured Associate Professor of German and the Director of the International Studies program at Colorado State University.
For his current book project, Erickson is at work on a cultural history of the escalator, tracing how the escalator has gone from being a symbol of upward economic mobility to becoming––through terms like "escalation," "de-escalation"––our primary metaphor for violence.
In 2021, as a professor of German literature, Erickson led a research project with the Colorado State University Extension service on immigrant beet workers in northern Colorado. And he subsequently taught a course on "Sugar and the American West," introducing students to the local history of sugar production in Fort Collins and connecting it to the broader history of sugar, immigration, race, and capitalism. Students read a range of other novels and memoirs about the sugar beet industry beyond those mentioned above, such as James Michener's "Centennial" and Louise Erdrich's "The Beet Queen."
Papers
Speaker Bio
Amber Bal is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her research explores the representation of rural spaces in African literature and archival documents written in French and Wolof.
Speaker Bio
Stacey Anh Baran is a Literature PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. Her research primarily focuses on film, horror, and food/agricultural studies. Stacey's dissertation explores how the iconography of maize in American horror cinema reveals historical anxieties around regionality, race, and consumption in the national consciousness.
Speaker Bio
David Huddart is Chair of the Department of English and Director of the Research Institute for the Humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.