Belonging through Land/Scape

Abstract

This paper addresses racialized practices of belonging through two examples which span the period after the Civil War in central Kentucky, and which might stand for questions of race, belonging, land, and landscape in the United States more broadly. It is focused empirically upon people who often have been written out of ‘belonging’, precisely through land and landscape. The examples presented are not intended simply to unmask the ideological undergirdings of land and landscape but, rather, to raise the possibilities for an oppositional politics of belonging in which land and landscape figure as the practical stage upon and through which citizenship and community can be practiced. The conclusions are directed toward grounding concerns for belonging-as-social-justice, which, in these cases, is an incremental achievement, eked out of daily existence, and largely-but not always-in response to dominant social, political, economic, and cultural practice.