Decoloniality is at once a struggle over land, land as stolen, as grabbed, as commodity source, as desecrated, as contaminated, as historically “settled,” as politically neoliberal, and as the very substance of contemporary regimes of ownership and accumulation, with all of the ecological impacts that now implies. Land here takes the form of a materialist injunction over the vexed intersectionality of the country and the city, but specifically in the ways the longue durée of the “agrarian question” mediates the cultural expressivity of land and landlessness in contemporary political economy, which will require maintaining a distinction with territory (or, how we not only mistook the map for the territory, to borrow from Sylvia Wynter, but the territory for the land).1 While there have been explorations of the postcolonial pastoral (Nixon 2005; Wong), often the meaning of land itself remains non-contradictory and normative, as if the logic of disceptation exists only at the level of description rather than in the immanent conditions of aesthetic change as such. The latter remains of interest to me, not to romanticize peasant anti-capitalism as artistic practice – a further idealism of the idyll – but to read the pastoral as
The postcolonial pastoral is the scene of transaction, and here I will focus particularly on how land is realized in that process. To begin, the question of land is never far from writing decolonization and several examples come to mind. For instance, from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958):
They want a piece of land to build their shrine,” said Uchendu to his peers when they consulted among themselves. “We shall give them a piece of land.” He paused, and there was a murmur of surprise and disagreement. “Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest. They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.” They laughed and agreed, and sent for the missionaries … They offered them as much of the Evil Forest as they cared to take. And to their greatest amazement the missionaries thanked them and burst into song … The inhabitants of Mbanta expected them all to be dead within four days. The first day passed and the second and third and fourth, and none of them died. Everyone was puzzled. And then it became known that the white man’s fetish had unbelievable power … “We have now built a church.” (149)
Here is an example from Mulk Anand’s Coolie (1936): “He had heard of how the landlord had seized his father’s five acres of land because the interest on the mortgage covering the unpaid rent had not been forthcoming when the rains had been scanty and the harvests bad” (11). Another example, this time from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988): “Wizards well versed in treachery and black magic came from the south and forced the people from the land. On donkey, on foot, on horse, on ox-cart, the people looked for a place to live. But the wizards were avaricious and grasping … The white wizard had no use for women and children. He threw my grandmother and her children off his farm” (18). In her novel Windward Heights (1999), Maryse Condé notes: “Guadeloupe was full of mulatto women who had been given a house, a carriage and a few acres of land in exchange for their reputation” (46). And, finally, from Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow (1980): “In his area there was Bharat Mahato. A heavy shaman. Hearing the manager he said, I’ll get t’ job done, but I must have four acres of land – ten bighas – without ground rent. Manager-Sir said yeah to this wish” (24).
I have three main aims in what is in many respects a prolegomenon to a discrepant critique on the substance of “the agrarian question” today. The first aspect explores what might seem a basic question but one with significant implications for how one thematizes the combined and uneven development of the world system in the current conjuncture: what is the subject of land? Part of my contention is that, when it comes to cultural critique, committed allies of peasant rebellion and resistance often substitute space for land (and sometimes cartography – Teverson and Upstone, although there are exceptions; see, for instance, Graham). This metonymy builds, of course, on a long tradition of aesthetic spatiality, a poetics of space in Gaston Bachelard’s sense as a place marker that artfully and appreciably builds on discourses of the imaginary and of affect. Rather than displace place and space in such theory, here I am concerned to differentiate their import, especially given the dialectical nature of Henri Lefebvre’s critique (whose long commitment begins with a dissertation on the Pyrenean peasantry). The subject of land is not the subject of space. Put another way, and one elaborated below: you can imagine space without land, but you can never imagine land without space. This is not a semantic distinction but will be explored as an antinomy in how the subject of land can be thought.
The second dimension of this problematic is to address the substance of land for capital. Again, there is a huge genealogy around this issue, and especially among materialist geographers, that remains provocative for cultural critique, or rather, the kind of analysis that more fully integrates the fate of the rural in what the world can become. Although there is some dissemblance about whether land is fictitious capital, such arguments have purchase on the reproduction of capitalist fictions (like the one that says capitalism is interminable). The materiality of land obviously does not exclude its abstraction, yet a materialist understanding of the fictiveness of
Third, after philosophy and geography, I reflect on the decolonial literary and its theorization. In a move that resists the Empsonian inclination to provide another version of pastoral (and rejects Empson’s argument, in Some Versions of the Pastoral, that pastoral puts the complex into the simple or, in other words, represents a dynamic rather than a distillation), I want to reconceive the poetics of the pastoral in order to address the writing out of land as a lot more than casual spatial metaphors, and as, rather, a deeply postcolonial cultural expressivity. Such an approach takes seriously the capitalist logic of land grabbing and extraction, for instance, not to indulge in some prelapsarian soft focus and petty-bourgeois liberal virtue signaling, but to seize the imaginary ground of land, and to struggle for a politics of living land (what Lefebvre calls efficacy – à l’efficacité2) that would realize rather than refuse its base for egalitarian socialization. On the whole, these brief reflections on the subject of land, land and capital, and the decolonial imaginary do not a methodology make, but they do attempt to enjoin a dialectic of rurality and globality where “fixes,” spatial or otherwise, fail to grasp the critical imaginative claims on the substance of land.
At its most basic, the subject of land is assumed to be anthropocentric. Did land have a subject before the human invented it? The question is false in the sense that the logic of science, like spirituality, extends beyond its capacity or age. It is demonstrable, however, that the formulation “the subject of land is nature” hardly displaces the subjective claims of the human, and this is as true for the rapacious colonialist as it is for Indigenous populations whose land has been stolen. When the Indigenous activist Nick Estes refers to “our lands” and the “homeland” “in a struggle over the meaning of land” (47), he registers a forceful politics of anti-colonialism (and anti-capitalism), yet a specific subject overdetermines the question of possession, as “ours,” and mediates how identification with the land can be thought (as one that includes pastoralism and nomadism). This does not negate in any way the authentication of claims through citizenship or ancestral inhabitation; it is merely to remark that the subject of land is already at work in its substantiation and, because land goes beyond what the eyes can see and the “I” can name, its subjectivation is very much an imaginary imperative. Legal systems often convert this imaginary – they have to, since law is a language of right with formal procedures that cannot rest only on what a claimant, for instance, believes to be the case.
Capital is an economic relation. Land is also a relation, but in modernity it is one of property with relatively finite attributes caught between distribution and ownership. As a relation, the property of land is infinitely scalable, from all of those countries whose names end in “land” down to the parcel of ground one rents (an allotment) to grow produce. Here, let us suppose the subject is itself and is itself according to its place (to borrow from Alain Badiou’s reading of Hegel3). What if we call this placing not land but land as relation? In other words, the subject can be thought of as composed simultaneously as that which is immanent to self but only by virtue of its land placing, a material abstraction of relation in which the subject itself is concretized. Surely there is a subject of land beyond political economy? Indubitably, as long as the property of land as relation is not property per se. If the latter is the case, however, then the subject of property in this schema can only be the subject of subjection (subject to land as property). Furthermore, the subject is not the owner, even the owner vexed by accumulation: the subject of land is only a subject to the extent that their subjecthood is mediated by the property relation of land. When theory attends to what comes “after” the subject, it is grappling with a world beyond being and landlessness, the condition of subjecthood as such. We can fight for land as a battle for freedom from subjection but the land that is gained is not the land that had been stolen and, if land as a relation of property remains, then it is not only the Lord that can taketh away. There is always the land that is not the sea or the air, but the subject of land has a shorter history.
It is important to stress that such an idea of the subject is materially specific and its link to land is suffused with historicity. Of course, there are many theories of the subject, including those, as intimated, that theorize its supercession. Any distillation of its extent may be deemed subjective rather than concrete, yet the subject of land is vital to an interrogative critique of landed labor, working the land, and living land as more than subject to the urban, for instance. The weakening of subject-centered reason is a decolonial desire and continues
Lefebvre is quite rightly read as a preeminent materialist philosopher of space, but it is important to point out that this conceptual critique pivots on land in its socialization. From Marx, he is interested in a particular if notorious trinity, land-capital-labor. Lefebvre is careful, however, to emphasize social space as more than land as property and indeed to point out that land itself is never simply a function of the economic. If we think of the pastoral as living land, for instance, it is not land bound only by an economic axis, by a measure of productivity, extraction, and exchange. Like the living body, living land is a place of transition and not only transaction, a threshold to be realized rather than being an index of the subject per se (hence, by the way, Lefebvre’s appreciation of Rabelais). Living land in this sense is closer to what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writes out as Las fronteras, a border epistemology that builds from Gloria Anzaldúa and is highly critical of identity as territory, here the subject of land.4 Against indigeneity as only locatedness, Rivera Cusicanqui stresses migration and movement. Yes, land is at stake – treaty aims, as Estes points out, must be honored – but again the land lived is not the land that has been taken or rendered as developmental space. For Lefebvre, this space is understood in the state’s articulation of sovereignty. It is the violence of such sovereignty that pastoralism decolonizes or struggles against. This may
If the subject of land has a problematic provenance it is largely because its logic of identity is coterminous with capital as relation. The heuristic in one is about the coding of the other. In Lefebvre’s research, the political economy of space is tessellated by rural sociology, so that rurality both clarifies and complicates the stark opposition of labor and capital. Even in the work of Raymond Williams, a parallelism lurks, as if the rural is noticeably adjacent rather than immanent. Here pastoralism is integrated through what Lefebvre calls horizontal and vertical complexities ([62] constellations of time/space, or, in an aesthetic register, chronotopicity) and permits comparative critique at different scales, like a world literary or even that baleful piñata of anti-dialectics, totality. Wary of reducing novels to a sociological compendium, their rural stories nevertheless bear the marks of capital in the articulation of social hierarchies and even, as I have already noted, in the emergence of ground rent (the rent paid for the use of the land, minus that paid for the fixed capital on the land). Marx reads Balzac on this point, as do Lefebvre, Pierre Macherey, and, more recently, Thomas Piketty. Here is not the place to ponder what puts the nature in naturalism, yet Balzac did more than make the detail the seat of veridicality – Les Paysans (1855), for instance, inscribes surplus and extraction as an organic real of peasant labor and rarely as an itemized cost of living. The organic real is not a faithful representation of reality but is precisely a representation, a mediation shot through with matters of form, context, and, not least, political unconscious. Politics are always at stake and Balzac seems determined to disabuse the bourgeois that the peasants are content in being exploited while at the same time refusing any and all pastoral idyll (the use of the word “savage” in Les Paysans has a specific worldview attached). Although Piketty loves the fact that actual rents are recorded (for example, 500, 50K, 60K
Contradictions abound. Marx, for instance, details the schisms of interest between landowners and capitalists, whose conflicted meanings over land redouble how agrarians and agrarianism may be figured. Rather than a grid of ground rent, therefore, Marx seeks the space of contradiction in its possibility, and he is careful to distinguish rent from interest in that regard. Just as the class concerns are not in parallel, neither are class fractions (a dynamic also redolent in postcolonial aesthetics). A quarter of the world’s population derive their livelihoods from agriculture, but smallholders may supplement their income by renting out land to each other and the landless. The key role of land for capital is what we might call its monopoly of disposition. It is this distinct characteristic that informs its valorization within the capitalist mode of production and shapes how pastoralism is thought in modernity and in its decolonization. Yet rather than focus on the landowner’s monopolistic acquisition of quantities of land, Marx emphasizes that the key to its valorization rests in accumulation from ground rent. State law does not eschew protections for the extent of land, but it is particularly interested in guaranteeing ground rent as a principle of private property itself. We know there are vast numbers of informal relations around land that defamiliarize the logic of its provision, yet whenever ground rent features in pastoral procedures a socio-economic reflex at greater scale is implicated and the contiguity between private and privation opens out into local or everyday practices of land estimation and its imaginary.
Why, if we are ultimately concerned with pastoral postcolonial poetics, do we need to understand ground rent? Can’t we just settle for bucolic identification with the soil, energetic expressivity in its defense, or specific examples of its cultural syntax, the grammar of agrarianism as it were? All of this is important and indeed pivotal of living land. Landowners under capitalism are creative, however, and what they create is rent in itself, or what Marx calls absolute rent. Such rent, ground rent, is not an illusion but necessitates an imaginary (imagine land as a space of exploitation) to suture its niche in nature as natural. Not surprisingly, the imaginary of landed property spread and intensified with colonial prescriptions, and, while so much of postcolonial autonomy and independence is marked by overcoming such order, the subject of land is reproduced in the process of ground renting (which helps
Although there is no space here to elaborate fully the concept of land in capitalism (David Harvey’s Limits to Capital is a useful reference), in general one can agree with Marx that rents do not grow out of the soil. If, as Marx suggests, surplus does not accrue from the natural force of a waterfall but from its monopolization, it is a basis of profit, not its source, which lies with those having the means to establish such monopoly. Because the nature of land varies greatly, so too does the possibility of relative surplus value, from the market value of what is extracted or grown. How much land capital is required (enhancements through fertilizer or irrigation or genetic modification, or non-tilling, etc.) also varies, so it is best not to think of rent as the reward solely for what Marx calls the indestructible powers of the soil but rather as the reward for the socialization of land in capital as relation. Lefebvre is important here because when he theorizes the socialization of space, he is simultaneously coordinating the function of land as property for capitalism. True, a good deal of land as shared or communal is permissible even under the hegemony of ground rent, yet as Harvey among others has been at pains to show, the value portions of land for the production and reproduction of capital are integral to its existence. Any pastoralism that seeks to sunder such capacity, one signed as it were in the proper conditions of ground rent, is thus not just protesting on behalf of nature or its closest advocates, but about the forms of social life in which land can be thought.
Inexorably, thinking land as relation at once entails confronting the difference in class positions around the drawing of ground rent. Smallholders might use this capacity among themselves to offset the ground rent of others. The monster called agribusiness also incorporates farmers on the basis of ground rent, but it is often seen to pay its own rent with the cost priced into the production process. The unevenness of ground rent distribution in the countryside is an important reason that its axioms persist. The feudal landlord and
When the postcolonial pastoral situates the rural in a transnational frame, including its pivotal ecological dimension, it might consider more forcefully how it is mediated if not overdetermined by property relations, small and large, in its worldview. Rob Nixon has usefully suggested that “Postcolonial pastoral can be loosely viewed as a kind of environmental double consciousness” (239). A pertinent riff on Du Bois, the concept also features as a socio-economic impress in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Of course, in an intersectional identitarian framework, doubling can be extended further, but here double consciousness maintains both a racial capitalist logic and an infrastructural denominator that remains as a political unconscious or second nature. To always historicize is to find a postcolonial pastoral steeped in propensities to ground rent, which we might say is a significant basis for efficacy, or struggle.
While acknowledging the various disputes over ground rent theory, the basic idea is to mark the extent to which a decolonial imaginary is sensitively dependent on a pastoralism primed by an everyday – one composed through the socio-economics of land. I am attempting to resist a fetishism of land that makes it an unalloyed source of value in favor of a critique that accentuates how its decolonial fulcrum rests in forms of socialization, including the labor expended upon it. The coloniality of power obfuscates the conditions of realization in land, so that even now change is registered as the transactional substitution of one master of exchange for another more authentic one. Surely, to place exchange in the hands of the Indigenous, or the peasant, or the landless unpicks the ratio of the subject of land? In the Cochabamba Water War, for instance, one notes a struggle against the privatization of what enables land to be lived as clearly preferable to the neoliberal and neocolonial desires of conglomerates like Bechtel. Yet, at the same time, if these appreciable victories maintain the exchange function of value in land occupation and use, a certain propensity to reterritorialization remains, as if the trace of monopoly power in the buying and selling of provision attempts to poison progress made. Other factors obtain in each crisis over land, like the pre-existence of pre-capitalist modes of ground rent, and these elements underline that even if capitalist and colonialist demands are repelled, capitalism will seek some form of co-existence, a mixture of communal and privatized socio-economic procedures. All
In traditional pastoral, as form, as content, as worldview, the literary mode often makes land transparent to itself: despite a preponderance of “representative anecdote” (which Paul Alpers borrows from Kenneth Burke for his conceptualization), the land depicted exists mostly by what it is not: the urban, the city, and machinic intensity. The “eclogic” is not the ecologic because the realization in land is not at stake. Even when such pastoral renders the bucolic as banal, the terms of identification do not seem to rest on use. Land is, in experience, and it grows tropes of lush sublimity. Joyelle McSweeney skewers this “lie of the land” as “necropastoral”: “The term ‘necropastoral’ re-marks the pastoral as a zone of exchange, shading this green theme park with the suspicion that the anthropocene epoch is in fact synonymous with ecological endtimes” (3). Alpers does make the appreciable point that pastoral need not be agrarian to have pastoral motives yet, as I have tried to indicate in my invocation of the subject of land, such drives have a Weltanschauung that can be historically specified, especially if one takes seriously the deep connections between the pastoral as imagined and land as realized (recall that I am using realization not just as the apprehension of nature but as an achieved value in use – pastoralism therefore as an epistemic and economic conundrum). If traditional pastoral for Empson represents “a beautiful relation between rich and poor,” it is small wonder that it is rightly contested in an agrarian imaginary today. True, there are postcolonial pastorals that appear to extend paradigmatic elitist jaunts into the countryside. V.S. Naipaul, for instance, may resist the naïve proclivities of the colonial traveler, yet conservative pastoralism persists in his panoptic gaze over postcolonial landscapes and his acerbic commentaries about backwardness, decline, and peasant poverty. While I agree with Rob Nixon (1992) that Naipaul substantially “invents postcolonial pastoral” (a sensibility that appears and reappears across his oeuvre well beyond The Enigma of Arrival [1987]), here thinking land as struggle and contradiction offers an alternative vision of agrarian aesthetics, a difference in differentiation bound to a decolonial contestation over, as noted from Estes, the meaning of land. The rurality in globality at once refuses the convenience of typology, but are cultural attempts to critique and overcome colonial and capitalist imperatives anything more than a contingent array of dissembling symptoms or the
The subject of land and capital’s relation to land in themselves might seem to suffocate literary expression, but part of my point is to stress the immanence of their conditions to aesthetic articulation. This does not excise modes of pastoralism that appear oblivious to their demands, as if one of the problems of rural sociology is not precisely the use of sociology in that conjuncture, yet a significant discord in the postcolonial pastoral today is articulated by a competing worldliness, one in which rural vision is radically particularized but nevertheless provocatively resonant at a world scale. At a very basic level, the concreteness of ground rent blocks not just identification with the land but living land as a social good (a good that does not exclude the ecological dimensions of its very possibility – destroy these and nothing good can come of land). Put another way, a decolonial imaginary must come to terms with postcolonial pastorals in which the absence of rent (differential or absolute) is precisely the reason for pastoralism (whether or not that is in fact conscious among pastoralists in each instance). Where colonial and capitalist relations are at stake, sensitive dependence on contradictions in the production of land as lived insistently ground what we might call critical pastoralism, a pastoralism where the locality of nature, community, and land use constitute a dynamic cultural challenge. Pastoralism can certainly smooth contradiction, but in critical pastoralism contradiction is enjoined with a decolonial imaginary, one which seeks through every practice at its disposal to make land matter beyond subjugation, extraction, exploitation, and the power politics of exchange value.
Perhaps the only thing more complex than the formal contradiction in ground rent for a decolonial imaginary is the contradiction in form represented by the postcolonial pastoral itself. Here, the postcolonial pastoral is read as an understanding of forms of cultural expression that attempt to defamiliarize the terms of living land during and after colonial accumulation and dispossession. The prospects of living land are not best represented by the long arc from the eclogue to the ecological novel, even as the latter remains for me a critical concern. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, for instance, develops a nuanced approach to Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s illustrated letter to the King of Spain (ca. 1612–1615) as an example of anti-colonial imaging. While the drawings appear to follow a Gregorian calendar, Guaman Poma’s tableau marks a temporal and figural disjunction for Spanish rule. How can these chronicles of land use and ritual be assimilated to trade as expropriation? More than what Rivera Cusicanqui terms a sociology of the image (12), this is a representational dilemma of colonial command or what Achille Mbembe calls commandement (24). Rivera Cusicanqui counterposes a looking with the body that here I freely
By contrast, in the Nigerian epic drama Tell It to Women (1997), Osonye Tess Onwueme eschews imaging for a different form of postcolonial perspective; namely, the charged dialogue of peasant women who have the power “to make and unmake the land” (7). Here the pastoral is defined not as traditionalism, since for the women in the play this often means patriarchy and predetermination, but neither does it proffer a conversion myth, where that power over land transmogrifies into the perquisites of modernity, represented through the characters of Ruth and Daisy, for whom rural backwardness needs only a good dose of feminist theory and NGO upgrades. This is, of course, a resolutely feminist text, but one that begins in an extended genealogy of women’s labor and land, and is thus wary of an enlightened liberal solidarity. The peasant women do not reject the “Better Life for Rural Women” project (or clean water, or electricity); indeed, they go to the capital to support the initiative. Yet, rather than a pastoral primed by country refuge and urban return that favors cosmopolitan progress (seen in Naipaul’s fiction, for instance), they reverse the trajectory. Thus, Yemoja notes, “We have a home. We have a place. Let us return to Idu where we know the texture of the land” (9). The move to carve autonomy from “white man’s land” is not without ideological limits and contradictions (as is clear, for instance, from the place of education and literacy in the play), but the critique, presented in dialogic disputation, is about deleterious modes of syncretism and what exchange does to communal identity. On one level, saving the land is principally about preserving a way of life and this, of course, is a long-standing pastoral prerogative. On another level, the play attempts to speak the land in the voices of its women and, while this courts an alienated spiritualism (in an English from afar), the words – in dance, in movement, in song – resist strict sociological comportment and translation. This does not mean, however, that it refuses stark and pointed political statements. Yemoja comments, “even the spaces and places I owned in the village, I no longer have. The freedom I had to till the land and earn my living, the independence I had to feed me and my children, I no longer have. Why? Because here I must look into someone’s face to be paid for only what pleases her as my new lord” (100). She is of the land but absolutely rent from it as a condition of living. Yemoja is the “mouth of the Earth,” yet even here her words are stolen and the play questions the very texture of that transaction.
Can the agrarian question for decolonization be historicized by aesthetic intonation or does this merely extend cosmopolitan projections of the pastoral? Does realization with the land counter realization of the land? In truth, a
Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021) is a realist eco-novel with a biopolitical unconscious. Like Onwueme’s play, the narrative is structured by competing discourses over land (and it also uses a chorus). Pexton (sounds like Exxon, etc.) is an American oil company that has conspired with state officials to render a local West African village, Kosawa, an unlivable oilfield. As a salve for poisoned water and diminishing food supplies, the villagers are offered edifying morsels of “civilization” and “prosperity” (these are not subtle references but do raise a basic question about hegemonic ideology and its translation on a world scale). Yet, lest we think that Mbue is setting up an easy binary with a straightforward denouement (restoration is hinted), the relaxed description belies a much more conflicted pastoral agency (the title, for instance, is in the past tense). Konga’s idea to kidnap Pexton employees is adopted in the heat of the moment, but the strategy ends badly (four of the villagers will eventually be hanged). In fact, Pexton, like the fossil fuel industry, persists and Kosawa, despite its foundation for the peasant community, disappears, lost to pollution and exchange. Much more could be said about the processes of resistance and change, especially through the story of Thula, the activist known as Fire Lady (who also disappears), but it is fascinating how the sense of land is transformed by the sheer force of developmental rhetoric coupled with on the ground corruption and opportunism. The voices of the narrative fight back and implicitly call into question Mbue’s own journey, from Western Cameroon to New York City, as if the writer wants to think coterminous yet conflicted conditions of transnationalism. What this means for land cannot be settled
Lenin once noted that peasant aspiration, like bourgeois aspiration, is materially contradictory and in the case of the former opposes capitalist predation but only by adopting protocols that essentially strengthen it. Possessing land is powerful, but if that power is interlaced with market price and exchange then the Pextel paradigm can draw on resources beyond the oil on which the people may sit. The subject of land does not have to be named but can be aesthetically interpellated as that which historically situates postcolonial pastoral in its capacity or not to think beyond such a subject. In Mbue’s novel, Thula embodies political change and she gets to decide on Liberation Day so that, when the revolution begins, the presence of the military no longer matters: “No one feared them; our bliss made them invisible” (312). “This land is our land,” the people roar, and no one doubts the sentiment. They seek reparations from Pexton but to fight the case Kosawa borrows from a hedge fund to pay legal fees (such details remind one that Mbue’s first degree was in business studies at Rutgers). At the same time, Thula forms a political party to fight the country’s authoritarian leader (“His Excellency”). These are not always complementary processes, but they are far from antithetical. Pastoralism now often offers extended cathexis whereby what must be possessed obfuscates the implications through which that takes place. This is not an argument against postcolonial pastoral modes (especially since these proceed in many ways, not reducible to the political economy indicated here), but perhaps by returning to the land in its economic figurations (the real of rent, for instance) we may yet deepen approaches to the conflicted imaginary of rural struggle, one where “liberation days” are still very much before us.
The agrarian question is much debated as a measure of modernity and capitalist development, and examines the complexity of the persistence and variegation of the peasantry within and adjacent to capitalism. Marx certainly engages this debate, although it is Karl Kautsky that gives the issue its name. See Kautsky; Lenin.
See Lefebvre’s “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology” in On the Rural. I will examine ground rent in this regard below.
See Badiou.
The point is not to give up territorial claims but is to distinguish the forms of subjectivity that come with its acquisition.
See Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft. MEW 19, 224, 1880. The basic idea is that the state dies or withers rather than being abolished, which can have profound implications for social and political formation. Available in English at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm.