AFR260H1

Land, Life, and Livelihoods

This course aims to challenge the often-uncritical understanding of land as a thing, object, or a commodity by engaging with land as a bricolage of multiple, dynamic assemblages. Land attracts manifold meanings in different cultural contexts and engenders vibrant discourses around identity, place, and belonging. The materiality of land, fixed in place as to not be ‘rolled up like a mat and taken away’, accords human and other-than-human life affordances that are vital to sustenance of life, and provides a fabric on which stories and histories are deeply embedded. In the African context, land constitutes a site where key political struggles transpire, key amongst them struggles against colonialism, and where African futures obtain form and meaning. It is on land that global interests have hugely converged as characterized by global land grabbing and quests for minerals and resources that offer hope to world’s future(s). These features of land impel us to discuss the institutions that govern land and related inscription devices such as maps and boundaries; technologies and techniques that seek to ‘improve’ agricultural productivity and biodiversity conservation; and the impacts of climate change on life and livelihoods in Africa.