Culture and the 21st-Century Agrarian Question

The classical ‘agrarian question’ concerned the development of capitalism within and through agrarian societies. It was often associated with processes of depeasantisation and deagrarianisation that came to be seen as fundamental to capitalist modernity. Long considered ‘resolved’ by many, under conditions of climate catastrophe and sustained capitalist crisis, the agrarian question has been reborn in the 21st century as an ecological question that is inseparable from questions of land, imperialism, energy, and food sovereignty. While the fields of critical agrarian studies and political ecology have studied these issues in detail, the 21st-century agrarian question remains a blind spot for theories of culture, which tend towards an urban bias. This one-day symposium intends to study the cultural logic and implications of the contemporary agrarian question: from its historical roots, through its aesthetic representations, to its philosophical coordinates and, ultimately, its possible futures.

This symposium consists of several lectures discussing: 'Food Rights and Local Fisheries in England, Virginia, and Jamaica, c. 1630-1830'; 'Aesthetics of Hunger: Mahasweta Devi's Irreal Tales'; 'The Cultural Logic of "Eating Well": From the Early Marx to the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement'; '21st-century narratives of depeasantization in Jim Crace's Harvest (2013) and Tom Branfoot's boar (2023); 'Crises of representation in the landscapes of end-stage capitalism', and 'Planetary Landscapes: Architecture(s) in Climate, Care and Food Crises'.