USA300H1 Lecture Notes - Annette Kolodny, Pastoralism, Settler Colonialism
USA300H1 – Reimagining Landscape
• Pastoralism and its critical re-imagination
o Our imagination of landscape affects how we use spaces
▪ Political, ideological work as opposed to simply descriptive
o Classical, simple pastoral: nostalgic, idealized, labor-eliding fantasy of rurality
o Marxian complex pastoral: possible pastoralism that permits the presence of
encroaching technology; allowing the machine into the garden
▪ A positive innovation, since is resolves pastoralisms essential errors
• Complex pastoral forgoes the historicity of pastoralism; we dont have
to construct fantasies of pastoralism outside of reality
• Marx preserves pastoralism, revitalizes it, allows it to survive
▪ The middle-landscape: mediating the urban and the wilderness
o Kolodny and Hixson: critical questions of what the pastoral permits, facilitates; what is
the effect, what are the implications of viewing the American landscape as such
▪ Kolodny: effect of viewing the landscape as virgin, feminine, etc.
• Product of second-wave feminism: revealing unseen presence of
women in history, critique of historical practice as phallocentric
▪ Hixson: effect of viewing the American landscape as American at all
• Annette Kolodny and The Lay of the Land
o Fled to Canada during Vietnam war; taught in B.C.
▪ Kolodny helped establish the first womens studies program in Canada
▪ Post-Vietnam, working in New Hampshire and wrote The Lay of the Land
• Her book massively influential, but rejected for tenure; sued the
University for sexism and antisemitism and won a large settlement
o Kolodnys assertion: that early American settlers saw the landscape as female, endowed
with a womb, female sexuality, and so on; a series of metaphorical patterns in history
▪ Kolodys focus on early America crucial; accounts of the new landscape by
British colonists; an era of colonization, settlement, nation-building
• Assertion that this way of thinking is foundational; idea, namely, that
the idea of the landscape as having a womb shaped national character
▪ Turner and the Frontier: experience at the edge of the wave on westward
moving lines of contact made American-ness, Americas exceptional qualities
• Educational experience of learning how to be American experienced
by settlers, the teacher being the feminine American west
• Ascription of feminine characteristics to the land in Kolodnys study
o Landscape as the total female principle of gratification: the souls home, from which
and in which the individual can never experience exile, alienation
▪ Unalienated labor: intimate connection to the land as opposed to Marxist
concept of an industrialized labor process inducing alienation
• Synchronicity between landscape and settler; imagination that it is the
will of the landscape itself to produce along with the settler
o Treasures having not yet been opened; paradise with all her virgin beauties
▪ Fetishizing of first-ness, placing settlers in a position of primacy in the new
world; also eliding indigenous presence beforehand
• Discourse of waste, use-value: land misused, wasted by indigenes;
suggestion that land is meant to be used to maximum production
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