Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New

Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

Through lively, engaging narrative, Understories demonstrates how volatile politics of race, class, and nation animate the notoriously violent struggles over forests in the southwestern United States. Rather than reproduce traditional understandings of nature and environment, Jake Kosek shifts the focus toward material and symbolic â€œnatures,â€ seemingly unchangeable essences central to formations of race, class, and nation that are being remade not just through conflicts over resources but also through everyday practices by Chicano activists, white environmentalists, and state officials as well as nuclear scientists, heroin addicts, and health workers. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, he shows how these contentious natures are integral both to environmental politics and the formation of racialized citizens, politicized landscapes, and modern regimes of rule.
Kosek traces the histories of forest extraction and labor exploitation in northern New Mexico, where Hispano residents have forged passionate attachments to place. He describes how their sentiments of dispossession emerged through land tenure systems and federal management programs that remade forest landscapes as exclusionary sites of national and racial purity. Fusing fine-grained ethnography with insights gleaned from cultural studies and science studies, Kosek shows how the nationally beloved Smokey the Bear became a symbol of white racist colonialism for many Hispanos in the region, while Los Alamos National Laboratory, at once revered and reviled, remade regional ecologies and economies. Understories offers an innovative vision of environmental politics, one that challenges scholars as well as activists to radically rework their understandings of relations between nature, justice, and identity.
Country USA
Brand Duke University Press
Manufacturer Duke University Press
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9780822338475
ReleaseDate 2006-12-08
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780822338475

Country	USA
Brand	Duke University Press
Manufacturer	Duke University Press
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9780822338475
ReleaseDate	2006-12-08
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780822338475

Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

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