From Waste Lands to Wasted Lives: Enclosure as Aesthetic Regime and Property Regime

Abstract

This chapter traces relationships between material processes and cultural logics of enclosure. Waste land—land not under cultivation, producing no revenue for the state—was the raw material of colonial capitalism. Waste also names the by-products of such transformations: lives and lands laid waste. These processes entail ways of seeing and knowing; aesthetic regimes help to naturalize property regimes. The literary personification of nature (as in the pathetic fallacy) is bound up with the objectification of humans: aesthetic renderings of landscape can reinforce a dehumanizing, anti-commons common sense. These resource logics understand nature as separate from humans, disposed for their use, and subject to their control. The chapter considers the role of European imperialism in consolidating ideas about nature and natural resources, situating new materialist accounts of non-human agency within a broader historical context. Mahasweta Devi’s “Dhowli” anchors an examination of a worldwide history of waste, which begins (for John Locke) when “all the world was America.” Devi’s story bears the traces of successive waves of conquest and enclosure in India and offers an Anthropocene allegory avant la lettre—which the chapter juxtaposes with East India Company officials’ observations of the effects of deforestation, a foundation for modern climate science.