Terrains of Struggle: Grounding the Open Field

Abstract

Grounded in the material and historical specificity of the Durham Coalfield, this essay engages two unlikely modes of field theory: the vein of radical poetry associated with the “open field” in the 1970s, and the parallel resurgence of a vernacular Marxism committed to reorienting the critique of capital “from below.” Tracing the intersection of open field poetics and partisan knowledge through Barry MacSweeney’s Black Torch (1978) and Bill Griffiths’s Coal (1990–91) as practices that come to militate against dominant methods of reading or rendering the coalfield, field theory is recast against a critical terrain of struggle over labor, energy, and infrastructure in the twentieth century.