Description
Book SynopsisThis book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo, a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions, they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate are not ‘thick descriptions,’ linked to larger political issues, but rather rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans within the nature-culture debate. Using these experiences, the authors argue that ‘the political’ reaches beyond the affairs of state and governance and should be seen as an all-encompassing part of life. The authors thereby invite the social sciences to focus on the microscopic and the day-to-day to illuminate how the political affairs of lives can be imagined differently.
Trade Review“The Urban Gardens of Havana offers an insightful, detailed, theoretically rigorous and imaginative account of the relationships between urban farmers, the state and nonhuman entities in Cuba … .” (Sahib Singh, LSE Review of Books, blogs.lse.ac.uk, November 8, 2019)
Table of ContentsPrologue: Whose Planet is it Anyway?Chapter 1. Introduction: Step into my GardenAnthropological GardeningThe Map into the Garden
Chapter 2. Intervening, Correcting, RewardingHow It All BeganRevolutionary Fruits and Ideologized VegetalbesState CommunismThe Prettiest Garden in TownState Control of Society or Social Control of the State?ConclusionChapter 3. The GardenThe Politics of the GardenSmall, Big, Wide and Narrow: The Urban Gardens of HavanaIntimate ExperiencesNon-human PerformancesThe Human-Non-human RelationshipCaring Collaborations with PlantsChildren of the GardenlandA House is Not a HomeReverberating GardentsTangling Them TogetherChapter 4. Living in a Non-human's WorldThe Nature We Live ByBecoming the Garden(er)Freedom and Some Gentle ResistanceThe Intimate Quality of BeingBodily LearningGently, Contested, Entangled Freedoms?Stories of FreedomEntangling Concluding RemarksChapter 5. Conclusion: Finally, How Does Everything Grow Together?
