Lie of the Land

Academic talks, like the pair recently staged at the Buell Center’s under the name Made Land, can be impossible to summarize—not because I find them confusing, but because every word is so carefully chosen. Like boulders being dragged into formation, the words plot, land, and reclamation were prodded throughout the presentations even while they served as chapter titles and thematic anchors. Word-agonizing is what makes these people historians, honey, and that nitpicking attention is what brings alive the conditioning systems of colonialism and neoliberalism under which we all live.

My respect for discerning historians is also my excuse for saturating my summary with quotes. The event, which was part of the Buell’s ongoing Conversations on Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas series, brought together two scholars to speak about land that “has been ‘made’ from its edges inward” over the past four centuries (in other words, for the duration of capitalism). Deepa Ramaswamy of the University of Houston and of Cornell University shared research that the websit…