Article
Rootedness Facing Colonial Conditions: Nourishing Hope, Accountability, and Orientation
Public: A Journal of Imagining America
(2020)
Abstract
In the field of urban community food systems, the origin of the word radical in rootedness is often discussed. The play on words in the title and content of the forthcoming local film Radical Roots: The Story of a Food Revolution is an illustrative example. And in an era of climate catastrophe, pandemic, and widespread protests for civil rights, radical, rooted-in-place hope is both necessary and privileged, requiring hopers to orient themselves to their collective goals and social context, especially important in places with histories of colonialism, with associated expropriation of land and labor. Considering radical hope in a settler colonial context consequently makes me consider what it takes to know when to put down roots and, conversely, when to pull them up. If settler identity is good for anything introspective, it seems, it should be an acknowledgement and awareness of the privilege of rootedness, and the unevenness with which this privilege is distributed. In this essay, I consider the relationship between hope and rootedness, and the accountability toward which shared educational experiences can orient people as they consider how to face the future, and how to live well in social relationships. Hope requires a certain level of grounding to be realistic and not delusional. And sometimes practicing hope requires you to look hard at things you don’t want to do anymore, and figure out whether the time for those things is done and the roots should be pulled up, and perhaps put down in some other domain that needs new roots.
Keywords
- hope,
- crisis,
- climate crisis,
- anthropocene,
- society environment relationships,
- political ecology
Disciplines
- Arts and Humanities,
- Art Practice,
- Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,
- Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies,
- Physical Sciences and Mathematics,
- Environmental Sciences,
- Environmental Education,
- Social and Behavioral Sciences,
- Agricultural and Resource Economics,
- Environmental Studies,
- Geography,
- Food Studies and
- Social Justice
Publication Date
2020
Citation Information
K. Valentine Cadieux. "Rootedness Facing Colonial Conditions: Nourishing Hope, Accountability, and Orientation" Public: A Journal of Imagining America Vol. 6 Iss. 1 (2020) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kvalentine-cadieux/43/