October 13 Reading Group Notes
Readings: Kate Brown, Plutopia, Introduction, pp. 3-9.
Kate Brown, Dispatches from Dystopia, chapter 6 (Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly The Same Place) and chapter 7 (Returning Home to Rustalgia), pp. 97-150.
Readings: Kate Brown, Plutopia, Introduction, pp. 3-9.
Kate Brown, Dispatches from Dystopia, chapter 6 (Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly The Same Place) and chapter 7 (Returning Home to Rustalgia), pp. 97-150.
- Given these readings are meant to intersect with environmental history and the concept of utopia, how can we understand the role of the grid in these two contexts? How can we understand the grid as an archetype of the process of state formation (as discussed by scholars like James Scott)?
- How specific is the process of gridded space, and what insights does it offer? Gridded spaces are very common; what is the advantage of comparing these spaces? How does she use it to examine political processes, like habitus, modes of production, and similarities between the US and Soviet Union?
- What does this work tell us about modernity? To what extent is it a history of the built environment, a history of these particular cities (and their respective countries), a history of the ways in which the space was emptied? Can we read it as a part of the history of the Soviet Union or the US?
- To what extent is this work focused on the question of success versus failure? Can we look at these cities as fitting into the success-failure binary?
- This was a very daring work when it was first published. Is it still viewed as controversial? How do scholars (and non-scholars) from different generations view it differently?
- How can we view this as a history of two “big” countries? When viewed from the perspective of smaller countries, the US and USSR appear a lot more similar.
- How can we read this as a piece of environmental history? To what extent is it not only about how people organize space, but also about how space organizes people? How does it trace the trend within environmental history to move from a very materialist viewpoint, into the cultural turn of looking at the ways in which these spaces are created?
- How can we link this into the historiography of the spatial turn? To what extent does Brown use theory, and how does she integrate it into her work? To what extent does Brown use the concept of ecology? How does this connect to her view of space and divisions of space?
- How does Brown use the term “landscape” to refer to both spatial and temporal categories? To what extent does she use landscape (both spatially and temporally) to discuss the concept of indigeneity? What does this description of indigenous people as landscape tell us about views of primitivism and how it connects to colonial modernities? How has the image of the nomad been used as both an image of backwardness and as an image of a golden past?
- To what extent is this article a history of the modern, and to what extent does it link into much longer history? Many of the trends can be seen during antiquity, yet we commonly associate many of the details with the project of modernity. How do we rectify these gaps? To what extent does it require us to adjust our conception of the modern? Or to apply the idea of the “modern” backwards on to the pre-modern period?
- How is Brown’s idea of modernity linked to universalization? Grids existed in disparate environments long before the modern period, but they were used for very different reasons (whereas in Brown’s piece, grids serve a very particular purpose).
- To what extent is this article not about the grid in and of itself, but about the system that allows the grid to end up in spaces that should be very different?
- In Plutopia, to what extent is Brown continuing her argument from “Gridded Lives” about the political implications of a comparison between the US and Soviet Union?
- How does the concept of “risk” factor into Brown’s work, particular in relation to Plutopia? How does this connect to the idea of tragedy, which permeates throughout all of her pieces, especially “Rustalgia”?
- How does the theme of utopia connect to the conception of “rustalgia”? To what extent can we connect it to the process of globalism?
- How can we understand the destruction in “Rustalgia”? She contends that slow violence is far less noticeable than its quick equivalent? How does this build off of the idea of “slow disaster” in Plutopia?
- How does Kate Brown use time? To what extent is she making a point about how people live in these spaces? How does the end of the spaces and the speed at which those ends come about given us an insight into our conception of dystopia? How is this connected to the concept of nostalgia?