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The Coachella Valley sits at the geographic periphery of Los Angeles. Despite its physical and political marginality, the Coachella Valley is a key site of agricultural production in Southern California. Access to water is essential for ensuring the region's centrality in economic and social reproduction. Today, access to water for industrial production is primarily achieved through ongoing water dispossession. Using archival and policy documents, I analyze how United States settlers leveraged multiple mechanisms for water dispossession to expand the region's growth. Literature on water dispossession focuses on forms (water rights, grabbing, allocation, diversion, or contamination) that advance either settler colonialism or capitalism. This article demonstrates how successful white settlement in the Coachella Valley could only happen through Indigenous water dispossession. I identify an understudied form of water dispossession: groundwater overdraft. I illustrate that groundwater overdraft is not just a characteristic of early U.S. settler colonialism in the Coachella Valley; it is ongoing. In addition, the economic and environmental drawbacks to overdraft are resolved by expanding water dispossession. Analyzing groundwater overdraft as water dispossession, questions this premise. Illuminating the structural processes at play in water dispossession exposes the need to address dispossession, rather than simply overdraft, through both policy and cultural changes.

This article deals with developments following a period of social conflict resulting from the dispossession of Rarámuri communities in the Copper Canyon of the Sierra Tarahumara by several tourism entrepreneurs. The planning of the “Aventuras” Tourist Park generated expectations and speculation that led private individuals to try to forcibly displace the Rarámuri communities. These communities organized and responded with lawsuits in the courts, most of which have been won. In this research we analyze the process of negotiation with the state government that occurred after the first victories of the communities and the arrival of a state government sympathetic to their demands. During the period studied, the recognition and exercise of the communities' human rights experienced paradigmatic advances at the national level, however, they also faced unforeseen obstacles and State inertia that have not allowed the satisfaction of the communities' demands. The establishment of the Park's Consultative Council and the construction of the regional airport are standpoints for the analysis of this sui generis situation in the region.

The article showcases the nature of climate colonialism by examining the transitions in heirloom seed conservation practices in the context of climate change. Insights for this article are drawn from an action research project implemented among heirloom seed keepers and small-scale farmers in Tamil Nadu, India. Local knowledge systems and indigenous seed conservation practices play a crucial role in strengthening the resilience of small-scale farmers to climate variability and extreme weather events. Throughout India, traditional seed keepers have voluntarily taken up the responsibility of collecting and conserving native and heirloom seeds for future generations. These practices also ensure that sustainable farming practices are adopted. However, the modernization and commercialization of agriculture since the colonial and post-independence periods have displaced several such practices, paving the way for the mass consumption of hybrid seed varieties and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. With the advent of climate change as both global discourse and locally experienced phenomena, yet another layer of dispossession and the cheapening of nature has occurred. The key argument of this article is that climate change adaptation has become a new commodity frontier, dispossessing and alienating small-scale producers.

The author evokes some hypotheses on the question of the negative way as a structural data in relation to the process of Beckettian writing (the critical position with respect to language; the practice of dispossession; disfigurement) by taking up elements of his books published by Classiques Garnier in 2019: La parole trouée. Beckett, Tardieu, Novarina, and Les Voies négatives de l'écriture dans le théâtre moderne et contemporain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Twenty-first century has witnessed change in the nature, dimension and dynamics of gender role and relationship. An important area of the change is in women rising engagement in agricultural production Sub-Saharan Africa. While women profile in agribusiness has risen, there remains impediments. One of these is the denial of women the right to land ownership through inheritance. This denial continued to be sanctioned through reference to cultural practices that limit women rights to inheritance. Given that land remains the major factor of production for agricultural activities, its accessibility particularly to women that are engaging in agribusiness in sub-Saharan Africa remains a major concern. This is because dispossessing women right to land ownership impedes the production of food crops, thus exacerbating household poverty. Adopting eco-feminism as theoretical prop, this paper examines women engagement in agriculture within the context of the land dispossession using South-Eastern Nigeria as point of reference.

Angela Kóczé, one of the leading sociologists associated with the “Critical Romani Studies” direction, and director of the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at CEU, has a dialogue with this issue's associate editor, Ana Chirițoiu. They discuss points of contention between “Roma ethnographies” and “critical” scholarship, especially with a view to the relevance of marriage and kinship, this issue’s topics, in relation to the broader issues that Roma are facing. Kóczé argues for an approach that pays more attention to the racialization of the Roma and to the structural processes that shape their lives, and criticizes the euphemistic overtones of the term “ethnicity.” She is decidedly against any “romanticization” of poverty and modes of making-do and of approaches that celebrate “cultural distinctiveness.” Instead, she says, we need to understand the processes of exclusion and dispossession that cause some Roma communities to become closed or isolated. Moreover, Kóczé argues that the reliance on kinship and neopatrimonial practices are just as frequent, if not more, in broader society, and would be best understood comparatively and in a more extensive analysis, rather than through a monolithic focus on Roma.

This paper analyses how the relationship between gender, domestic and public space can be seen as a way to reinforce roles or subvert them. In this context, it is essential to show how gender relations are structured socially through urban spaces, especially how limits established by stereotypes of feminine mysticism are understood as a set of discourses and presuppositions about a passive femininity that block the participation of women in the struggle for the city. An international reference framework is constructed to illustrate how different urban struggles demystify this image. Through a case study at Pedregal de Santo Domingo in Mexico City is analysed how they are the ones that often build parallel urban projects and inform against the neoliberal urban transformation that lurks their neighbourhoods.

Since the mid-2000s, northeastern Cambodia has undergone a rapid and radical agrarian transition, driven firstly by large-scale agricultural enterprises that have acquired and, partly, grabbed vast areas of agricultural land; secondly, by numerous Khmer inmigrants. Indigenous households, which have been dispossessed of some of these lands and natural resources, have tried to reorganize their productive activities, without success for the majority of them, at the cost of land use and growing indebtedness which do not seem sustainable. The article analyses these processes marked by growing economic and social inequalities between indigenous and Khmer populations, as well as among indigenous populations.

In Mediterranean Europe there has been a notable increase in evictions and foreclosures in the past few years. During these processes, families are ‘locked out’ of their pasts – incorporated into walls, objects, relationships, but also a wider world built on the possibility of anticipating and imagining futures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an informal neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon, I demonstrate that hospitality is capable, on the one hand, of re-connecting home and hope, and, on the other, of providing a convincing basis of regional comparison. My intention is to show that hospitality can be investigated as a «weapon of the weak».

Les romans d'Ali Smith sont traversés par l'idée de perte, qu'il s'agisse de la disparition d'un être aimé, de la destruction de possessions matérielles ou encore de l'angoisse de l'effacement des souvenirs. Dans Hotel World et The Accidental, les personnages se confrontent de diverses manières aux enjeux de la mémoire et de l'oubli : obsession archivistique, oubli systématique et volontaire, persistance insurmontable d'un souvenir traumatique… A travers ces multiples facettes de la relation entre mémoire et oubli se dessine une éthique de l'oubli, mise en place à travers un outil stylistique : la métalepse. L'emploi de cette figure permet une déstabilisation et une reconfiguration des rapports de cause à effet faisant ainsi apparaître une temporalité vulnérable, condition nécessaire de l'émergence d'un "sujet dépossédé".

Between 2004 and 2012, the conditions of a "forced displacement" of rural populations linked to the construction of a dam in central India were studied. New studies conducted since 2014 have analysed the consequences and explored partially submerged areas to highlight the socio-spatial approaches embodied by elements of the "new" landscape as experienced daily. This article analyses the effects of the transformations in the landscape brought about by the Gosikhurd dam and how they bring to light issues in the relocation of a social environment composed of castes.

This article offers a reading of the euphemised forms of experimentation hosted by the contemporary novel through the category of afterwardsness or deferred action, through which anterior forms of experimentation can be envisaged. It addresses Nicholas Royle’s Quilt (2010), and more particularly the formal and ethical reconfigurations that it performs. The narrative renews the conventions of elegiac discourse through the means of a poetics of trauma that prises the text open, exhibits the modalities of its reconfiguration and evinces a preference for vulnerable form. In Quilt, one of the main modalities of reconfiguration lies in the dialogue between fiction and theory, according to the powers of what the author, in the eponymous theoretical study, has called “veering.” In so doing, Royle provides a practice of experimentation as faithfulness to trouble, which calls on the reader to perform consideration or attentiveness as a prelude to dispossession. For him, faithfulness to the spectre of experimentation that haunts modern and contemporary literature goes along with a poetics and an ethics of vulnerability.

‘Humbled Masters in Cracked Structures: Dispossession within Possession in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948)’ examines the ways in which the novel undermines patriarchal mastery over inheritance, language, story, history, and literature through the spectral otherness that haunts the notion of possession, meaning ‘ownership’: the possession of a master by a ghost. Haunting appears in the novel in several forms: as actual ghosts, but also as the excess that haunts the proper origin or the ownership of an object, a text, a word, etc. By revealing and deciphering excess in an inherited household, in a document, in words, in narratives, as well as in the structure of the novel, this paper shows how the excess not only dispossesses patriarchal masters of their power, but also empowers the female characters of the novel. Thereby, The Heat of the Day is considered as a novel that opens a fragmented space of literature where one can think about alterity and outsiders through the spectral excess that allows the cracking of patriarchy.

Written during some of the darkest years of the apartheid regime, Age of Iron, Coetzee’s sixth novel, presents us with a radical experience of dispossession and destitution to which the main character and narrator subjects herself in response to the advanced state of decomposition of her country. As she is led to offer ‘unconditional hospitality’ (Marais, Derrida) in more respects than one, Elisabeth Curren experiences a form of dislocation through which she in turn becomes a stranger and a homeless within her own home. Dispossession dislodges the subject from a situation of mastery but also places her in the position of object and reject—an experience which is lived in the flesh, but which is also at the heart of language. It is within the textual space she weaves that the narrator must also practise ‘unconditional hospitality’, facing the permanent exposure and displacement involved in the act of speaking and in the attempt to ‘bare something’ to an addressee she might never reach. While the will to ‘let go’ reflects the despair that permeates the book, dislocation is nevertheless also felt to be a condition to shift imaginary barriers and allow a remapping of the body—whether it be organic, textual or politic.

The purpose of this article will be to analyse in Adam Thorpe’s first novel, Ulverton (1992), the implications of the notion of ‘dispossession’, both in terms of politics and ethics, in relation to the (un)recordability of England’s modern history, that is, as of the mid 17th century. As a literary example of ventriloquism, the novel illustrates the ethical commitment to restoring the humble voices of anonymous past lives, made ‘bare’ by relations of power and, as a result, obliterated from English official historiography. However, this ethical restoration is shown as linguistically and historically precarious. ‘Precarity’ is indeed the social and ethical result of a life made ‘bare’, submitted to the repressive power of dispossession which, from a historical perspective, is equated to the deprivation of traces and the condemnation to oblivion. The voice of the lost other hovers between presence and absence, thereby emphasising the trauma of loss and impossible mourning which appears as the ethical quality of having one’s life made bare by the absence of the other. Ulverton illustrates this state of ethical dispossession showing the attachment to the other’s memory and confirming elegy as an ethical mode of expression.

This article looks at a selection of Philip Larkin’s poems which deal with the hospital or the notion of care and therefore all stage, more or less extensively, bare lives caught in liminal situations: either waiting to be taken care of by a nurse, wheeled in a corridor to a consultation, lying on a hospital bed, or stowed into an ambulance. This article first tries to show how these anonymous bare lives exposed in public spaces are constantly escaping the reader’s eye, as though such poetic technic were conveying the dispossession experienced by these bare lives, covered by hospital cloths and, quite significantly, sometimes merely passing. A reading of these poems through the angle of biopolitics, as Larkin actually subtly stages the institutional regulation of bare lives in such public places, shows how therapeutic time and space turn out to partake of a wide regimented system in which individual identities are at bay. The end of the article tries to show how Larkin’s somewhat bare style in fact seeks to suggest that biopolitics, extreme regulation, even medicine or religion, will in fact be powerless when it comes to counteract the experience of death. His bare, common, poetic stance then suggests each human being’s unescapable, common bareness.

This paper delves into Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospels (2013) as a biographical novel that draws on the official Gospels to address current issues. Focusing on the sections on Miryam (the Jewish spelling for the Virgin) and Barabbas, dispossession turns out to be the central subject, related to relationality in the former case and to violence in the latter. Hence, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s concept of dispossession as a bifurcation of Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics of alterity and Slavoj Žižek’s conception of violence constitute the theoretical framework of the analysis. With all this in mind, my main contention is that in Alderman’s novel acts of dispossession and violence are redirected towards ethical relationality and reconciliation between Jewishness and Christianity.

Harold Pinter’s one-act play A Kind of Alaska (1982) stages Deborah, a woman who wakes up after twenty-nine years of coma, along with her doctor and sister. Her presence on stage in her hospital bed inevitably raises the question of the perception of the diseased body: her body is exposed, made audible and visible. This exposure is striking because it unveils the body in its materiality, underlining the dispossession caused by our embodiment, the lack of control over our own bodies, and our inevitable subjection to ageing and possible diseases. Exposing the materiality of the body is thus a way to reveal its vulnerability and acts as a reminder that we are all potentially dependent. This forced surrender of total control actually initiates a re-evaluation of the notions of exposure and dispossession: exposure becomes a necessary way to acknowledge the presence of the other beyond any attempts at understanding him/her through language or knowledge.

This introduction traces back the conditions of emergence of the concept of bare life, from Foucault, though Agamben to more contemporary followers like De Boever and Lemke. It also takes pains to contextualise the emergence of the notion within the framework of the ethical turn in literature and theory and connects it with related items like dispossession, that have become influential thanks to the works of Judith Butler and Guillaume Le Blanc, among others. It then goes on to give a brief evocation of the articles published in the volume.

This rewiev compares Henri Lefebvre idea concerning the “right to the city” with David Harvey‟s one. This comparison, rather than an academic practice, implies a political connotation. Both Lefebvre and Harvey consolidate this right in the context of the theoretical and practical struggle against capitalist urbanization that should be undertaken and, what is more, against the productive model that capitalist encourages to perpetuate. This article on two radical thinkers of the urban environment expects the right to the city not just to remain in “an alibi, a pious wish or fiction” and it reveals contributions and contradictions in both authors thought regarding the basic question on the transition from critic to action: What to do? Henri Lefebvre thought presents a first period in which working-class is interpreted as the spearhead of a socialist revolution that implied a collective re-appropriation of the urban space; and a second one in which he is content with a “citizen” view of social change. Harvey, for his part, defines the right to the city as the peak of a real urban civilization, which is radically different from the capitalist productive model, but, as far as the methods to reach it are concerned, he re-invoke “citizen movements”, “spaces of hope” and “alternatives sites” like squats. The author of this article claims that the current return of a critical and radical thought on the urban is being spread only in academic areas and defends that we should start to think about how to transit from theory to execution.

This paper explores the policy need and legal case for including social safeguards in a post-2012 agreement on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). One serious charge laid against so called 'market-based' approaches to REDD is the potential for forest dwelling communities to be dispossessed from their land and to lose other rights afforded to them in international human rights law. Rather than criticise current REDD proposals as being inherently negative for forest dwelling communities, this paper asks firstly, whether REDD can potentially work in their favour and secondly, how such an opportunity could be realised in a future REDD agreement. After reviewing current REDD proposals and related threats, this paper argues for the inclusion of social safeguards within the post-2012 agreement on REDD. The primary cause of forest dwelling communities vulnerability is not REDD itself but the potential for REDD to operate in the absence of social safeguards. This paper presents four mutually reinforcing safeguards to protect forest dwelling communities in the context of a future agreement on REDD. This paper finds that a REDD market which requires minimum international standards of social protection is likely to benefit forest dwelling communities.

Patrick Neate’s disrupted narrative brings the condition-of-England novel up to date by analysing the effects of the Digital revolution on the nation and on the invisible, inarticulate masses. It is a satire as much as an elegy, and the two generic components merge to build up a contemporary state-of-the-nation narrative. Jerusalem is a study in vulnerability and dispossession, and this is what the article aims to demonstrate. To do so, it focuses on the issues of inarticulacy and invisibility as modalities of dispossession. It then moves on to show how the condition-of-Britain theme is taken up by analysing the singularity of a situation and setting it within a global and historical context. Jerusalem thus appears as a trauma narrative. The last part of the demonstration concentrates on the narrative apparatus separating all the better to connect, which is another way of voicing the novel’s ethics, before concluding on the notion of empowerment.

My article examines the animated documentary, a hybrid genre that has its origins in the early twentieth century (The Sinking of the Lusitania, 1918, Winsor McCay) but has enjoyed tremendous growth in recent years. It has three main objectives. At first I intend to show that the aesthetics of animated documentary inter-media, which is located at the crossroads of visual arts, documentary, and animation film, is inherently performative and political. The second objective of this project is to recognize and theorize figures and expressions of dispossession and insecurity, as well as the articulation and function of the voiceover in the feature film The Travel of M. Crulic (2012), the work of Romanian director Anca Damian. The third objective is the political performativity of this film. Specifically, I propose to show that The Travel of M. Crulic is both an incriminating document and a performance of resistance and protest against the "logic disposable body" (assignment of disposability, Butler & Athanasiou, 2013) of neoliberal capitalism and against the arbitrary violence of contemporary wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire is the property of Belin Editeur and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article analyzes a corpus of stories told by Palestinians who abandoned their belongings that held sentimental and financial value, including homes, after the creation of the Israeli State in 1948. It mentions that the ten stories written in or translated into English are excerpted from autobiographies, essays, and articles told by Palestinian refugees including Hala Sakakini, Ghada Karmi, and George Bisharat who returned to visit their former homes in 1967 and during the 1990s. It notes that most of the authors originate from Jerusalem and offer details on Palestinian urban life. Israel's expropriation of the Palestinians' belongings from 1948 to 1960 and how the authors claimed their former property or faced the residents or owners of their former homes are discussed.

The article analyzes the collection of short stories written by Chinese-British-American author Edith Maude Eaton known under the pen name Sui Sin Far entitled "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" (1912), re-edited by Hsuan L. Hsu. Focus is given to her autobiographical essay entitled "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" in which she claims her Chinese identity. Her aim to depict the Chinese in America, her writing style, and her double ethnicity are discussed.

The Dispossesed Face. The Liberating Function of the dédire in Emmanuel Levinas' Philosophy. This article deals with levinasian face revealed as a pneumatological intersubjective intrigue of self-dispossession. The face as illeity becomes a neutral symbol that makes from its epiphany a disturbing event. The language shown in the event resides in a continuous deny of the communication having the structure Dit-Dire-Dédire. The face preserves the absolute strangeness of the Other as a Third Person that has nothing to do with the phenomenological "there is". Contrary to the common opinion that makes from Levinas' philosophy one of abstract judaism, Marc Faessler, Guy Petitdemange, Michel Dupuis argue on the hypothesis that the pattern of the self-dispossession and of the ethical proximity lays in the christic kenosis. The levinasian self is incarnated as a pure passivity always exposed to an immemorial and exceeding responsibility. This aproach of the christic kenosis opens a new path of research in levinasian philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Études Rurales is the property of Editions EHESS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Inability to access pre-displacement housing, land and property poses a significant obstacle to the achievement of durable solutions for most IDPs in Libya. Displacement and dispossession cannot be separated from the legacy of the Gaddafi era.