Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship

Rhetoric & Public Affairs Jun 2024

Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship

Noor Ghazal Aswad ; Michael Lechuga

Abstract

Abstract In this essay, we respond to claims made about so-called leaderless social movements, which tend to overstate the organizing abilities of their membership. Like many Indigenous, feminist, and activist scholars, however, we contend that many so-called leaderless social movements are land-based and rely on cultivating human connection to land or, in some cases, severing human connection to land. This essay re-centers land and land-based leadership in a conceptualization of rhetorical leadership that accounts for social movements mediated through shared space. Then, the essay draws from a case where social movements described as leaderless draw direction from a relationship to place, what we call land-led politics: the enduring Syrian revolution. We show how a land-led politics is impelled not only by the severing of people from their subsistence base and the expropriation of their lands but by an ontological relation that draws leadership from the land. Hence, the land as theopanic influences social actor subjectivities and how they manage their conduct in relation to land. Emphasizing the amorphous, symbiotic, and rhizomatic relationships social actors have with land brings to light the land's political power and agentic qualities. As such, land-led politics demonstrates the limits of a leader-centric approach, which reproduces colonial understandings of power by failing to account for the political valence of land in realizing visions of a transformed landscape.

Journal: Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Published: 2024-06-01
DOI: 10.14321/rhetpublaffa.27.2.0025
Open Access: Closed
Topics: race and writing multilingual writers place and space