Reimagining landscape: Materiality,decoloniality,and creativity

Abstract

Geographers have been engaging with landscape since the beginning of the modern discipline of geography. A series of concurrent turns have taken place in human geography in recent years that are influencing the ways in which geographers approach landscape. We take forward new material, decolonial, and creative shifts in the discipline to reimagine landscape. Landscape is a geographical concept that has historically excluded a range of other voices and perspectives. To build a radically inclusive agenda for landscape research in geography, we put forward a generative conceptualisation of landscape that brings together (i) materiality; (ii) decoloniality; and (iii) creativity.

I What does it mean to reimagine landscape?

Abu Khaled points at the map and asks, why does the trail go this way? Looking down at the crumpled paper, away from the landscape, it is clear to see what he means, as the line of the Jordan Trail traces the tarmac for a distance. The road connects the village of Wadi Rum to the Desert Highway, a postcolonial road system built after the creation of the Jordanian state in 1946, named the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. Prior to the construction of the concrete village of Wadi Rum, the local Bedouin population lived a mostly nomadic existence. Yet as with all nomadic populations, their mobility was a challenge to the fixed borders of the new Jordanian state. Again pointing at the map we are holding to navigate our way along the trail, Abu Khaled this time highlights a landform called Jabal Um Ishrin. If you walk this way towards Jabal Um Ishrin, instead of walking along the dirt highway, it is quieter and more beautiful, adding, why would you go the worst way through this landscape? Taking his advice, we leave the marked route of the Jordan Trail, walking away from the main road, the town, into the desert. As Abu Khaled walks, he speaks of the Arabic names for different formations throughout the landscape, with many features named after the memories of people who moved there; after stories, songs, and poems; after an object the landscape resembles; or else, an animal, a plant, or a bird, for instance.

‘Landscape rises from the dead’, Mitchell (2021: 147) observed recently. Historically pushed to the margins of the discipline, landscape has once again become a significant cultural thematic for geographers. We show in this article that contemporary shifts in the discipline are emboldening the geographers of today to use landscape to explore pressing global concerns and this old geographical term is now central (see e.g. Brand, 2022; Mahanty et al., 2023; Wolford, 2021). Of course, the idea of landscape has been around for centuries (for a description of the etymology of the word ‘landscape’, see Makhzoumi and Pungetti, 1999: 3). Landscape is defined most simply as an area of inland scenery and is often associated with landscape paintings. In the modern academic discipline of geography, its use stretches all the way back to Sauer’s (1925) influential essay on landscape morphology. This is the nominal beginning of the story of landscape in geography. Landscape has been shaped since by engagements with the ordinary (e.g. Meinig, 1979), the everyday and vernacular (e.g. Jackson 1984), the symbolic (e.g. Cosgrove, 1985; Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Duncan and Ley, 1993), the textual and metaphoric (e.g. Barnes and Duncan, 1992; Duncan and Duncan, 1988), labour (e.g. Mitchell D, 1994a), power (e.g. Mitchell WJT, 1994), transformation and de-signification (e.g. Falah, 1996), vision (e.g. Wylie, 2002), stories (e.g. Lorimer, 2003), embodiment (e.g. Wylie, 2005), presence (e.g. Rose, 2006), the material and more-than-human (e.g. Whatmore, 2006), performance (e.g. Pearson, 2007), memory (e.g. DeSilvey, 2007), mobility and practice (e.g. Merriman et al., 2008), nature (e.g. Caprotti and Kaika, 2008), political ecology (e.g. Neumann, 2011), absences and hauntings (e.g. Wylie, 2009), melancholia (e.g. Dubow, 2011), the postcolonial and race (e.g. Tolia-Kelly, 2011), resistance and settler-colonialism (e.g. Falah, 2012), the non-representational (e.g. Dewsbury, 2015), visual impairment (e.g. Macpherson 2016), skill (e.g. Hunt, 2018), loss and mourning (e.g. Lorimer, 2019), and the otherworldly (e.g. Kingsbury, 2019).

Our prompt for this intervention piece comes from our own engagements with landscape. We have repeatedly pressed human geographers to engage with the politics of landscape. Exploring the line of the Jordan Trail attends to the everyday experiences of walking, and in so doing, reveals the more-than-human, Indigenous, storied, and imagined lines of movement emerging in landscape that challenge a concentration on borders as the dominant linear imaginary in the region (Mason, 2020). Marching with mourners to a mass funeral in Srebrenica via mass graves in a study of landscape after genocide suggests that landscape could be put to work as a ‘conflictual lens’ (Riding, 2019; see also, Riding, 2020). We build upon this engaged work in the landscape with local communities in this article and argue that now is the time for geographers to reimagine landscape. It is not our intention here to simply catalogue histories of landscape thinking. We suggest in this intervention that exploring how the term is being used in geography today, by critically evaluating its history in the discipline, and how geographers are rethinking and could rethink landscape anew, is crucial. This is a time in which geography as an academic discipline is confronting its colonial and racist pasts, and terms ubiquitous to geography, such as landscape, need to be interrogated within this necessary critical turn in the discipline. Geography requires for Mitchell (2021: 136), the ‘re-introduction of landscape’ as the key mediating spatial form. Landscape is increasingly being used to address larger questions central to the discipline. We explore the work landscape is doing for geography in this article and consider how landscape could be put to work in decolonising geography. Landscape ‘sculpts the future’, as Mitchell (2021: 150) puts it, and landscape research today questions landscape to engage with intermeshing challenges in our contemporary socio-environmental epoch (see e.g. Brand, 2022).

The reimagining of the story of landscape we tell in this article is inspired by our opening vignette led by Abu Khaled. In this vignette we see how materiality, colonial imaginaries, and creativity shape the landscape of Wadi Rum in conflicting ways. Imaginations of landscape and its use are held in material infrastructures and colonial texts, which conflict with the local stories and experience of landscape captured through everyday journeys and poems, songs, and memories. Colonial imaginations of Wadi Rum, and Middle Eastern landscapes more widely, as empty, desert spaces, was cemented in the geographical imagination by twentieth century travel writing. Lawrence (1935: 360) writes of Wadi Rum: ‘Landscapes in children’s dream, were so vast and silent… Rumm the magnificent… vast, echoing and godlike… a processional way greater than imagination… the crimson sunset burned on its stupendous cliffs and slanted ladders of hazy fire down its walled avenue’. It was such inscriptions that in turn preoccupied Said (1978) and divided ‘our space’ from ‘their space’, and both Said (1978) and Foucault (1986) paid attention to the relationship between text and world, exploring how ‘constellations of power, knowledge and spatiality are put in place’ (Gregory, 1995: 30). della Dora (2009: 350) refers to these constellations as the ‘role of mobile landscape representations as instruments for the shaping of geographical imaginations’. In this article, we seek to move beyond and challenge dominant narratives of landscape to delink landscape from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being in the world in order to promote and perhaps enable other forms of existence on Earth. We centre landscape stories from (post)colonial locations and Indigenous communities and include radically creative ways of engaging with landscape which have decoloniality at their heart. Geographers have been reimagining landscape to acknowledge the colonial and racial violence that has taken place in the landscape for centuries (see e.g. Schein, 2006).

A shift towards landscape research as vital, necessary, and useful has taken place in recent years. We seek to build upon this vital work, which reimagines landscape to represent the geographers and geographies of today. Geographers are no longer tied to the discipline; our subdisciplinary affiliations are fluid, and our agendas transdisciplinary. These interdisciplinary encounters are central to new landscape ideas in human geography, enabling new possibilities, practices, publics, and politics (see e.g. Hawkins et al., 2015). We suggest here that a review of landscape research in human geography that reflects these progressive contemporary shifts is overdue (see previous reviews of landscape, Cosgrove, 1990; Duncan, 1994, 1995; Minca, 2007; Mitchell, 2002). We chart recent engagement with the term in what follows and take forward with Friess and Jazeel (2017) efforts to unlearn or reimagine our strictly defined and bounded concept of landscape in the discipline of geography (see also, Jazeel, 2013). We join the call for decolonising geography and focus upon landscape research that expands the traditional stories we tell of landscape (see Kinkaid and Fritzsche, 2022). Landscape and decolonisation are intrinsically linked. Dang (2021: 1004) writes that ‘if decolonisation truly begins with land, then it can be said that landscape studies – as a field concerned with the study, design, and ordering of land – has at least some stake in ongoing processes of decolonisation’.

We highlight three ways in which a reimagining of landscape is already taking place in this article. Firstly, we engage with new landscape research on materiality, the more-than-human, and the (non)representational, secondly, we prioritise decolonisation and research in (post)colonial landscapes, and thirdly, we extend creativity and intersections with the environmental humanities and the geohumanities in landscape research, building upon the opening sections of this article. Contemporary geographical engagements with materiality, decoloniality, and creativity have enabled new spatial thinking in the discipline, influencing the ways in which we explore landscape as geographers. The article proceeds in three substantive sections where we take forward recent shifts in landscape research to present a reimagined landscape in geography.

II Grounding the new material landscapes of power

Geographers have been engaging with landscape since the beginning of the modern discipline of geography, and the fixed narrative of landscape research in geography begins with Sauer (1925). For Sauer (1925: 325), ‘geography is based on the union of the reality of physical and cultural elements of the landscape’, and in Germany in the 1920s when Sauer was writing, their term for the discipline was landschaftskunde or länderkunde – the knowledge of landscape – while their other term for geography, erdkunde – the science of the earth – was falling into disuse. Landscape is still today a key concept in geography. It is unique in bridging human and physical geography and is invoked in human geography by cultural, social, political, historical, and economic geographers using various conceptual and methodological approaches (see Friess and Jazeel, 2017). Landscape is unlike place, space, territory, region, and the state, as ‘landscape is perhaps the only modern concept that refers to both the thing itself – and to its description’ (Minca, 2007: 179). ‘Landscape recalls both a portion of territory as well as its image and imaginary, its artistic and scientific representation’, as Minca (2007: 179) writes. This accounts for why, according to Minca (2007: 179), even today, ‘despite the achievements of the new cultural geography and the influence of non-representational theories, landscapes all too often continue to be read either as texts or, worse still, as “real” spaces and/or built environments’.

Landscape research in geography traditionally focused on the day-to-day making, working, cultivating, and stewardship of landscapes, narrating the stories of communities and their relationship with the ‘cultural landscape’ (see Sauer, 1925; see also Rose, 2006, 2021). Landscape was delimited to a ‘cultural landscape’ fashioned from a natural landscape by a group, until the flourishing of new cultural geography, when landscape in geography became a ‘cultural image’ (see Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988). Landscape research in the new cultural geography was largely concerned with images, maps, and texts as a means of thinking through arrangements of space, power, and knowledge. It was a project propelled by understanding and explaining ‘maps of meaning’ (see Cresswell, 2010). Complicating this linear history, geographers Tuan (1974) and Relph (1981) began writing alternative humanistic interpretations of landscape, ‘which declined the Marxist invitation to regard landscape as purely social and ideological construction and focused attention on the unalienated direct experience of the world’ (Cosgrove, 1990: 2). Cosgrove (1979: 43) noted that these geographers were moving ‘towards re-examining the qualitative dimensions of our experience of landscape and the uniqueness of place’ and also spoke more broadly of ‘the roots of geography, which lie in a naïve prescientific awareness of place and of variation between areas’.

Following Ingold’s (2000: 183; see also, Ingold, 2010) provocation that there is no world ‘out there’ but rather ‘it is through being inhabited…that the world becomes a meaningful environment’, geographers turned towards non-representational landscapes (e.g. Dewsbury, 2015) and practices and performances of landscape (e.g. Lorimer, 2006; Pearson, 2007; Wylie, 2005). Embodied, affective, non-representational landscape research would go on to become the dominant landscape mode in geography in the new century (see Dewsbury, 2015). Landscape research in geography reimagined human relationships to the depths and folds of landscape through embodied, affective, non-representational research, stitching and unstitching self and landscape through (post)phenomenological renderings (e.g. Wylie, 2005). There was ‘a rhetorical and substantive shift, from studies of representations of landscape… to studies instead investigating various performances and performativities of landscape’ (Wylie, 2007: 163). Landscape is ‘performed in a process of flows, where combinations of memory, action and meaning are complex and performed together’ (Crouch and Malm, 2003: 253). In the process of documenting the self in landscape, geographers began to experiment with landscape and today landscape is being reimagined in creative ways. Books about soil and water that bear the hallmarks of an older pre-disciplinary poetic landscape writing have become popular again (e.g. Cresswell, 2013; De Leeuw, 2015). At the same time, landscape research on memorial benches (Wylie, 2009), pet cemeteries (Lorimer, 2019), hardscrabble homesteads (DeSilvey, 2007), bothies (Hunt 2018), and memorial trees and treescapes (Cloke and Pawson, 2008) has creatively curated human–nonhuman relations.

These fixed origin stories of landscape in geography have become embedded in our disciplinary history. Yet we demonstrate here that landscape is ‘far from being uniform, homogenous, and pre-prepared’ and it is ‘variegated, composite, and undergoes continuous generation’, meaning any definition of the term is in effect partial and selective (Ingold, 2010: 121). ‘Landscape is tension’ (Rose and Wylie, 2006: 475). Alongside this often-told linear history of landscape in geography, there is another that bubbles under the surface. Reimagining the genealogical story of landscape in the discipline, Whatmore (2006: 603) writes that the conventional history of landscape in geography casts the making of landscapes as either ‘worked/lived’ or ‘represented’, centring human achievement, and prioritising the human experience of landscape. Landscapes as co-fabricated between more-than-human bodies and a lively earth have turned attention to ‘the processes and excesses of ‘livingness’ in a more-than-human world’ (Whatmore, 2006: 604; see also e.g. Barua, 2014; Clancy et al., 2021; Connolly, 2017, 2020; Davies, 2021; Garlick, 2019; Geros, 2021; Marijnen, 2021). Crucially, this landscape research explores the entanglements of human habitation and environmental interaction by attending closely to the materialities of landscape. Building on Tsing’s (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, landscape research in the discipline has returned to the ground, and things such as soils, mushrooms, and disease organisms, as a way to understand ecological degradation in twenty-first century landscapes (see e.g. Krzywoszynska, 2019). Krzywoszynska (2019) explores landscapes of conventional English farming and soil biota, investigating the ethical potential of attentiveness, returning in the process to landscapes of labour in newly material and more-than-human ways (see e.g. Mitchell, 1996).

The politics of environmental change is increasingly the focus of work on the more-than-human and political ecologies in landscape (e.g. Barua, 2014; Brettell, 2016; Clancy et al., 2021; Connolly, 2017, 2020; Davies, 2021; Duggan, 2021; Garlick, 2019; Geros, 2021; Hubbard and Wilkinson, 2019; Huddart and Huggan, 2022; Jamieson, 2017; Marijnen, 2021; McConnell and Saladyga, 2020; Ojeda et al., 2021; Olden, 2017; Ray, 2016; Sutherland, 2021; Youngs, 2020). Rapid environmental change is increasingly affecting landscape futures, and this ‘not only puts immediate pressure on identifying alternative futures for landscapes but also threatens to unsettle patterns of attachment to the landscape’ (Bartolini and DeSilvey, 2021: 8). Recent explorations of landscape and the Anthropocene complement this landscape research on the politics of environmental change (e.g. Brace and Geoghegan, 2011; Neumann, 2011; Parsons, 2019). Interconnections among landscape, the more-than-human, and materiality emerge too in work that uses experimental approaches (e.g. Bauch, 2015; Bolland, 2015; Doel, 2019; Ebbensgaard, 2017; Rich, 2017; Rush-Cooper, 2020; Nordström, 2017; Wylie and Webster, 2019), agenda setting military and nuclear landscape work (e.g. Rabung and Toman, 2022; Pitkanen and Farish, 2018; Woodward, 2013), and research in post-industrial and post-World War II landscapes (e.g. Humphris and Rauws, 2021; Braae et al., 2021; Van der Schriek, 2020).

New landscape research ranges from the long-term socio-environmental legacies and residues of ethnic conflict (Riding, 2020), to the geontological time-spaces of modern warfare (see Griffiths, 2022), to the intensifying eliminatory speed of settler-colonialism (dromoelimination) (see Ghantous and Joronen, 2022). New landscape research places colonialism, capitalism, and enduring racial hierarchies at the centre of the conversation about human-caused environmental change by returning attention to the scale of the plantation landscape as a discursive ideal (see Wolford, 2021). Recent ruptures in landscapes caused by wildfires or toxic pollution releases have inspired landscape research that argues concepts like the Anthropocene do not fully capture the intensity and generative scope of this crisis (see Mahanty et al., 2023). It is a crisis that is experienced locally and unevenly through landscape, and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Brand (2022) excavates the backswamps of a delta city to examine valorisations of ‘Whiteness as a landscape’.

Elsewhere in the discipline thick descriptions of the non-human are now attending to vibrant, ‘storied matter’ (Bennett, 2010), becoming stone, dust, air, concrete, mud, water, rock, fire, and ice humanities and geographies (e.g. Edensor, 2021; Cosgrove and Della Dora, 2008; Dodds and Sörlin, 2022; Klinke, 2018; Nassar, 2018; Nieuwenhuis, 2018; Peters et al., 2018; Squire, 2016; Steinberg, 2013). Moreover, spatial and socio-natural cyborgian metaphors have emerged on geography’s horizon, from void, to deep, to high, to hole, to edge, to wet, to plastic, to polymorphic, to volumetric, to hybrid, to nexus thinking (for instance, Jackman and Squire, 2021; Jones, 2022; Kingsbury and Secor, 2021; Steinberg and Peters, 2015; Whatmore, 2002; Van Dyke, 2013). Alongside these new spatial metaphors, thinking beyond terra has given rise to political-ecological more-than-human, more-than-wet, and more-than-dry explorations of seascapes, riverscapes, waterscapes, and sandscapes working at the interfaces of coasts, banks, islands, and the seabed (e.g. Pugh and Chandler, 2021; Riding and Dahlman, 2022; Squire, 2021a; Steinberg and Peters, 2015; Stratford, 2017).

This new spatial thinking is influencing the ways in which geographers approach landscape. For example, landscapes suffering extreme changes such as in coastal sites where erosion is scraping away the land are detailed through a ‘community geography’ approach to a hardening of the shoreline in built coastal infrastructure (see Trimbach et al., 2022). Similarly, through practices of ‘walking, looking, and wandering’ in the landscapes of Tuscany, Mathews (2018) explores encounters among people, trees, soils, and terraces (carefully detailing stories of disease and wildfire) in formerly cultivated landscapes in central Italy. This is positioned as a means to engage with the politics of environmental change in landscape by looking backwards as well as forwards in collaboration with local communities. To fully appreciate landscapes and to return them once more to landscapes of wellbeing for those who reside there, Bell et al. (2018) argue, it is crucial to link the present(s) of landscapes to their past(s). The old idea of ‘therapeutic landscapes’ has grown ‘as researchers have examined the dynamic material, affective and socio-cultural roots and routes to experiences of health and wellbeing in specific places’ (Bell et al., 2018: 123). For example, recent research on community gardens positions them as tools for place and community building (see Walshe and Law, 2022). Building attachment in novel ways and noticing the materiality of landscape are enabled also through Rickard and White’s (2021) study of barefoot walking and their detailing of the greater feelings of landscape connectedness that arose. Wisdom writes Ingold (2023: PN) ‘lies in taking time to observe’, and ‘turning towards the world, paying attention to the things we find there’ (Ingold 2023: no PN). Or to put it another way, ‘human beings experience and transform the natural world as a human world through their direct engagement as reflective beings with its sensuous, material reality’ (Cosgrove, 1983: 1).

III Decolonising geography through the landscape

Mitchell (2021: 151) has recently argued for a return to landscape as the key mediating spatial form in geography, forcefully stating that ‘new futures are sculpted out of old landscapes’. Yet historically, as Dang (2021: 1004) sets out, ‘landscape has been used as a disciplinary tool to facilitate the control of land and to naturalise colonial hegemonies, including the cultural framing of art through art and architecture’. As a result, Dang (2021: 1008) writes ‘it would be naïve to approach colonialism as something that was done to landscapes, rather than exploring the more radical contentions that the discipline of landscape itself is colonising’. Such calls to reframe landscape beyond narrow Western framings have already been taken up by geographers and here we seek to build upon their work (see Friess and Jazeel, 2017). The idea, or ideal, of landscape, is intimately embedded in Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies that are cemented through, for example, the creation of nature trails, national parks, and landscape gardens, all considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal. Such landscapes exhibit a perceived universality of Western knowledge and the superiority of Western culture with certain landscapes deemed picturesque, as defined through Romantic ideals presented in landscape painting and poetry.

Scenic landscapes become sites of national identity formation that often erase Indigenous communities and are built on settler-colonial imaginations of wilderness and emptiness (see Cronon, 1996; Estes, 2019). Beyond the West, such imaginations of empty landscapes, as Lawrence’s (1935) writing on Wadi Rum demonstrates, are frequently today used to justify colonial control. For instance, desert landscapes despite their diverse material resources are ‘frequently narrated as ‘empty’ to justify their transformation into toxic zones of extractions’ (Koch, 2021: 87; see also Willems-Braun, 1997). The myth of emptiness appears in a well-travelled proverb, ‘Land without a people for the people without a land’, used to justify Palestinian displacement (Said, 1979: 9). Hoffmann (2018) too describes how the Middle East’s landscapes are frequently portrayed as ‘fragile, alien, and hostile’, and this creates an ‘imperial Oriental imagination’ that blames societies and states for mismanaging resources to justify ongoing imperial control. The history of terra nullius moreover is a disturbing story of how no-man’s [sic] land became the province of the White man, operating as an inhuman geography, a legal fiction in international law enabling the remaking of landscapes viewed as empty (see Lindqvist, 2007).

In conjunction with the writing of British authors such as Lawrence (1935), landscape images became increasingly key in creating the imagined landscapes of the Middle East. ‘Although imagined, these geographies had real consequences for people’s actions’ (Sharp, 2009: 12). Landscape photography, for instance, was central to the development and marketing of the Holy Land to the West and served to contribute to colonial and Zionist political visual heritages, appropriation, and cultural claims over landscape (see Barromi-Perlman, 2020). When landscape histories and stories emerge only from the West, there is little opportunity to consider other histories of landscape and how these might trouble dominant colonial landscape imaginaries. Most pertinently, Makhzoumi (2002) notes the lack of a word in Arabic for landscape. Makhzoumi (2002: 218) concludes this is the result of ‘cultural differences between a Middle Eastern conception of “landscape” and a Western one’, and not linguistic shortcomings. Like Orientalism, landscape is ‘an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary’ (Said, 1978: 5). Delinking landscape from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being in the world could enable other forms of landscape to emerge, moving ‘toward more inclusive and diverse imaginaries of the geographic tradition’ (Kinkaid and Fritzsche, 2022: 2469).

Landscape has historically worked to make certain values seem natural. ‘The power of landscape features lies in the fact they are easy to grasp both emotionally and intellectually, for they can be visited, touched, venerated, and most importantly taken for granted as right and natural’ (Duncan, 1992: 81). As Sharp (2009: 56) writes: ‘Landscapes did not simply reflect colonial aspirations but were also both consciously and subconsciously used as social technologies, as strategies of power to incorporate, categorise, discipline, control, and reform the inhabitants of the city, town, or plantation’. The plantation landscape, for instance, became a ‘modern technology for the reconfiguration of space, tools, scientific instruments and other material resources, bringing together culturally heterogeneous populations, stripping them of their former social attachments and reconstituting them as workers through the use of space-time strategies of monitoring and control’ (Duncan, 2002: 317). Mitchell (2007: 559) has long examined the relations among labour, social struggle, and circulation (of capital and bodies) in the production of landscapes. Struggles over landscape and nature are fundamentally related to the production of commodities for exchange. ‘Local struggles intersect with wider scale processes to determine the morphology of that circulation in the transformation of landscape in a particular locale’ (Mitchell, 2007: 561). Mitchell’s (2007: 561) examinations of capitalism reveal how nature is produced and transformed under capitalism, which requires not just labour as ‘living, form-giving fire’ but labour when it is ‘past… dead – for dead labour is the shape that not only the landscape but also the possibility for justice takes’. A focus on the Holtville cemetery, for Mitchell (2007: 575), tells us about systems of production and unproduction because the ‘landscape is a lived – and died – in space… it is a landscape that makes life, and death, possible’.

Deathly landscapes are centred in Leshem’s (2015) account of Palestinian struggle over a Jerusalem cemetery, in which the politics of death is part of lived spaces and cultural resistance. Acknowledging landscape dispossession, struggles over the use of landscape, and colonial violence, requires readings of landscape that are of silenced communities (see e.g. Falah, 1996, 2012; Long, 2009; Makhzoumi, 2002). Landscapes are reshaped symbolically and materially and their depths and folds reformed through dispossession, cleansing, and extraction. The short vignette we opened with centres aspects of landscape thinking crucial to this article. Material and ideological struggles over living and working in contemporary Jordan have played a part in the production of the Jordanian landscape. It is a landscape that was remade to sedentarise Bedouin through new infrastructural and imaginative borderings. Here, we centre such embodied engagements with more-than-human landscapes and Indigenous communities through a vignette to reorient ‘dominant, ocular-centric Western perspectives’ towards other ways of knowing (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 455). This Indigenous reimagining of landscape research attends ‘to the world’s communicative nature, and to the way humans can both understand and become part of it’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 467) and foregrounds ‘an ethics of co-becoming’, which ‘demands that we attend to the connections that bind and co-constitute us’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 469).

Landscape research in geography is being reimagined by a convergence of decolonial, Indigenous, and more-than-human perspectives, promoting vital new ways of engaging with landscape to ‘guide those who are listening’ (Smith et al., 2020: 941; see also e.g. Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Yandaarra with Gumbaynggirr Country et al., 2022). Post-anthropocentric thinking and more-than-human research questions the centrality of the human in landscape, imagining networks of ethics and responsibility emerging not from the ideologies of old but from the messy and complex liveliness around and beneath us, forged in relation to nonhuman potentials and forces (e.g. Braun, 2005; Dowling et al., 2017; Lorimer, 2008; Panelli, 2010; Whatmore, 2002). More-than-human and animal geographies engage a bio-geo human–nonhuman rendering of flora, fauna, and funga, attending to the lively materialities of landscape (e.g. Brigstocke and Noorani, 2016; Buller, 2014a, 2014b; Matless et al., 2005; Philo and Wilbert, 2000; Wolch and Emel, 1998). At the same time, feminist anthropological work on kinship in human–nonhuman relations and interspecies kinship, transcends difference, and is inspired by Indigenous kinship thinking and practices of protecting and restoring landscapes in proximities with the nonhuman (see Clark and Szerszynski, 2020; Simmons, 2019; Van Dooren and Chrulew, 2022).

The ‘kinship turn’ in environmental humanities decolonises research practice by interrogating and seeking to move away from Western modes of knowledge production (see Tynan, 2021). This vital move recasts landscape beyond the ocular-centric and human-centric. Instead landscape is written through the distributions of stories and practices, as in Indigenous landscapes, engaging with the physicality of landscape and its agency (see Richardson-Ngwenya, 2014). Tribal borders, memories, and legends, Indigenous plants, and the tracks of animals, present a diverse way of knowing landscape, attending to the material and the imaginative, the creative and the critical, in decolonial ways. Yet struggles surface when centring Indigenous narratives of landscape, and as Todd (2016: 18) argues, social scientists must not cherry-pick ‘parts of Indigenous thought that appeal to them without engaging directly in (or unambiguously acknowledging) the political situation, agency, legacy orders, and relationality of both Indigenous people and scholars’ (see also, Todd, 2018).

‘Others are already inscripted in the foundation formulation of the universal as a space of privileged subjectification… caught between the hardening of geopolitical borders and the material de-stratification of territory’ (Yusoff, 2019: 50/62). In the Capitalocene (Moore, 2015), Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016), Plantationocene (Tsing, 2005), or ‘a billion Black Anthropocenes’ (Yusoff, 2019), a radical re-conceptualisation of earth’s history is required. As Elden (2021: 174) writes, ‘this involves taking some account of colonial questions in relation to territory, to take the body more seriously, and the physical nature of the landscape, the places over which, through which, territories are established and contested’. In response to Elden (2021), Peters (2021) argues that critical accounts of terrain can emerge when social and cultural perspectives common in landscape research are brought into conversation with the terms territory and terrain. Emphasising and working with more-than-human and Indigenous perspectives can destabilise static, bordered, and linear framings of the landscape (see Squire, 2021b).

We aim to stay with the trouble in this article (see Haraway, 2016). For example, landscapes have long been shaped by a reinvention of nature with the human (coded as White), the inhuman (techne, and the racialised Other), and the nonhuman (the great outdoors) remaining as signifiers leaving lasting roots in the imagination that continually remake, exploit, and dispossess the lands of Indigenous communities (see Meillassoux, 2008). The centring of research by ‘Indigenous and Black scholars regarding kinship and intersectionality, and respective ethical practices of struggle, resurgence, and rebellion against the mutual oppression of peoples of colour and the environment’ (Schmidt, 2022: 1; see also, Schmidt, 2020) expands the stories that we tell (see Kinkaid and Fritzsche, 2022: 2469; see also Purifoy, 2021). Theorisations of terms such as landscape in human geography must avoid excluding other narratives and pushing them to the edges of the discipline (see Gieseking, 2017). McKittrick (2006: 57) describes Black women’s geographies as taking place at the margins of geography, but the margin is ‘emptied out, placeless, just theory, just language’ (see also Bledsoe, 2021; Hawthorne, 2019; McKittrick and Woods, 2007; Noxolo, 2022). Rethinking the evolution of concepts and their narrow, linear, ‘ongoing reproduction in conceptual debates’ is key to begin to foreground alternative disciplinary stories that have been pushed to the periphery (Jackman et al., 2020: 10; see also Oswin, 2020; Pulido, 2002).

Landscape justice involves thinking critically about the formation of knowledge and questions whose knowledge is valued and asserts that attending to power in landscape is an ethical as much as a scientific endeavour (see Löfgren, 2020). Landscape justice is understood as ‘people’s emplaced right to landscape as a common good of importance to their quality of life’ (Olwig, 2022: 717). Responding to this concept of landscape justice in the Argentine Dry Chaco, Vallejos et al. (2020) argue that global food demand not only alters landscapes at local levels but also affects forms of life and the culture of rural life, while at the same time increasing inequalities across multiple landscapes. Powell (2018) also explores the rise and fall of the controversial Desert Rock Power Plant initiative in New Mexico to trace the political conflicts surrounding native sovereignty and contemporary energy development on Navajo (Diné) Nation land, refocusing attention once more on landscapes of power (see e.g. Mitchell WJT, 1994b; Zukin, 1991).

Decolonising geographical knowledges through the landscape involves recognising the contemporary exclusions of an Anglo-American, Anglophone, Eurocentric, Western geography situated in the Global North (see Clayton and Kumar, 2019; Kinkaid and Fritzsche, 2022; Müller, 2021; Naylor et al., 2018; Radcliffe, 2017, 2022; Sundberg, 2014). We acknowledge here historical systems that conceived places, plants, and the racialised Other, as interchangeable parts, encoding socio-environmental violence in multiple landscapes (see Williams and Porter, 2022). Anti-racist, anti-colonial ecologies and geographies in landscape acknowledge the violence which results from the overlapping ills of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism (see Tilley et al., 2022). This new landscape research acknowledges colonial, imperial and racial violence, which undermines the very ability of the landscape to support life (see Mitchell, 2021: 151). Landscape in our reading is more than an image or indeed a built environment. Landscape research for us involves exploring ‘the way people have signified themselves and their world through their imagined relationship to nature, and through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to nature’ (Cosgrove, 1984: 15).

IV A creative (re)turn to landscape in geography

Geography’s current interest in creativity, as Hawkins (2019: 966) cautions, should not become ‘just another example of disciplinary colonialism or a fad driven by less than intellectual or creative ambitions’ (see for critical explorations of creativity, Marston and De Leeuw, 2013; Mould, 2018). Extending the opening sections of this article, we seek to show in what follows the ways in which geographers are harnessing creativity to reimagine landscape. Research across the environmental humanities and the geohumanities is questioning how we write, think, and know landscape, especially through creative and arts-based approaches. Geographers are now much more comfortable, following what Hawkins (2019) calls a ‘creative (re)turn’, operating in registers to represent landscapes that previously would have been considered beyond the realms of academic geography (see also Madge, 2014). Geographers are artists too, as these new interdisciplinary spaces have emboldened creative geographies and new creative geographic methods (see Hawkins, 2015, 2021). Yet it is crucial that creative work does not become the only way to engage critically with landscape or is used to bolster Western ideals and notions of both creativity and landscape.

The creative tools used by geographers to engage with the landscape in innovative ways, such as walking, poetry, mapping, and storytelling, are not new and have been used in landscape research for decades. What is new we suggest is the ways in which creative tools are being used to trouble and subvert the pasts and presents of landscape. We suggest future landscape research might challenge geography’s problematic pasts by emphasising worldmaking promoted by Indigenous and decolonial scholars. Inspired by the vignette that shapes this article, we seek to delink landscape and creativity from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being in the world. Vignettes as a tool to reimagine landscape are used by Todd (2016: 10) to incorporate Indigenous ways of experiencing landscape to confront ‘the European academy’s continued, collective reticence to address its own racist and colonial roots, and debt to Indigenous thinkers in a meaningful and structural way’. We pay attention here to the different ways we ‘tell stories about the particular space-time contexts that we make, transform, and inhabit through our ongoing lived (im)mobilities’ (Sheller, 2018: 2). This is ‘contingent, contested, and performative’ and ‘striated by gender, race, ethnicity, class, colour, nationality, age, sexuality, disability, etc., which are all in fact experienced as effects of uneven mobilities’ (Sheller, 2018: 10).

One way in which geographers are considering landscape anew is by attending to the mobility politics of landscape in performative and creative ways. Emphasising landscape mobilities is to explore ‘how landscape/landscaping is practised, emergent through mobile and material practices, and how mobilities animate landscapes’ (Merriman et al., 2008: 192). Landscape performances, such as pilgrimage, increasingly attend to the emotional-spiritual aspects and representations of landscape as much as physical activity to understand human–landscape interactions (see Scriven, 2021). Central to much work on landscape mobilities is a critical reformulation of these practices by considering who gets to be part of the making of landscape, as landscape is central to the (re)production of social life (see e.g. Duncan, 1990; Mitchell D, 1994a, 1996). Decades old debates within British landscape studies have detailed how landscapes can be sites of exclusion and alienation (see Tolia-Kelly, 2007; Askins, 2009). For Askins (2009), rural England is an exclusionary White space where the term landscape was rarely employed in research regarding perceptions and use of the English countryside by participants with African, Caribbean, and Asian backgrounds. Tolia-Kelly (2007) similarly demonstrates how the English Lake District has been culturally embodied as a memorial to a sense of Englishness. There is little research investigating how emotional registers and power geometries within rural landscapes exclude British multi-ethnic, translocal, and mobile landscape values and sensibilities, ensuring the British countryside is a White space (see Tolia-Kelly, 2007). Tolia-Kelly (2007: 337) responds to this absence through work with a landscape artist with the political intention ‘to record multiple cultures of engagement of individuals and groups who are fearful, frail and feel endangered by the concept of even just walking the lakeside pathways of Windermere’. Building on this landscape research, Tolia-Kelly (2011) re-narrated the postcolonial landscape by recuperating Black histories of Hadrian’s Wall, recovering a set of counter-narratives that operate as an important political tool in the doing of public geographies.

Engaging with artistic approaches to rethink landscape anew continues in the play ‘Black Men Walking’ written by the producer, rapper, and singer known as Testament (2018: 3) and begins with the words:

We walk. Though we are written into the landscape you don’t see us. We walked England before the English.

The play is based on a Black walking group in Sheffield established by Maxwell Ayamba (who grew up in Ghana before moving to the UK for university) and contrasts modern day attitudes to the sight of Black men walking in the Yorkshire Dales with histories of black British history in the countryside that are largely unwritten. For Ayamba, these unwritten histories are also connected to differing ideas of nature between Ghana and the UK. In Ghana, Ayamba observes that the idea of nature is less connected with conservation, leisure, and recreation but as a source of livelihood with humans and nature intrinsically connected. The play therefore uses the creative medium of theatre to attend to the different understandings of landscape and exclusionary power geometries of the English landscape so that walking becomes a political landscape act as conveyed through the words of one of the characters (Testament 2018: 549):

We’re claiming this land as ours.

It’s a political act.

The need for such alternative accounts of landscape emerges in a published exchange between Blacksell (2005) and Wylie (2005). In response to Wylie’s (2005) introspective and non-representational account of walking the South West Coast Path in England, Blacksell (2005: 518) writes:

The whole focus seems to be overly self-centred and introspective and, thus, omits some crucial elements of what it is that influences the appreciation of such a walk.

The crucial elements missing for Blacksell (2005) include the topographical and geographical descriptions of coastal landscapes, the ‘real-politik’ of walking, the physical processes producing landscapes, and the health and safety considerations of walking. In contrast, Sidaway’s (2009) walk on an urban section of the same path walked by Wylie (2005) weaves a narrative that combines the historical, political, and military hauntings that produce the landscape. In our landscape research, we have analysed the language, materiality, and politics of walking and explored how walking becomes an exclusionary landscape tactic (Mason, 2021). Centring the tensions of walking trails, we explored seemingly innocuous sites that demonstrate how nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism are built into landscapes (Mason, 2023). The frequent use of the term ‘hiking’ in Jordan is notable because while walking translates into Arabic, hiking does not (Mason, 2021). Long distance trails illustrate the cultural imperialism of certain practices of movement, in turn producing exclusions of who can walk in landscape and how they should walk through a form of ‘right’ or ‘correct’ walking (see Ingold, 2004). Landscape research in geography has questioned the politics of mobilities, how embodied methods such as walking can risk ignoring the diverse contexts and cultural circumstances within which people walk, and the relational qualities of landscape (see Macpherson, 2016). MacPherson (2009) explored how people with visual impairments navigate landscape, and navigating landscape in this reading becomes an intracorporeal collective act.

Paying attention to community stories and looking beyond singular introspective accounts of walking in landscape come through also in Falah’s (2012) description of growing up in a village in Galilee. Sharing Indigenous attachments to landscape, Falah (2012) shows how landscape stories can be a catalyst for political resistance. Walking as a collaborative rather than self-centred practice was crucial in nurturing relationships with landscape, enabling the uncovering of ‘multifaceted geographies that underpin the cultural and social fabric of a small Palestinian village/community’ (Falah, 2012: 303). This attention to ‘small stories’ and intimate yet collective mobile storytelling is quietly radical (see Lorimer, 2003; Lorimer and Parr, 2014). Building upon such storytelling, is a project called ‘Disembodied Territories’ in which a story-telling workshop has resulted in a website containing different mediums of knowledge production to ‘re-imagine mapping, space, power, and coloniality’ (see Disembodied Territories). ‘Maps and images are instruments of landscape governance’ that create ‘visual manifestations of assumptions about socio-ecological casual relations’ (Movik et al., 2021: 148; see also, Yoon, 2020). The ‘Disembodied Territories’ multi-media mapping project uses the map in new ways, resonating with Cowen’s (2019) recent call to mobilise colonial tools to contest the colonialism it has engineered. Similarly, Stein’s (2008) work on the marketing of the Middle East as ‘The Holy Land’ and Agha’s (2020: no PN) research mapping Palestine-Israel argue that maps, while colonial tools, can be reclaimed as ‘expressions of geographic imagination and a means of resistance’.

A contributor to the ‘Disembodied Territories’ project, Nassar (2021: no PN), re-imagined mapping, space, power, and coloniality using poetry, as it is a ‘practice that is attuned to the political act of destabilising rather than shoring off self’ (see also Said, 1994, 1999). As Last (2017) illustrates, drawing on Ménil (1978), poetics can be a means of expressing concepts and can be critical ways of reaching new audiences providing a framework to address landscapes in new ways (see also, Megrane, 2021). Nassar’s (2022) poetic work takes up the invitation for geographers to employ such creative practice as a decolonial practice to reorganise the wor(l)d, beginning with a poem, arguing that geopoetics might be a way of speaking back to and with colonised voices (see also, Megrane, 2021). Creative practices can produce interdisciplinary connections and can challenge fixed academic categories, from Todd’s (2016) use of vignettes to incorporate and acknowledge the critical scholarship of Indigenous thinkers, to Aquilina’s (2022) use of counter-mapping to explore colonial infrastructures. As Aquilina (2022: no PN) writes, a ‘juxtaposition of the past colonial and present emergent city can, indeed, collide with invention and experimentation’. This is demonstrated too in Nassar’s (2022: no PN) creative practice, which reveals the importance of telling other stories of landscape:

When your city crashes the headlines with a bang, dust is the leftover… Dust also returns. Always. Usually not suddenly as a haunting ghost but quietly and cumulatively, like a falling snow… When I attune to dust, it is usually when I am in a position of witnessing a change in my city, in front of which I feel helpless… The promise of dust, I think, is that it disinvests from the neat division between the spectacular and the boring, the violent and the not, the eventful and the everyday… Dust smuggles out academic selves.

The attention to dust is central to Nassar’s (2018: 412) work as a ‘material and an imaginative metaphor that assembles architecture, urban space, archives, and histories’. This curating of landscape stories through mud and concrete in the production of (post)colonial landscapes reimagines landscape research in human geography and returns to older landscape questions that once troubled geographers (see e.g. Mitchell WJT, 1994b; Sorkin, 1992; Zukin, 1991). A dusting of landscape in Cairo reanimates landscape research concerned with landscape and power in the production of material and symbolic landscapes (see e.g. Mitchell WJT, 1994b; Sorkin, 1992; Zukin, 1991). These are the overlooked landscape ideas in human geography that have been pushed to the edges of landscape research since the turn of the century.

V For other forms of landscape and modes of existence

Landscape continues to be a key concept in geography and is reimagined today as a central geographical trope once more due to contemporary critical shifts in the discipline. We have put forward a progressive conceptualisation of landscape by showing how materiality, decoloniality, and creativity have the potential to be radical new directions in landscape research in geography. In so doing, we have suggested ways to unlearn a concept that has historically excluded a range of other voices and perspectives (see Friess and Jazeel, 2017). The reimagining of landscape set out here is inspired by our vignette and opens onto and engages with new Indigenous, more-than-human, decolonial accounts (see e.g. Agha, 2020; Aquilina, 2022; Bawaka Country, 2016; Braverman, 2021; Cowen, 2019; Todd, 2018). In addition, we closely explored landscape research in this article that centres colonialism, the remaking of landscapes, and ethnically cleansed landscapes (see e.g. Falah, 1996; Long, 2009; Makhzoumi, 2002), work that reveals how the effects of human-caused climate change, ruptures, and disasters are unevenly experienced in landscape (see e.g. Brand, 2022; Mahanty et al., 2023), and work which uses alternative creative tools to think with landscape in decolonial ways (see e.g. Nassar, 2018). To avoid reproducing an exclusionary history and a singular tale of one of geography’s key concepts, we aimed to reimagine landscape in alternative, open, generative ways (see Kinkaid and Fritzsche, 2022).

The way we think about landscape matters. What matters to us in our research is the narration of alternative ‘multifaceted visions’ of landscapes – labour, craft, making, livelihoods, and technologies – with communities who generate counter-narratives, re-makings, and alter-imaginations in and of landscapes (Said, 1999: 6). We offered a vignette to recognise Indigenous ways of knowing and experiencing landscape, following Todd (2016), to contribute alternative stories of landscape which centre those involved in its day-to-day making, working, cultivating, and stewardship to recover once again a ‘substantive nature of landscape’ (see Olwig, 1996). Focusing on what have been called the ‘forgotten geographies of landscape’ reveals how certain histories of landscape are erased from disciplinary accounts for historical-political reasons, which has impacted critical forms of knowledge within modern geography (see Minca, 2007). Although politics is arguably present within landscape research in geography, it too often remains quietly and subtlety in the background (see Hunt, 2019), and as Minca (2007) argues, renders it immune to critical reflection.

Our landscape research has been defined by its engagement with politics and power in landscapes, telling the story of the dying as well as the living landscape, the deathly as well as the lively, the inhuman as well as the human, the less-than-human as well as the more-than-human (see Mason, 2021, 2023; Riding, 2020). We suggest here to end that greater attention could once more be paid to landscapes of/and power whereby landscape is not an object to be seen or a text to be read but a process by which social and subjective identities are formed (see e.g. Mitchell WJT, 1994b; Zukin, 1991). Landscape is well placed to engage with the world in ways that reorient dominant geographical imaginaries as it enfolds the material and the imaginative and is perhaps the only modern geographical concept that ‘refers to both the thing itself – and to its description’ (Minca, 2007: 179). Attempts to decolonise the discipline and build decolonial geographies must remain grounded in the landscape, not as a metaphor, text, or signifier but as part of a struggle over the very landscape as others have argued (see Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Daigle and Ramirez, 2019; De Leeuw and Hunt, 2018; Ferretti, 2020; Jazeel, 2017). To decolonise landscape is to demand decolonisation that ‘brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 1). Reimagining landscape for these times and facing up to the very real demands of landscape was the goal of this article. Landscape is more than tension. Landscape is composed of constellations of stories, distributions of tales, or else, an animal, a plant, or a bird.