The Urban Gardens of Havana

This book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo, a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions, they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate are not 'thick descriptions,' linked to larger political issues, but rather rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans within the nature-culture debate. Using these experiences, the authors argue that 'the political' reaches beyond the affairs of state and governance and should be seen as an all-encompassing part of life. The authors thereby invite the social sciences to focus on the microscopic and the day-to-day to illuminate how the political affairs of lives can be imagined differently.

Combines bottom-up, actor-network, and green-continuum methodologies to provide creative insights into contemporary Cuba Examines the constant dialogue between Cuban urban gardeners and the State and gardeners and their plants Develops the idea that urban gardens are an amalgamation of simultaneities that reveal the skewed foundations of the Anthropocene

Autorentext

Ola Plonska is an anthropologist and junior researcher affiliated with the department of social and cultural anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has published in journals such as the Journal for Cultural Research and is interested in human-nature relationships and the politics of food.

Younes Saramifar is the Post-doctoral Einstein Research Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. His area of research is material culture of resistance movements and paramilitarism, as well as ecological crisis in precarious conditions of the Middle East.

Inhalt
Prologue: Whose Planet is it Anyway - Chapter 1. Introduction: Step into my Garden - Chapter 2. Intervening, Correcting, Rewarding - Chapter 3. The Garden - Chapter 4. Living in a Non-human's World - Chapter 5. Conclusion: Finally, How Does Everything Grow Together?