Politics of belonging in the construction of landscapes: place-making, boundary-drawing and exclusion

Abstract

Issues of belonging, exclusion and the creation and maintenance of boundaries have surfaced in recent considerations of the production of space, yet the relevance of boundaries and belonging for understanding the construction of landscape has remained largely implicit. In this paper, I wish to explore more explicitly the connection of boundaries, belonging and landscapes by thinking about how landscapes become spatially bounded scenes that visually communicate what belongs and what does not. My focus is on understanding how landscapes are, in part, constructed through a territorialized politics of belonging-the discourses and practices that establish and maintain discursive and material boundaries that correspond to the imagined geographies of a polity and to the spaces that normatively embody the polity. To explore this relationship, I consider a controversy surrounding the operation of a slaughterhouse in Hugo, Minnesota, which was used extensively for Ua Dab-a Hmong tradition of ritual animal sacrifice. The discourses and practices surrounding efforts to remove the slaughterhouse from Hugo, on the one hand, and to have it remain in Hugo, on the other, offer a case through which to explore the politics of belonging and the boundaries that this creates in constructing landscapes.