This is the blurb I just sent to Duke University Press for
the back cover of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (I
posted a longer summary of the book here, but
this is a much more succinct version).
At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying
forests and homes to create soy fields in a geography already strewn with rubble
from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on extensive fieldwork
in the region where the Gran Chaco lowlands meet the mountains, this book proposes
to examine space through the rubble that is part of its materiality. Rubble seeks to rethink the very idea of
“ruins” by asking: Can the spatial, historical, and affective ruptures congealed in the debris
scattered all over the world help us look at space differently? The book
explores this question by leading the reader on a journey through lost
cities from the seventeenth century, derelict train stations, overgrown Jesuit
missions and Spanish forts, steamships stranded in forests, mass graves, abandoned
towns, razed forests, and bulldozed ruins, as they are entangled with each
other and with the towns, cattle ranches, farms, and annual collective events that
exist around them. For the rural poor, these palimpsests of debris evoke —rather
than dead relics from a distant past— the latent and ongoing presence in the living
geographies of the present of the processes of violence that created them. The book shows that
this experience is at odds with, and often challenges, the fetishized views of
ruins embraced by the regional and scholarly elites. The subaltern experience
of the people who live in areas disrupted by agribusiness reveals that the modernist,
elite infatuation with ruins is based upon the disregard for the rubble generated
by capitalist and imperial forms of destruction. Drawing from anthropology,
history, geography, philosophy and the exploration of constellations of debris from
multiple eras on the scarred edges of the Gran Chaco, this ethnography brings
to light the salience of a spatial, conceptual, and political analysis of rubble.
