Heidi J Nast

cultural geographies in practice Representing possibilities: the DuSable Museum meets the Kano palace

Center. One of the conditions for accepting the award was that each Fellow develop a '

neglected Chicago housing projects). Why not, she suggested, show some photographs of the palace in some public context or other and talk about the work that way?

The idea took hold, especially since I had hundreds of photographs from 1988-90 and 2000 that had never been adequately considered in my published works. As part of the Fellowship, I had enrolled in a graphic design course that allowed me the skills needed to complete the graphics for my forthcoming book, my Program Chair allotting me the monies to purchase high-resolution scanning equipment, along with the appropriate software. Community outreach now seemed easy.

In late fall of 2002, I began sorting through my photographs, realizing in the process two representational dilemmas. First, the story of the palace is structured, for me, around the lives of royal concubines and wives. And yet I knew that exposing photographs of the adult women of the family of the emir (the traditional ruler) would be culturally inappropriate and deeply offensive. How, then, was I to represent the lives and agency of royal wives and concubines, the majority of whom I would make sure the audience would never see? Secondly, many persons serving the emir proudly identify themselves as bayin sarki, 'slaves of the king'. How was I to describe persons scarified as royal bayi (three scars etched whisker-like on either side of the mouth three days after birth) to persons in a place (Chicago) renown as the most segregated city in the US? How I negotiated these two representational dilemmas is the stuff of this essay.

Choosing a place

With a small grant provided to me by the Humanities Center, I had about a dozen of my slides made into photographs and mounted for gallery showing. These I hoped to cart around to various Chicago sites in an effort to sell the idea of a photographic exhibition. In December 2002 I set off first to the DuSable Museum of African American History.

I chose the DuSable because it is the largest and most renowned independent museum in the US dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history and achievements of African Americans. Unlike the Field Museum's outstanding exhibition on Africa, moreover, the DuSable museum's exhibitions were to my mind not tainted by institutional associations with nineteenth-century 'white' colonialism. Rather, the DuSable was created out of African American desires to found an institution beholden to the black community and honouring the first permanent settler in Chicago, the Haitian fur trader Jean Baptist Pointe DuSable. 2 Whereas most Chicago museums are located in (or north of) the downtown area and serve a largely white audience, the DuSable Museum is located in Chicago's south side and is renown for its outreach to the surrounding African American community. Its history and political sensibilities made it an ideal place from which to launch an exhibit about a monumental and beautiful place that had emerged out of the complex Islamicized urban political culture of a formidable African city-state (Kano) in the late 1400 s. The Kano palace had historically been built and managed by slaves, the utility and quality of the most elite palace slaves' lives being much removed from those of the New World.

As fortune would have it, the DuSable curator, Dr Selean Holmes, had lived for some time in Sokoto, northern Nigeria, the former capital city of a pre-colonial regional caliphate. She had for some time wanted an exhibit that would foreground the Islamic context of northern Nigeria-most persons associating Nigeria with the vibrant non-Muslim cultures of southern Nigeria, especially the Yoruba. Soon after viewing the photographs, Dr Holmes accepted the proposal for the exhibit and we began the somewhat lengthy process of getting the exhibit passed by the DuSable board (which was accomplished successfully) and thereafter organizing and carrying out the logistics of launching a city-wide exhibit.

Naming the exhibit

I decided to name the exhibit 'Disrupting perceptions' to foreground the fact that the exhibit would be set up to challenge four popular misconceptions in the US about Africa and African cultures, my objectives in turn effecting the representational dilemmas alluded to, above. The first misconception is that pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa has always been utterly rural and has had no large urban centres or complex state structures. I hoped to challenge this perception by having the photographs point to the palace's complex political culture and by foregrounding the palace's embeddedness in a process of Islamization and urbanization that began in the 1400s as a result of scholarly in-migration from across the Sahara. Secondly, I wanted to challenge the perception that all slavery in the world was like the chattel slavery that existed in the Americas, an inherited condition characterized by a complete absence of social authority and based on racism. By contrast, I hoped the exhibit would emphasize that thousands of slaves served the Kano palace in a number of capacities and that many palace slaves were enormously powerful and wealthy, not unlike those in ancient Rome. Powerful male slaves administered state lands, were military advisers, leaders, and soldiers; maintained a palace-based cavalry; ran palace blacksmithing facilities (eventually manufacturing guns); and served as important political advisers and leaders for the king. The most powerful female slaves were concubines, a form of slave taken by a wealthy owner to bear his children. Slavery was not based on racism or preconceived ideas about skin colour.

The exhibit would also challenge the notion that concubines were debased slaves with no rights whose sole purpose was to satisfy male sexual desire. This would be done by showing, through photographs and maps, that the largest area in the Kano palace was (more than 80% of the 540 m  260 m structure) reserved for royal women in Islamic seclusion, along with their children and servants. Within this area, referred to as the ciki (inside) in the local language of Hausa, hundreds of women had historically lived, most of them royal concubines who had been prisoners of war. Within the historical regional context of enslavement, royal seclusion inside a magnificent palace was a sign of privilege and prestige: here, these women would be accorded royal prerogatives, would hold considerable power and rank, and would have many slave women serving under them. They were also guaranteed kingly patronage for life. In return, they administered life in the massive palace core. Some served as political representatives of the territories from which they were captured; others helped administer The DuSable Museum meets the Kano palace grain tax collection; while still others fed about 2 000 persons daily. Islamic law, moreover, stipulated that concubines who had borne children were to be freed upon their master's death. In this sense, concubinage promised freedom.

Lastly, the exhibit would challenge the perception that all concubine children were chattels that could be sold into slavery. This was indeed the case under slavery in the Americas, where a child born of a slave woman inherited its mother's status. In Kano, in keeping with Islamic law, a concubine's child has the same birthrights as the freeborn father, regardless of who their mothers were. Palace concubine children were thus princes and princesses, just as were the children of freeborn wives. Many Kano kings have been sons of concubines, including the current ruler. Even today, the birth of a concubine child is recognized and celebrated by the entire palace community.

These misperceptions would be addressed not only by the photographs but by maps posted above each set of photographs, and by a twelve-page catalogue where more information about each photograph could be obtained. A one-page flyer provided a re ´sume ´of this information, along with maps of Africa and Nigeria and aerial photographs of Kano city (in the 1500s it was one of Africa's three most important cities), and the palace.

Representing without 'seeing'

To disrupt such perceptions, I first had to figure out how to foreground the importance of royal concubines without showing their images outright. Most royal women (including concubines) would abhor being seen in public, besides the fact that any husband would be much insulted if the women of his inner secluded household were placed on view without his consent. Throughout my fieldwork (1988-90, 2000, 2003), it was made clear to me that proper royal women would never deign to have their photographs taken for strangers to see them. I therefore rarely photographed palace concubines or wives; if I did so, I sent the photographs to those photographed, for their own personal pleasure, to be circulated amongst their immediate family and friends.

I negotiated my first dilemma, then, by choosing photographs and crafting catalogue captions that highlighted the grandeur of where concubines lived or by foregrounding the material-objective fruits of their at times extraordinary histories and labours. Take, for example, Photograph 8, titled 'Abundance' (Yelwa) (Figure 1), which featured an annotated reproduction of a 1903 sepia photograph taken by the British just after their conquest of the palace. Abandoned, the place appears eerily silent and strikingly majestic. As we look out eastward from a large palace field in the foreground, we see that the interior landscape includes two extremely long, monumental adobe structures running parallel to one another, the one in the background featuring a second floor and a domed armoury, both structures featuring meshed, rectangular windows. The area in the mid-ground features the most important concubine 'ward' known as Yelwa or 'Abundance' where all of the most important title-holding concubines lived and where the massive central kitchen was located. As the catalogue caption points out, it was here that food for thousands of persons was produced through a complex hierarchy of concubines and slave women. Arrows point out to the viewer the name and=or function of each structure, information gleaned in discussions with elderly palace women. The photograph and caption thus relayed important information -the ward-based organization of palace concubines, the importance of toponyms in marking place function, the huge scale of the concubine-controlled food production process, and the monumentality and beauty of the palace structures -without exposing the women themselves. Moreover, the photograph's annotations reflected the fruits of discussions with female elders, many of whom were delighted by a photograph that helped them remember place names and a landscape only they had experienced and known.

'Bride in blue' (Photograph 10, Figure 2) was similarly instructive about concubine life without putting them in the picture. The photograph features a close-up of the king's (emir's) young daughter, Sadiya Ado Bayero, who looks solemnly off in the distance. She wears a powder-blue dress and a dark blue headscarf; her neck and ears are demurely adorned with bright gold and coral jewellery. In the background, out of focus, stand other palace women visiting the palace for the event at hand: the marriage celebrations for six royal brides. Palace brides are married communally once a year because the emir has so many children (almost 100). Her photograph is part of a series of six, three of which feature palace women of slave descent actively involved in various labours needed to produce the massive wedding feast. . Herein lay the central palace kitchen and the residences of the highest-ranking title-bearing concubines and slave women. Food production was a monumental affair, concubines administering to the cooking of grains for about 1 500-2 000 persons daily. Yelwa's central cooking hall stands in the middleground and was located in the exact centre of the secluded ciki or 'inside'. Yelwa was also where palace women carried out spirit practices, known as bori. After the British conquest of Kano city-state, British officials passed through the palace taking photographs of its largely abandoned landscape. The long, massive building in the background is the king's chamber, which included a domed armoury.

The DuSable Museum meets the Kano palace

Like most of the photographs, 'Bride in blue' was used to speak to the many social and political processes of which much of her social person is an effect: the colour blue, for example, is the colour that concubines require all brides to wear, though the young brides and many concubines no longer know why. My research shows, however, that blue was historically a colour related to fertility, femaleness, and royalty -something common throughout West Africa; and that palace concubines may have monopolized indigo-dyeing since the sixteenth century, later innovations in indigo-dyeing pot technology tied partly to the technology of massive cooking pots. Concubines administered the cloth-dyeing in a huge dyeing yard abutting Yelwa. The caption for the photograph relays this information, in addition to the fact that after the dyed cloth became a particularly lucrative venture in the early nineteenth century the dyeing industry was wrested away from women and placed firmly in the hands of men (I conjecture that by the seventeenth century, indigo dyeing had escaped the palace confines and become the domain of rural and urban women, generally). Special laws were even passed forbidding Kano women to participate in the industry, which by the nineteenth century was one of the economic mainstays of the city. FIGURE 2 Photograph 10, 'Bride in blue'. Royal brides must wear blue on their wedding day, a tradition that probably dates back hundred of years, though young women today do not understand why they must do so. Throughout much of West Africa, blue was associated historically with the queen mother, royal women generally, and=or female fertility. In Kano, hundreds of palace concubines dyed homespun cotton cloth with indigo blue dye. Eventually, indigo-dyed cloth became valuable in long-distance trade and in some cases was used as currency. In the late 1700s, the size of the vessels used in the palace dyeing yard increased. After the 1807 religious war, the Fulani king shut down the dyeing yard and instead transferred the industry to male Islamic scholars and students, the industry soon being taken up by other men to become one of the city-state's economic mainstays. At the same time new laws were created forbidding women from the industry.

What I should and could have noted in the catalogue caption (only now have I thought of it) is that Sadiya, a royal princess, is the great-granddaughter of a concubine captured in Niger and brought to the palace of Katsina (historically, a rival city-state to the northwest). Before going ahead with gallery production of this photograph, I called Sadiya's husband for permission (he is a member of the royal family and a banker based in Lagos), which he gave me. I then asked him to request permission from Sadiya as well; she lives in Kano, and at the time had no working phone. 3 In this way, I followed cultural protocol.

The third photograph used to evince a concubine presence and concubine histories and labours was Photograph 17, 'Talia' (Figure 3). Here we see a concubine named Asmau bent over at the waist, her head pointed towards us, her face thus obscured. Her right hand reaches out and turns the crank on a shiny new manual spaghetti maker, out of which stream noodles. In front of her left leg is a small stool upon which sits a sheet of rolled-out spaghetti dough, ready to be made into spaghetti after she finishes with the first sheet. Off to her right on the ground is a straw mat upon which are reams of spaghetti strands drying in the sun, waiting to be collected up and sold. The catalogue caption tells the viewer that talia is the Hausa word for spaghetti, a noodle probably introduced into Kano centuries ago as a result of trans-Saharan Mediterranean trade where goods from Italy (hence, talia) could be obtained. A primary source from the mid-1800s tells us that wheat, the primary ingredient, was a crop grown for, and consumed mostly by, royalty. Concubines must therefore have learned how to reproduce the noodle using locally grown wheat, the concubine in the photograph showing how technological innovations continue to be employed. The photograph hence focuses on the phenomenon of noodle production, rather than on the body or face of the concubine per se, showing how concubines were enmeshed in innovations tied to trans-Saharan trade and, today, in the consumption of new foodproduction technologies. The photograph and caption also explain that Yaya Asmau's labours are part of a commercial venture, with initial capital outlay provided by one of the wives. In this way, the reader is also made aware that although royal women are secluded, they can be independent businesswomen, and that royal wives and concubines live co-operatively within the same palace interior.

Representing 'difference' in slavery

The second major concern I had, one of special import to the Museum curator, was how to depict palace slavery. The problematic nature of depicting the institution first became clear to me whilst describing the project early on to an African American friend and graphic designer whose input I was soliciting. She became visibly upset as I described the exhibit and declared that as an African American she found my description offensive: how could I use the term 'elite' to describe any slavery context? As she pointed out, most African Americans would find an exhibit celebrating any slave-based culture to be insulting. Our ensuing discussions, wherein I attempted to explain the differences between US and northern Nigerian slavery, were fruitful, helping me to figure out the contours of how the exhibit might be framed. The argumentational contours of this framing became even clearer after I met with the Director of Education for the Museum, Dr Stephanie Davenport. Dr Davenport also emphasized the representational dilemma; the last thing desired was for a largely African American viewing audience (estimated at 5 000 persons over the three-month period) to think a white woman was relaying how marvellous and productive slavery could be. In most US minds, the only form of slavery recognized or known was that of the Americas. There had to be a clear platform for registering differences amongst slavery systems. We therefore carefully reviewed all of my photographs together and Dr Davenport chose one that she thought could be used for public pedagogical purposes: Photograph 22, 'King of Grain' (Figure 4). The image features a man dressed in brilliantly coloured striped robes and a heavily embroidered brocade cape. On his head sits a large turban made partly with gold-coloured threads. His hand holds his cup of office, an Islamic standard for measuring grains, the surface of which bears an Arabic inscription praising Allah. He stands under an adobe archway in a regal posture, staring into the camera, the sunlight falling in a way that make the golden threads in the cloth of his turban glisten and the colors of his robes especially vibrant. Here is Sarkin Hatsi (King of Grain), historically a slave titleholder of modest status, his roots in slavery evident in the uku-uku, the three characteristic scarification marks etched along either side of a slave child's mouth only days after birth. Though the British colonizers outlawed palace slavery in 1926, many persons of slave descent continue to scarify their children with the uku-uku out of pride, all of them, when asked, identifying themselves as bayin sarki (slaves of the king). Indeed the British outlawed the institution, and exiled the most powerful titleholders along with their households, because these men were actively thwarting British rule -not relaying messages to the emir, for example, or disobeying British directives. King of Grain was a state title invented in the mid-1800s and held by a eunuch. This photograph shows the office holder today, a proud descendant of powerful slaves who ran the state, known as bayin sarki, or 'slaves of the king'. These men and women controlled state lands, political offices, taxes and the army. By the late 1700s slave men controlled taxes paid in cowrie shells, which replaced in-kind grain tribute and taxes that had been traditionally the preserve of palace concubines. Cowrie-based revenues allowed the king to build and engage in larger universe of trade. Since few grains now entered the palace as taxes, agricultural slave estates were created to fill the palace's monumental grain needs. In the early 1800s the king placed a powerful palaces slave in charge of his rural agricultural slave labour force, additionally creating the title and position of King of Grain to serve under him. The latter monitored the gathering of estate grains (in addition to grain tribute and some grain taxes) and the storage of these grains in the large palace granaries.

The DuSable Museum meets the Kano palace

After brainstorming and some experimentation, 4 we decided that I would produce and hang a very large format image of Sarkin Hatsi high up on the large square pillar on the side facing the entrance to the exhibit. It would be large and striking enough to catch the attention of all who entered, an image that would effectively greet the public. In very large font above the image would be the question, 'Who is this man?' The bottom of the poster would feature a multiple-choice answer: 'A king? A wealthy merchant? An Islamic scholar? A slave?' Underneath the image on a separate poster would be placed the 'answer' to the question: 'A slave'. Additional text below the answer would then explain that certain male and female slaves in the Kano palace had historically wielded substantial powers. At the same time, we kept the smaller photograph of the King of Grain in the regular exhibition line-up, the catalogue caption providing additional information, explaining Sarkin Hatsi's position in the palace (as keeper of the granaries) and describing the kinds of power he and others wielded in the past.

My discussions with Dr Davenport led me additionally to think through ways of framing Sarkin Hatsi's position in a larger global context. I therefore decided to create a very large triptych, comprising three columns of text, on one of the exhibition walls that would provide comparative historical geographical information. To accomplish this, I solicited the assistance of other slavery scholars whose authority on their respective topics would be made clear. The left column was titled 'Slavery in the ancient Roman Empire: 2000 BCE to 230 CE', and was written by J. Albert Harrill, an expert in the field. 5 At the top of the column was a large coloured map of ancient Rome, showing the extent of the empire during its central period. The text explained how ancient slavery was not based on race or skin colour, how Greeks and Romans acquired slaves from all over the Mediterranean, and how some slaves served in professional fields, like medicine and education, while others were trained as poets, business managers, and philosophers. It also made it clear that 'most slaves lived and died under a brutal system that never questioned the morality of enslaving fellow humans and had no abolitionist movement'. The central column, 'Islamic slavery in the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria: 1250 to 1517 CE', shifted the focus of attention toward Egypt and several centuries into the future, a second map above the text similarly showing the location of Mamluk rule. Written by Warren Schultz, Associate Editor of Mamluk studies review, the text explained how Islamic law allowed for many different types of slavery and the importance of slave warriors, describing the Mamluk context, where 'young non-Muslim boys [were] purchased from outside the Islamic world'; these boys trained as soldiers, eventually gaining so much power that they overturned the rule of an Egyptian ruler and assumed power themselves.

The Mamluk scenario provided an ideal segue into the Kano context, given that one Kano scholar recently referred to Kano palace slaves of the past as 'Kano Mamluks'. 6 The third column, 'Elite or ''high status'' slavery in the Kano palace, northern Nigeria: circa 1500 to 1926 CE', similarly capped by an appropriate map, emphasized how formidable Kano was, and how '[w]ithin the palace, concubinage and eunuchism, common to sultanates of the period, were instituted'. I also described in detail the importance of concubines, and explained how Islam guaranteed them certain juridical rights.

The triptych therefore educated the wider public about an entirely different geography of slavery tied to ancient empire-building and war, rather than modern racism and economic profit. While I certainly did not want to glorify any kind of slavery, the triptych helped make clear some important differences.

Representing futures

Although the Emir, His Highness Alhaji Ado Bayero, had given me permission to have the DuSable exhibition, it was hoped that he would have direct input into the choice of photographs. A trip to Nigeria was planned in July 2003, in part for this purpose. Unfortunately, two weeks before my departure I learned that I had to have emergency spinal surgery. I was therefore compelled to rely on a sense of cultural propriety and phone calls, the latter used to confer regularly with Sadiya's husband (Sanusi Lamido Sanusi), who is also the grandson of a former emir. Though the Emir could not attend the exhibition opening on 13 September, he planned to come a few days later, following a business-related trip to the east coast. Hurricane Isabel, however, forced him to abandon that plan and he left immediately for London. Nonetheless, two representatives from the Nigerian Consulate in Atlanta attended the opening of the exhibition, including a friend of the royal family. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi also visited the DuSable curator and the exhibit several days before the exhibition ended. In order to communicate the museum event to the royal family at large, I brought catalogues to all of the wives (4) and concubines (12) when I was finally able to visit Kano in mid-November. The very large museum banner advertising the exhibition was at this time given to the second wife of the emir as a gift, since it featured two of her very young children dressed in finery, staring out at those below them with a regal gaze. Many palace persons later requested additional copies and=or asked that they or their kin be included (or not included) in the next catalogue. 7 About 30 catalogues were given to one of the emir's wives, who began selling them to 'white people' who came to visit her in her palace quarters (she is the main patroness for outside women). There was also plenty of time to confer with the emir about the content and structure of the forthcoming photographic history book. After consulting with his daughter Sadiya on protocol, I requested of the Emir that she should be allowed to work with me on the book as a co-author, a similar request being made to Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, both men agreeing.

The representational dilemmas described here are part of any intersubjective project, intersubjectivity always being a very partial and highly political and mediated process. The photographic history book that Sadiya and I hope to produce in the near future, also named Disrupting perceptions, will take the intersubjectivity process a bit further. Opposite large-format photographs of particular objects and places and persons will be two captions, one in English and the other in Hausa. My caption will use its space to reflect on the object at hand in order to disrupt the perceptions of English-speaking people; Sadiya's will be crafted in Hansa not as a translation, but as entirely separate text that addresses the misperceptions of Nigerians and even those living in Kano, persons who imagine all sorts of fantastical things happening behind the high, impenetrable walls of the palace. In this way, the same photograph becomes a node for channelling very different sorts of contextualized knowledges and hence representational and historical processes, these knowledges lying side by side, their partial incommensurability a leisured, pleasurable fact rather than a place of anxiety. 7 Those most adamant about not being included were the royal wives and the most senior concubines, who consider photographs a voyeuristic tool that would expose them unnecessarily to the public. I have never shown photographs of any of these women, except for Asmau, whose face is obscured and who cannot be identified. Her approval of the image when I later pointed it out to her upon giving her a catalogue was nonetheless clear, perhaps because it featured her as a young woman, years earlier in her tenure.

The DuSable Museum meets the Kano palace

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 Photograph 8, 'Abundance' (Yelwa). The largest and most important concubine-slave 'ward' in the palaces's secluded female interior, 1903. Herein lay the central palace kitchen and the residences of the highest-ranking title-bearing concubines and slave women. Food production was a monumental affair, concubines administering to the cooking of grains for about 1 500-2 000 persons daily. Yelwa's central cooking hall stands in the middleground and was located in the exact centre of the secluded ciki or 'inside'. Yelwa was also where palace women carried out spirit practices, known as bori. After the British conquest of Kano city-state, British officials passed through the palace taking photographs of its largely abandoned landscape. The long, massive building in the background is the king's chamber, which included a domed armoury.

FIGURE 3

 3 FIGURE 3 Photograph 17, 'Talia'. A palace concubine makes talia or spaghetti using a modern device. Talia has been known in Kano for probably hundreds of years. The word derives from Italy or 'Italia'. Wheat is a delicacy consumed mostly by aristocracy. In the 1500s Kano was one of the three most important cities of Africa and a renowned entrepo ˆt intersected by several major trans-Saharan trade routes. Trans-Saharan traders stayed in North and West African towns for months or years at a time, establishing families and kinship networks. Likewise, North and West African Islamic merchants and scholars travelled southward, establishing themselves in villages and towns, including Kano. Talia's presence in Kano shows how vital precolonial Kano-Mediterranean connections were, connections the British severed after their conquest of 1903.

FIGURE 4

 4 FIGURE 4 Photograph 22, 'King of Grain'. King of Grain wears the traditional robes of state and holds his cup of office, a cup designed to serve as the standard Islamic grain measure, the mudu.King of Grain was a state title invented in the mid-1800s and held by a eunuch. This photograph shows the office holder today, a proud descendant of powerful slaves who ran the state, known as bayin sarki, or 'slaves of the king'. These men and women controlled state lands, political offices, taxes and the army. By the late 1700s slave men controlled taxes paid in cowrie shells, which replaced in-kind grain tribute and taxes that had been traditionally the preserve of palace concubines. Cowrie-based revenues allowed the king to build and engage in larger universe of trade. Since few grains now entered the palace as taxes, agricultural slave estates were created to fill the palace's monumental grain needs. In the early 1800s the king placed a powerful palaces slave in charge of his rural agricultural slave labour force, additionally creating the title and position of King of Grain to serve under him. The latter monitored the gathering of estate grains (in addition to grain tribute and some grain taxes) and the storage of these grains in the large palace granaries.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Nitza Rosario for her comments on this text and to Catherine Nash for her encouragement.

I n the fall of 2002 I was awarded a one-year Fellowship at DePaul University's new Humanities community outreach' project to communicate some facet of the work accomplished during their tenure. My project involved preparing for production my book on the Kano palace of northern Nigeria.

Notes

1 Concubines and power: five hundred years in a northern Nigerian palace (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 2 The official website of the DuSable museum relays the history of the museum, the oldest of its kind in the country, which began in 1961 when Margaret and Charles Burroughs, along with other Chicago artists and educators, recognized the institutionalized omission of black history and culture in the education establishment and set out to found a museum to rectify the situation. The first site was located in the Burroughs' home, the home itself having a long history of serving the African American community (http:==www.dusablemuseum. org=about dusable museum history.html). In 1968 the site was renamed after Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, the Haitian fur trader who was the first permanent settler in Chicago. As the website states: 'In 1971, the Chicago Park District granted the museum's request to use a former park administration building in Washington Park. The museum became the city's principal memorial to Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable and the eighth member of the consortium of museums on Park District land. In 1993, the museum opened a new wing bearing the name of the late Mayor Harold Washington that included additional gallery space. The DuSable Museum remains a community institution dedicated to serving the cultural and educational needs of our members. Our research, curatorial and educational divisions are committed to listening and responding to these needs, as well as the ever-increasing demands of art and cultural historians nationwide.' 3 He assured me that she would think nothing of it. When I revisited the palace in 2003, Sadiya was surprised to see herself in the catalogue; her husband had apparently never asked her permission. I was at first quite taken aback, but she seemed to take pride in the fact, handing out many of the catalogues I brought with me to friends and family members and agreeing to work with me to co-author a photographic history book on the Kano palace. 4 We initially thought of creating a life-size cut-out of his image, but because enlarging the transparency-based image to such a large size would have produced an image far too grainy to be of much use, we decided against it. Besides, keeping viewers away from the cut-out (who might inadvertently knock it over) would be logistically impossible. Practical considerations hence led to a less interactive representational format. 5 J. Albert Harrill, The manumission of slaves in early Christianity (Tu ¨bingen, J.C.B. Mohr Paul Siebeck, 1995). 6 Sean Stilwell, 'The power of knowledge and the knowledge of power: kinship, community, and royal slavery in pre-colonial Kano, 1807-1903.', In Slave elites in the Middle East and Africa, ed. Miura Toru and John Edward Philips (London, Kegan Paul International, 2002), pp. 117-56.


Harald Bauder

Landscape and scale in media representations: the construction of offshore farm labour in Ontario, Canada

Thousands of migrant workers travel from Mexico and the Caribbean to Ontario every year to assist Canadian farmers in their horticulture operations. These migrants have become a structural necessity to the industry, ensuring growth and profits. I propose that exploitative and coercive labour practices are legitimated and sustained through cultural representations which identify migrants not only as outsiders to the community and a cultural threat, but also as economic assets and subordinate labour. A content analysis of the Ontario daily newsprint media between 1996 and 2002 reveals that the construction of offshore workers relies on coexisting dualisms created on different geographical scales. These dualisms work in tandem to produce a powerful and pervasive discourse of subordination.

O ffshore labour has become a regular feature of Ontario's horticulture industry.

 Yet it has remained in place for decades, and public outcry against it has been minimal. I suggest that the representation of migrant workers in the economic and cultural landscape of rural Ontario plays a pivotal role in the ideological justification of current labour practices and in sustaining the program. In particular, I propose that the discourse of migrant labour is fragmented along various geographical scales, but that scale-particular narratives interlock to subordinate and marginalize seasonal labour migration.

At a time when some researchers continue to draw on Carl Sauer and use essentialized ethnic categories to explain rural landscape and social relationships in agricultural production, 2 it is politically important to expose the ideological underpinnings of landscape representation. I seek, therefore, to reveal the relationship between particular 'ways of seeing' 3 and the situation of migrant labour as a subordinate but necessary element of Ontario's horticulture industry. 4 While my focus is on the discursive representations of offshore workers, I recognize that these representations are recursively linked to the material practices in the agricultural economy.

I examine the representation of foreign farm workers in the Ontario daily newsprint media between 1996 and 2002. A content analysis reveals narratives of displacement and non-belonging. In addition, the identity construction of the offshore workers relies on several coexisting dualisms that are created on different geographical scales. These dualisms distinguish between workplace and living space, the farm and the community, and Canada and the 'homeland'. I conclude that these representations contribute to the legitimation of the offshore program.

Background

A history of the offshore program

The Commonwealth Caribbean and Mexican Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, or offshore program, regulates the recruitment of foreign farm labour for Ontario's harvest season. The program was part of a series of steps responding to the supposedly 'special' nature of farming in Canada' [START_REF] Wall | Personal labour relations and ethnicity in Ontario agriculture[END_REF] that justified the exclusion of agriculture from labour protection legislation. While the offshore program officially aims to improve the economic prosperity of both Canada and the migrant workers, [START_REF] Greenhill | Managed migration and the seasonal agricultural worker program[END_REF] it reflects processes of racialization of non-European groups. As late as 1963, Canadian immigration officers who interviewed applicants for the program described '''Negro'' males from the Caribbean as childlike, indolent, lazy and stupid', 7 while Caribbean women were depicted as immoral and promiscuous.

Since its first inception in 1966 the offshore program has grown continuously. In 1998, Ontario farming operations recruited 5233 workers from Mexico and 6937 from the Caribbean to work primarily as fruit, vegetable and tobacco pickers, but also in greenhouses, nurseries and canning factories. The towns of Simcoe, Tillsonburg, St Catharines and Leamington each attracted more than 1000 foreign seasonal workers in 1998. 8 Tanya Basok provides a detailed account of the importance of the offshore program to Ontario's horticulture industry, and the working and living conditions of workers who participate in it. 9 The vast majority of participants are men, most of them employed in tobacco, vegetable, fruit and apple growing operations. An increasing number are also working in greenhouses. 10 Offshore workers are employed as farm workers, for planting, pruning, feeding livestock, etc., and as harvesters to bring in the crop. Their wages are minimum wage or slightly higher, but significantly below those of Canadian workers with similar jobs. Workers are expected to work long hours and weekends if needed, and they are routinely exposed to pesticides, chemical solvents, sun and heat. 11 During the tenure of their employment, offshore workers live in housing provided by the growers -mostly bunk accommodations located on the farms.

Relevant criteria for participation in the program are that workers should be married, should be poor, should have low levels of education and should support large families. Although participants receive higher wages in Canada than in Mexico or the Caribbean, wages and working conditions are generally below Canadian standards. An important aspect that differentiates offshore workers from Canadian labour is that the former can easily be intimidated into complying with their working conditions. Since they are only authorized to work for one employer, their ability to remain in the program depends on this employer's satisfaction with the worker's performance. 12 Some researchers have suggested that Caribbean and Mexican offshore workers constitute an 'unfree' labour force. [START_REF] Basok | Satzewich, Racism and the incorporation of foreign labour[END_REF] 'Unfree labour' generally refers to the denial to workers of the right to circulate freely in the labour market. [START_REF] Miles | Capitalism and unfree labour: anomaly or necessity?[END_REF] While the notion of unfree labour is often applied to feudalism and slavery, in the context of the offshore program it reflects the coercive labour practices under which 'workers are not only unable to change employment, but they are also unfree to refuse the employers' request for their labour when need arises'. [START_REF] Basok | [END_REF] Although workers are legally free, they face the continuous threat of expulsion from the program and consequent deportation from Canada. [START_REF] Marx | Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen O ¨konomie[END_REF] Under the offshore program, growers are expected to provide free accommodation to workers, pay at least Canadian minimum wage, contribute to the cost of air travel to Canada, provide transportation to and from the airport and pay an administrative fee. While the total expenses in hiring foreign workers may in fact exceed the costs of employing Canadian workers, growers who hire offshore labour receive obedient workers who agree to live on the workplace and 'comply with all rules set down by the employer relating to safety, discipline, and the care and maintenance of property'. 17 Basok argues that Ontario's growers have grown so accustomed to foreign farm labour that the offshore program has become a 'structural necessity' for their horticulture operations, enabling many of them to expand and accumulate large profits. 18 In this paper I suggest that the cultural representation of offshore workers in the rural landscape of Ontario contributes to the legitimation of the constraints on these workers' freedom and of their substandard working conditions, thus enabling the relatively smooth functioning of this labour regime.

Landscape and scale

Geography has offered various approaches to the study of landscape. George Henderson recently identified four dominant discourses on landscape, associated with different traditions of geographic scholarship. [START_REF] Henderson | What (else) we talk about when we talk about landscape[END_REF] These discourses treat landscape as expression of rural lifestyle, manifestation of everyday social space, material reflection of social relations, and ideology. Here I assume the fourth perspective of landscape, which Henderson also describes as 'apocryphal' landscape because it does not directly reveal authentic social relations, but rather an ideological 'way of seeing'. [START_REF] Berger | Ways of seeing; also D. Cosgrove, Social formation and symbolic landscape[END_REF] When Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove say, 'A landscape is a cultural image', they refer to the ideological representation of people and objects through landscape. [START_REF] Daniels | Introduction: iconography and landscape[END_REF] In fact, many cultural geographers concerned with landscape interpret the very idea of 'culture' as an ideology. [START_REF] Mitchell | There's no such thing as culture: towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography[END_REF] The manner in which people are situated and represented in landscape can reveal ideologies of subordination and exclusion. 23 David Sibley, for example, showed that the portrayal of gypsies as uncivilized, dirty and a 'polluting presence' in the English countryside reflects 'the assumption that the countryside belongs to the privileged'. 24 He uncovers the discursive construction of landscape 'as a stereotyped pure space Landscape and scale which cannot accommodate difference'. 25 In a similar manner, the representation of migrant workers in rural landscape reveals underlying ideologies. In California, for example, the representation of landscape has historically played an important role in the marginalization of migrant workers. While migrant workers are not rendered completely invisible in the imagination of rural landscape, they are pushed into the background and represented in a light that devalues their economic contribution and denies them the status of human agents. 26 As dehumanized and objectified labour power, migrant workers are subject to processes of social exclusion and economic exploitation.

Basok notes that in many Ontario communities 'the Mexican invasion of the local supermarket has become a part of the social landscape, as has the image of Mexican men riding their bicycles along rural roads'. 27 Since offshore workers cannot afford their own cars and public transit does not reach the farms where they live and work, they often travel by bike to local stores, to church or to neighbouring farms to visit fellow workers. Clearly, Mexican and Caribbean migrant workers are not invisible in the rural landscape. Yet the cultural image revealed of these workers reinforces un-belonging. While the presence of foreign migrant workers is acknowledged, they are not perceived as part of the local community. Rather, they are represented as temporary visitors who leave again after the harvest -despite the fact that many workers stay up to ten months in Ontario and return annually. Smart makes similar observations of Alberta, Canada: 'The presence of Mexican seasonal workers in the community is known but not felt.' 28 Geographical scale is a powerful analytic concept for understanding the social production of landscape. 29 Andrew Herod remarks that 'scale needs to be treated dialectically. . .Scale is not merely socially produced but is also socially producing.' 30 In this sense, scale is not only a reflection of material practices but also 'a way of framing conceptions of reality'. 31 The newsprint media's cultural representations of migrant workers on different scales are therefore not independent from scale-particular material practices of the offshore program and the agricultural economy. While I recognize that media representations reflect existing economic relationships, my analysis of scale in media discourse focuses on the ideological underpinnings and the 'rhetorical stances of political actors' 32 that shape economic practices. Don Mitchell has examined the relationship between the 'material' and 'ideological scales' in the context of labour conflict between agricultural migrant workers and California growers in the 1930s. 33 He showed how local growers strategically deployed the scale of the local to depict transient migrants workers as outsiders and to dismiss their struggle as illegitimate. In contemporary Ontario, offshore farm workers could similarly be represented negatively on a local scale, as intruders and a threat to the rural community. They could also be depicted positively on an international scale as appreciated helping hands who migrate long distances to help build and maintain a strong agricultural economy in Ontario. Below I examine how the newsprint media represents offshore workers on different scales and what kinds of role are given to offshore labour on these scales. I suggest that these scale-particular representations convey political messages to the reader that lend ideological legitimacy to the offshore program.

In the newspaper content analysis below I pursue two main research questions that relate to the cultural production of landscape and offshore labour. First, what is the situation of foreign migrant workers within the imagination of rural landscape in Ontario? Second, what is the role of spatial scale in the construction of particular images of foreign migrant workers?

Research design

The deployment of racial stereotypes and representations of migrants as cultural and economic threats has a history in the Canadian media. 34 In a review of the literature on media representations of minorities, Mahtani points to studies that see the portrayal of ethnic minorities in the media as central to maintaining racism and Eurocentric hegemony. 35 In a migration context, Sean Hier and Joshua Greenberg recently showed that the media depicted unwanted Chinese migrants as human cargo, boat people and a human avalanche. 36 Due to the media's proximity to public discourse, I chose to analyse Ontario's daily newspapers to investigate the representation of offshore labour.

Discourse analysis often focuses on key terms, cultural labels and linguistic codes to reveal the authors' attitudes toward people and events. 37 In the analysis below, I concentrate mostly on the contents and narratives presented in newspaper stories to extract more complex images and often taken-for-granted ideas about offshore farm workers. 38 In particular, I seek to unveil the ideological underpinnings of the discourse of offshore labour circulating through the newsprint media. 39 The voices reflected in this discourse are those of newspaper reporters and writers. Even farmers, residents and offshore workers who are occasionally quoted in newspaper articles were carefully selected as interviewees, and it can be assumed that reporters cautiously screen the interviews for quotations that convey particular viewpoints. 40 My interest focuses on how these powerful voices of the newsprint media represent offshore labour. While migrant workers themselves may be best able to convey their own experiences of participating in the offshore program, 41 newspaper articles are better suited to uncover the public attitudes towards the offshore program and offshore workers.

The press rarely speaks with a single voice. Instead, discourses perpetuating in the newsprint media are complex and multi-dimensional. 42 The analysis below revealed no single image of foreign farm workers or the offshore program. Rather, authors and newspapers present various perspectives within a dynamic debate. I attempt to reveal these perspectives by presenting multiple viewpoints -for example, linking geographical scales of representation to different narratives. 43 The analysis concentrates on Ontario daily newspapers that are electronically accessible through the web-based search engines Newsscan, EBSCO, Elibrary, CBCA and Canadian Newsdisc. The sample covers the period between 1 January 1997 and 6 May 2002. In cases where the electronic archives do not reach back as far as January 1997, only electronically accessible issues were used. In addition, the survey examined a special series about migrant farm workers published in 1996 in the Simcoe Reformer. Table 1 depicts the sample profile.

Landscape and scale

Articles, editorials, letters to the editor and book reviews were selected on the basis of a search on the keywords: labour(er=s), worker(s), farm, migrant(s), seasonal, temporary, fruit pick(ing=er=s), and transient. After a cursory content review, only articles dealing with foreign farm workers or directly related issues were retained in the sample. If an article made reference to previous articles, the latter were used if they addressed issues relevant to the analysis.

Results

Migrant workers in the rural landscape

Migrant workers are not perceived as an integral, constitutive part of Ontario's rural landscape. 44 Rather, they are represented as a foreign element in a landscape defined The images of misplacement and un-belonging are reinforced by reports in the newsprint media of bicycle accidents, road safety training, and secondhand bike donations. For example, most newspapers in this sample reported the collision between two Mexican cyclists near Windsor in 2001 which resulted in one death, and the death in 1999 of two Jamaican workers who were killed by a drunk driver. The victims were almost always referred to as 'Mexicans' or 'Jamaicans', implying the status of racialized other. The Branford Expositor, for example, writes: 'The driver of the vehicle was travelling too fast, but he was also impaired, and it was the impairment that caused the deaths of the Jamaicans'. 45 After these spectacular accidents, newspapers announced that Niagara on the Lake offered bicycle safety training for offshore workers, and the Building Bridges Through Bicycles program in Leamington won the Peter F. Drucker Award for Canadian Nonprofit Innovation. University of Guelph student Emmanuelle Lopez-Bastos was featured in the Guelph Mercury for organizing a bicycle drive for migrant workers. 46 The extensive reporting of these programs affirms the stereotype of the bicycle-riding foreign worker as an alien, yet visible, element of the rural Ontario landscape.

Some articles acknowledge the treatment of migrant workers as separate from the rural village community. Windsor Star labour reporter Mary Agnes Welch, for example, writes about a festival in Leamington:

There was a rockin' big party in the town's back yard this summer, complete with dancing, a blaring stereo, spicy food and some patriotic hollering. The town barely noticed. 47 Hidden in the parking lot behind St. Michael's Church, hundreds of Mexican migrant workers gathered on the third Sunday in September to celebrate their country's independence from Spanish colonial rule.[. . .]=Much like the Mexicans themselves, the four-hour festival barely registered beyond St. Michael's property line. 48 Apparently, the Leamington community does not incorporate migrant workers into the imagined landscape of their town.

Another article confirmed that offshore workers are seen as separate from the Newmarket village community, and emphasized the need to establish a special ministry program to bring Mexican migrant workers in contact with the local community. A parish social minister is quoted as saying: 'The outreach aspect here is that people deserve to be included in the community and not just used and ignored'. 49 The exclusion of offshore workers from the imagined village landscape, and their incorporation in the agricultural landscape only as a distant image of bicycle riders who can be viewed when passing by in a car, represent offshore workers as separate and not-belonging. However, while this 'us versus them' perspective denies offshore workers membership in the rural community, it does not amount to a legitimation of Landscape and scale exploitative labour conditions and material inequities. Such a project is associated with the discursive deployment of scale.

Putting migrants in their scale

The construction of offshore worker identity relies on dualisms created on different spatial scales. The first dualism distinguishes between the workplace and the living space. The workplace is valorized while the living space is devalued. A former apple picker wrote in the Toronto Star about the skills of his foreign colleague:

Even though I thought I knew how to, as Frost wrote, 'Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall' the precious fruit, I was still chided occasionally by Winston, the crew foreman. Winston had the air of a Rastafarian patriarch and the hands of a concert pianist when it came to judging fruit. He could tell a 2 [START_REF] Basok | Tortillas and tomatoes: transmigrant Mexican harvesters in Canada[END_REF] 2 -inch apple from a 2 1 3 -inch apple by cradling it between thumb and forefinger for a split second before putting it in the correct bin.='Delicately, you must handle them delicately,' his resonant and musically Jamaican voice would rumble up from his post by the sorting bins. It was a voice that seldom needed to be raised. As he spoke, his penetrating gaze would catch mine through the foliage and he would demonstrate the correct technique with eloquent, emphatic gestures, the master directing a careless apprentice. 50 The same author dwells later in the article on the differences between Canadian and Jamaican workers, 51 but at the same time appeals to the human equality of both.

As tons of apples flew delicately into the bins, spirited discussions of every aspect of life in Canada and Jamaica echoed throughout the trees. When passionate disagreement flared too close to confrontation, there was one phrase that dispelled the tension: 'You be you. Me am me.'=The courtly grace and effectiveness of this phrase never ceased to amaze me. This ability to acknowledge and even to honour valid differences while remaining friends is the mark of truly civilized people. 52 While the admiration of the experience and skills affirm the value of the migrant in the workplace, a romanticized image of difference and human equality conceals the structural disadvantages and the condition of 'unfreedom' imposed by the offshore program. 53 Photographs accompanying the newspaper articles tend to reinforce the notion of the skilled and compliant foreigner whose labour contributes to the success of the business, while the Canadian farm owner oversees the operation. For example, the Toronto Star printed a picture depicting Gary Cooper, a farmer and president of the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Service (FARMS), 'chatting' and giving instructions, while one of his offshore employees unloads a bucket of freshly picked apples. 54 The ideological underpinnings of this narrative are revealed in text sequences which suggest that the natural qualities of offshore workers and their 'soft hands' translate into economic benefit to growers and ultimately explain the success of Ontario's horticulture industry. The Hamilton Spectator writes: ''The offshore workers are said to 'have soft hands,' a reference to the fact that the fruit they handle is rarely damaged.[. . .] If inspectors find too many apples bruised, they'll grade an entire truckload as cider apples which means the farmer gets $3 a bushel instead of $11''. 55 According to some newspaper articles, an additional benefit is the high productivity of migrant workers relative to Canadian workers. The Sarnia Observer writes:

[Farm-] Co-owner Bill Reid says he has to hire Mexicans because Canadians won't do the work. 'We can't get them. The kids don't even want to pick rocks anymore. They want $12 an hour or they won't even think about it.' [. . .]=The Mexicans [. . .] 'They're good workers,' Linda (the wife of Bill Reid) says. ''They pick, prune, hoe, they do whatever has to be done.'' Bill Reid says Canadians he's hired in the past would pick an average of 50 quarts of strawberries a day. The Mexicans, by way of contrast, will collect upwards of 200. And they're 'tickled pink' to work as many hours as they can. 56 Despite recognizing the value of offshore workers, the author of this report stops short of acknowledging that the threat of expulsion from the program and deportation from Canada exerts the pressure that forces migrants to work harder and longer hours than Canadians. The condition of unfreedom, which creates the value associated with migrant labour in the first place, goes unmentioned.

While the valorization of offshore labour is necessary to justify the employment of foreign workers as economically rational, the migrants' living space, which does not serve this economic objective, is devalued. For example, an article in the Ottawa Sun degrades the living quarters of migrant workers relative to the 'outside', or the fields in which they work:

The two-bedroom trailer the four Barbadians call home has a full bathroom, a kitchen and a living room with a television. Not spacious, but for these guys, the space is outside. 57 The devaluation of living space dehumanizes foreign migrants. The de-emphasis of the space where workers spend their off-work time and the simultaneous emphasis of the workplace signifies that offshore workers are primarily workers rather than human beings. According to the workplace=living space narrative offshore workers are labour power -a commodity bought by growers as an input factor for their operations. Their needs, desires and integrity as human beings are less important. As abstract labour, offshore workers serve the main purpose of generating value for the growers to run their operations profitably. 58 Some news reports presented counter-narratives describing the workers' living quarters as 'home-away-from-home'. For example, after a fire in Shrewsbury destroyed the living quarters of 12 workers from Trinidad, the report noted the personal loss for these workers:

Jim Clendenning, their employer, agreed this was a terrible thing to happen to the men.='This is their home-away-from-home. They took pride in this house and they were already purchasing things to go back to Trinidad,' he said. 'Three or four lost everything they had. . .they're pretty upset about it all and being so far away from home doesn't make it any easier.' 59 However, this article is not written in the context of a workplace=living space dualism, but rather focuses on a particular event that occurred within the home of migrant workers. It does not challenge the general devaluation of the living space relative to the workplace.

A second dualism differentiates between the space of the farm and the space of the community. Within these two spaces, offshore farm workers assume different roles.

Landscape and scale

On the farms, they are depicted as desired, even irreplaceable, labour. For example, the Ottawa Citizen writes: 'Without migrant workers, we wouldn't have a fruit and vegetable industry in Ontario,' says Alex Just, 41, who has been using migrant workers for about 11 years. 60 Newspaper narratives echo Basok's observation that migrant workers are a 'structural necessity' to Ontario's horticulture industry. 61 Offshore workers enable growers to stay in business despite economic restructuring and increased competition for labour. The Owen Sound Sun Times reports:

When Robert Taylor's father ran the family orchard, growers drew labour from neighbouring farms.=Back then, neighbours anxious to earn some extra spending money for Christmas lined up for the opportunity to help harvest Georgian Bay apples.='But the days of the small family farm are over. These days farmers are busy with their own large scale operations or they have jobs off the farm to make ends meet,' said Taylor. By the time Taylor took over the operation of Oaklane Orchards in Clarksburg in 1972, the foreign migrant program had been bringing in workers from the Caribbean for five years. 62 To sustain this narrative of migrant workers as a structural necessity for the production process, a parallel narrative represents offshore workers as outsiders to the community. One article featured the complaints of Kingsville residents who wanted the city council to remove their Mexican neighbours. The Windsor Star reports: 'Ten migrant workers living in a residential neighbourhood is unacceptable,' said Pitkin, the head of the guidance department at Harrow District Secondary School.='Migrant workers by their very definition are transitionary. That home should be used for people who are going to live there and stay there. We want to develop relationships with our neighbours.'=Mayor Pat O'Neil said [. . .] 'if it's determined that the home is being used illegally, the municipality will take steps to make sure the bylaws are enforced.' 63 Migrant workers are also represented as troublemakers in the community. Describing a Mexican Independence Day celebration, the Windsor Star reports how the mayor of Leamington expressed his surprise about the peaceful behaviour of the offshore workers.

During a rare day of fun, the workers were treated to a cavalcade of traditional folk dancing, a two-table buffet of Mexican food and some door prizes. A few words of thanks were offered from one or two civic leaders, including Leamington Mayor David Wilkinson, who praised the men for their hard work and delivered a backhanded endorsement of their good behaviour, expressing surprise at 'how little trouble we've had'. 64 The only time migrant workers are depicted positively in the context of the community is as consumers. The appeal of migrant workers' consumer power to the community is noted in the Hamilton Spectator:

Much of the combined $90-million in salaries [of migrant workers in the Simcoe area] is pumped back into the local economy. According to Cooper [president of FARMS], Christmas comes twice to Simcoe, once in December and another in September.='He's absolutely right,' says Al Schott, owner of Schott's Home Hardware. 'There's been years when the economy wasn't worth a darn and the difference between us winning and losing was the migrant farm worker.'=On Fridays, there are no fewer than 100 migrant workers in his store at a time between 5 p.m. and closing. They buy mostly televisions, stereos and tools, which are much cheaper than they are at home.=And that's good news for Rob Lall's cargo company.

He ships stoves, freezers, TVs, stereos, bicycles and toiletries in more than 500 jam-packed crates to the Caribbean each fall. 65 The Christmas-comes-twice metaphor is also used in the Toronto Star:

On Friday evenings, Simcoe area farmers bus their 4,500 foreign workers into town for banking and shopping. [. . .]='If you go into town on a Friday night, it's all Mexicans and Jamaicans; they represent 37 percent of my weekly business,' says Lance Farrish, who manages the Simcoe Town Centre's A&P.=[. . .] 'They say Christmas comes twice a year in Simcoe and some say September sales exceed December sales,' says farmer Schuyler.=Rob Lall's cargo company ships stoves, freezers, bicycles, and more than 500 filledto-the-brim barrels to the Caribbean for the workers each fall. ='Every single store in this town depends on them,' says Lall, who also runs a West Indian food store that's open daily at harvest times and only on weekends when the workers have gone home.=A 1995 Canadian Horticultural Study estimated the seasonal workers boost the rural Ontario economy by $33.6 million. 66 The value of migrants' consumer power is also emphasized in a debate revolving around occurrences of racism in the Delhi community. The Hamilton Spectator published an article condemning racism in the light of the value migrant workers represented as consumers:

There's no doubt the workers are avid consumers. Friday night is shopping night in the area's urban centres. Clothing, footwear and appliances are favoured goods among the workers, who send them home by ship. The area's retailers count on the workers to spend their money. ='The migrant workers are very important to business,' said Darryl Harriott of Jack's Smoke Shop on Main Street in downtown Delhi. 67 The narrative on this farm=community scale valorizes the economic contribution of offshore workers as labour and consumers, while emphasizing the need to protect the community from the presence of foreign workers. This narrative reflects an ideology of economic exploitation and social exclusion.

The third dualism distinguishes between Canada and the 'homeland'. This dualism depicts Canada as the superior place to work, and Mexico and the Caribbean as the suitable place for migrant workers to live and raise their families. The emphasis on different earnings levels between Canada and Mexico and the Caribbean facilitates the representation of offshore workers as mere labour in Canada, who become human beings only when they return to their 'homeland'. For example, the Sarnia Observer remarks: 'The money isn't a lot, but it goes a long way in their homeland. ''They live like kings all winter,'' (farmer) Bill Reid said.' 68 Articles consistently stress the superior Canadian wages and working conditions. For example, in a letter to the editor a farmer assertively responds to a report in the Windsor Star about offshore workers' working conditions: I have just spent $300,000 on housing for my migrant labour and, if I may be so bold, living conditions in housing in Leamington far exceeds those in Mexico. By the way, living quarters are inspected and must meet standards set by the government before they are approved. As for wages, these too are superior to Mexican wages and most migrant workers know this and want to work as many hours as possible. =[. . .] To state the facts, Mexican migrant workers are flown to Canada, provided housing, access to medical care, living conditions and earning potential -all of which are superior to their own country. 69 Other authors emphasize the harsh economic conditions in Mexico and the Caribbean, which puts the migrants into a desperate situation that is subsequently exploited by Landscape and scale local growers. The Windsor Star printed a series about the lives of offshore workers in Mexico. 70 The following excerpt is taken from this series:

[W]hen Rivera was 16 [. . .] he had long abandoned school and was soon to start working for an electricity contractor installing wall sockets and light switches in rich people's homes on the outskirts of Irapuato. What's a well-paying skilled trade in Canada pays barely $4 a day in Mexico and the work is sporadic. And, there's not much chance to ferret out a job in Irapuato that pays like a Canadian greenhouse. 71 The differences in wage structure and living standards between the two geographical contexts are used to justify the low standards for Mexican and Caribbean workers in Canada. The juxtaposition of economic circumstances in Canada and in the 'homeland' allows migrant workers to be depicted as earning high wages, enjoying good working conditions and living in luxurious accommodation -although their earnings are in fact low, their working conditions miserable and their living arrangements poor by Canadian standards.

An important element in the justification of the substandard treatment of offshore workers is that work in Canada enables them to increase their levels of consumption in their home countries. The Simcoe Reformer reports on the consumption levels achieved by offshore workers from Jamaica:

The extra income helps them to purchase some of the consumer goods most North Americans take for granted. After nine years, their standard of living is princely compared with that of other local Jamaicans. The Browns dress in Canadian casual wear and have a television, a VCR, a refrigerator, a sewing maching, and a 35-mm camera, all shipped or carried back from stores in Tillsonburg or Delhi [Ontario]. Music is one of Brown's joys and he adds to his collection of cassettes each summer. 72 This article is accompanied by a photograph of Mr Brown standing in 'Canadian-style' clothes in front of his motorcycle in his native Jamaica (Figure 1). Another picture in the Simcoe Reformer shows two children and their mother as recipients of the money earnt in Canada by their father (Figure 2). 73 Offshore farm labour is presented as a means to help poor families in foreign countries to move out of poverty.

Conclusion

The discourse of offshore farm labour serves to exclude immigrants from the imagined community of rural Ontario and to legitimate the exploitative and coercive labour practices experienced by migrant workers on Ontario's farms. This discourse does not consist of a singular narrative, but relies on multiple interlocking narratives that coexist on various geographical scales.

Offshore workers are represented in the newsprint media as alien elements in the village and agricultural landscapes of rural Ontario. Notably, the image of the bicycle-riding migrant worker is rooted in the fact that migrant workers cannot afford cars and have no access to alternative means of transportation. Thus, the representation of migrant workers in rural landscape is itself a revelation of their material deprivation. However, the landscape of rural Ontario is not only a reflection of social relations; it also expresses an ideal in which bike-riding migrant workers appear as misplaced and not-belonging. This view of landscape shapes the role of foreign migrants as outsiders.

In addition to this narrative of un-belonging, the discourse of offshore labour deploys several narratives on different geographical scales. On the workplace=living space scale, migrants are valorized as workers but devalued as human beings, making them a desired labour force but unwanted people. On the farm=community scale, migrants are depicted as a structural necessity for Ontario's farming operations and a valuable asset to the local retail sector, but as a nuisance and cultural threat to the rural community. The narrative on the Canada=homeland scale represents Canada as a superior workplace, offering an explanation for the attraction of migrant workers to Canada. At the same time, the economic inferiority of the country of origin justifies substandard working conditions in Canada as economic opportunities for the foreign workers and as development assistance to the origin countries.

These interlocking narratives constitute a powerful discourse of offshore labour that simultaneously identifies migrants as cultural threat, valorizes their economic contribution but subordinates their labour. This discourse not only commodifies offshore labour but also represents offshore workers as an inferior commodity. Moreover, the exploitative and coercive labour practices of the offshore program, which have become a structural necessity to Ontario's horticulture industry, are now justified as an all-win situation which enables poor families in developing counties to raise their consumption levels, strengthens Ontario's agricultural economy, and preserves the cultural integrity of the village community. Through exposing these interlocking narratives, the analysis revealed the power of media discourse in masking the harsh material realities of the 13 Dec. 1996, p. 4) offshore program, while lending ideological support for the continuation and expansion of existing farm labour practices.

A wider implication of this research is that the production of landscape and discourses of labour should not be seen as a-geographical or operating on a single scale. In tandem with the material manifestation of the rural economy, which relates to international wage structures, local communities and particular home-work relations, the cultural representations of offshore workers penetrate various scales. I found that representations coordinated on three scales produce a powerful and pervasive discourse that legitimates the current labour regime and thereby assumes an important role in the regulation of labour.

Some researchers have argued that scale can be strategically deployed to initiate policy shifts and manipulate discursive meanings. 74 For example, agricultural migrant workers in California evoked wider-scale notions of justice to combat the locally produced label of outsider that discredited their political claims. 75 In the context of the discourse of offshore labour in Ontario, media-based narratives extend onto three vital scales of representation. However, counter-narratives can potentially destabilize and subvert these scale-particular narratives. For example, an appeal to universal human equality could call into question the legitimacy of the differential treatment of Canadian and Caribbean or Mexican workers. What the above analysis suggests is that the scales on which the discourse of offshore labour is constituted mirror the scales in which the rural economy is materially embedded. A critical question in my view, therefore, is whether and how meaningful counter-narratives can be simultaneously produced on various scales. Only if counter-narratives are coordinated on several scales we will be capable of reshaping the manner in which the rural economy materially operates. 13 Dec. 1996, p. 4)

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 Farm worker in 'Canadian-style' clothes with motorcycle (E. Smith, 'Carpenter goes from sawing to sowing in Courtland', Simcoe Reformer,13 Dec. 1996, p. 4)

FIGURE 2

 2 FIGURE 2 Recipients of money earned in Canada (E. Smith, 'Farmers defend use of Caribbean workers in H-N; Simcoe Reformer,13 Dec. 1996, p. 4)

TABLE 1

 1 Newspapers included in the search by number of articles Canadians who have farmed the land for generations. Although newspaper articles often mentioned bicycle-riding Jamaicans and Mexicans, recognizing them in the visual scenery of rural Southern Ontario, their presence is perceived as misplaced. They differ from European-Canadian farmers, whose image may appear in the popular imagination of rural landscape as handling big farming machinery and travelling unnoticed through the rural landscape by car or pickup truck. The images of bicycle-riding migrant workers reinforce the sense of un-belonging.

	Newspaper	Years searched	No. of articles
	Beacon-Herald (Stratford)	Nov. 2001-2002
	Brantford Expositor	1998-2002
	Brockville Recorder and Times	2000-2002
	Cambridge Reporter	1997-2002
	Chatham Daily News	1998-2002
	Cornwall Standard Freeholder	1998-2002
	Daily Miner and News (Kenora)	Nov.2001-2002
	Daily Observer (Pembroke)	May 2000-2002
	Globe and Mail (Toronto)	1997-2002
	Guelph Mercury	1997-2002
	Hamilton Spectator	1997-2002
	Kingston Whig-Standard	1998-2002
	Kitchener-Waterloo Record	1997-2002
	Lindsay Daily Post	May 2000-2002
	London Free Press	1998-2002
	National Post (Toronto)	1997-2002
	Niagara Falls Review	1998-2002
	North Bay Nugget	1998-2002
	Ottawa Citizen	1999=01-2002
	Ottawa Sun	1999-2002
	Owen Sound Sun Times	1998-2002
	Packet and Times (Orillia)	May 2000-2002
	Port Hope Evening Guide	1998-2002
	Sarnia Observer	1998-2002
	Sault Star	1998-2002
	Simcoe Reformer	Dec. 1996
	St Catharines Standard	1998-2002
	Sudbury Star	1998-2002
	Times-Journal (St Thomas)	July 2000-2002
	Timmins Daily Press	1998-2002
	Toronto Star	1997-2002
	Toronto Sun	1999-2002
	Welland Tribune	1999-2002
	Windsor Star	1999-2002

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the University of Guelph. I thank Margot Corbin for outstanding research assistance. I thank Don Mitchell, Minelle Mahtani and an anonymous reviewer for comments. Tanya Basok and Karen Uchic also provided valuable feedback.

Notes


reviews in brief

The cultural economy reader. Edited by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. Oxford and Maiden, MA: Blackwell. 2004. 413 pp. £60.00 cloth; £19.99 paper. ISBN: 0 631 234248 cloth; 0 63123 429 2 paper.

The interdisciplinary debate over the relations between culture and economy may no longer be as feverish as it was a few years ago. But within and beyond human geography there remains widespread interest in whether economy and culture are separate but related domains or else no longer distinguishable. Amin and Thrift's reader is an indispensable purchase for those who research and teach on the economy-culture problematic. Its 22 essays represent the wide diversity of viewpoints that have emerged this last decade or so -theoretically, topically and politically. Handsomely produced, the book assembles germinal contributions from across the disciplines. The editors have wisely elected not to top-and-tail the essays, so that all of them retain the substance of the originals. As with any reader, there is convenience in having contributions first published in disparate journals and books drawn together in one volume. But more than this, Amin and Thrift have used their peerless knowledge of the economy-culture literature to make some considered judgements about which essays should command the reader's attention. Most readers will find here contributions they have never read, and perhaps one or two they have never heard of. This fact reflects the considerable literature produced this last decade on economy and culture, and it is to Amin and Thrift's credit that they have been able to parse it into the present volume.

The book opens with an excellent chapter by the editors, offering readers a roadmap through the mountainous literature on economy and culture, as well as explaining the structure of the reader. It is written lucidly and by the end of it readers will feel fairly well equipped to read the subsequent 21 contributions. These contributions are organized into six parts, entitled 'Production', 'Finance and money', 'Regulation', 'Commodity chains', 'Consumption' and, more unexpectedly, 'Economy of passions'. The authors included range from Danny Miller to Celia Lury to Michel Callon to Phil Crang to Angela McRobbie. There really is something in here for everybody, and I think this book should be read by those wishing to know more about the culture-economy debate, as well as those familiar with its main contours.

The cultural economy reader not only aims 'to reflect and give coherent voice to' interventions made across the human sciences this last decade. It also aspires, quite rightly, to be 'a ground for further work ' (Amin and Thrift, pp. xii, xxvii). That ground is furnished by the hybrid, unitary term 'cultural economy', as the book's title indicates. As the editors suggest, the culture-economy debate has moved from one about where the line between the cultural and the economic should be drawn, through a more synthetic approach to (in recent times) a debate over whether the two domains are identifiable any more. Amin and Thrift endorse the third view, while acknowledging that it is 'still struggling to find an exact vocabulary' (p. xiv).

The pity is that the editors' introduction does not do more to develop that vocabulary, other than noting that it will have to dispense with a priori divisions between all the actors and things that we have heretofore placed in the two boxes of culture and economy.

Given that the book is a reader, it is no surprise that it reflects a not always obvious contradiction and weakness of the broad literature it seeks to showcase. I mentioned above the enormous range of work contained in The cultural economy reader. This begs the question of whether the notion of 'cultural economy' is, analytically speaking, as much of a chaotic conception as the two separate terms it is intended to supersede. Because the term is intended to question the 'fixity' of any distinction between economy and culture, it raises the issue of what, precisely, is being captured by the term in any given situation. The phenomena discussed in the book's six parts are so diverse that one can argue that it is just as arbitrary as it is meaningful to convene them within the same intellectual space. In other words, the ontological variety of the volume's contents makes one wonder how the editors -and authors -can be sure that 'cultural economy' is the focus here. One might -following the editors' preference for a relational ontology -argue that environment, politics and society are all equally imbricated in the things discussed in this volume. Followed to its bitter end, the critique of the economy-culture distinction must, surely, be applied to all distinctions, so that even a neologism like 'cultural economy' is deemed inadequate because it brackets out other dimensions of life.

Rather than seeing the move away from the economy-culture distinction as a reflection of a more hybrid world, I think it's worth heeding David Harvey's sound advice of 30 years ago (in Social justice and the city). 'We should not', he said, 'ask whether concepts, categories and arguments are ''true'' or ''false''. Rather, we should ask what produces them and what they serve to produce.' I quote Harvey here because it seems to me unproductive to ask whether the sorts of argument put forward by. the contributors to this volume are 'better' or 'worse' attempts to describe, explain and evaluate those things we have hitherto compartmentalized as 'economy' and 'culture'. Instead, I think it's worth asking: what is the project here, and why is it deemed better than previous attempts to understand the same issues? What alternate realities are we enjoined to create as much as to see?

This excellent reader deserves to be on the shelves of many human geographers and many more outside the discipline. It is a significant and useful aid to a field of study and debate that has captured the imagination of numerous workers in the social sciences and humanities. I recommend it highly. Though I have not said much about its pedagogical value, it will be essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates taking courses on economy-culture relationships. At the research level, it will be equally invaluable. I dare you not to buy it.

Manchester University NOEL CASTREE

Reinventing Eden: the fate of nature in Western culture. By Carolyn Merchant. New York: Routledge. 2003. 308 pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 0 41593 l64 9.

Was Eve of the Bible the first scientist? After all, as Carolyn Merchant remarks in Reinventing Eden, Eve's consumption of the forbidden fruit illustrated her 'independent and curious' (p. 23) nature and her preference for knowing the world through empirical observation rather than through God's word alone. The question, inspired by Mark Twain's The diaries of Adam and Eve, illustrates the sort of insightful gems that Merchant produces in her ambitious and richly illustrated eco-feminist rethinking of Western culture. She aims to show how Western culture has long conformed to variants of a master narrative of recovery -Eden is lost, -but since the seventeenth century secular society has embarked on the project of 'reinventing' it on a global scale. Shopping malls, theme parks, genetically engineered agricultural products and the Internet are contemporary fruits of this dream. Merchant devotes much of her book to critique: the 'Recovery narrative' has legitimated the dominance of nature, women, the poor and non-white peoples. She concludes by proposing a new narrative for the new century. Her postmodern-influenced 'partnership ethic' rejects the linear logic of traditional narrative while promoting equality between men, women and the natural world.

Reinventing Eden offers fresh insights into Western culture and, boldly and constructively, it offers a new master narrative (or set of narratives). However, I doubt that feminist geographers and environmentalists already versed in the white male anthropocentrism of Western culture will find the bulk of Merchant's book -the eco-feminist critique -to be fundamentally surprising or new. Students interested in the technical subject of geography and narrative will not find much here either: Merchant writes only a few simplistic paragraphs on the structure of narrative, defining it as 'an ideal form into which particular bits of content are poured. The form is the organizing principle; the content is the matter' (p. 37). For the purpose of introducing alternative environmental histories to undergraduate and graduate students, however, the book would be an excellent resource.

  California State University, Northridge RONALD A. DAVIDSON Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge. By David Livingstone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. 234 pp. $27.50 cloth. ISBN: 0 22648 722 9. Scholars have long recognized the importance of history in understanding the social dimensions of science. Biographies of prominent figures and institutional histories of leading disciplines have established historical context as a central supporting theme Reviews in brief