Landscape, History, and the Politics of Place in the Hudson Valley

This dissertation explores the entwinement of landscape transformation and racial formation in the Hudson Valley since the beginning of the colonial period. Through the term “complicit ecologies,” I insist that the nonhuman world and the material landscape were not merely “stages” upon which human historical and political processes took place. Rather, I draw attention to how the creation of a White-dominated society in the Hudson Valley, through the inter-relation of settler colonialism and racial slavery, occurred to a great extent as a result of the activity and reorganization of nonhumans and the material landscape. Through an integration of ethnographic, archival, and natural history methods, I examine how the human-nonhuman interface remains a vital site of racialized place-making in the present. Ethnographically, I explored how primarily White small-scale animal farmers and conservation professionals engage these patterns of landscape change as they seek to achieve a more sustainable future. The animal farmers and their land conservation NGO supporters were guided by powerful visions of past agrarian landscapes, leading them to look past the fraught social and ecological legacies embedded in the pastoral scenes they yearn to renew. In my adjacent field site, I worked alongside conservation professionals whose efforts to confront the challenge of biological invasion brought them up against the accumulated fallout of centuries of species introductions motivated by colonial goals of biological enrichment and replacement. In both cases, the ways in which my interlocutors conceptualized the past shaped not only how they went about pursuing their objectives but also the extent to which their work interrupted or sustained the broader social and ecological processes, bound up with colonialism and the fortification of White control, that deliver the precarious present. In approaching the pursuit of landscapes forms that have historically been most amenable to White settlement as a form of violence, I draw from the analysis and experience of Black and Native residents of the Hudson Valley who have long charted alternative landscape trajectories that depart from the regional mainstream