The Urban Gardens of Havana: Seeking Revolutionary Plants in Ideologized Spaces

By Younes Saramifar and Ola Plonska

Book Overview

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

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3030126560
• ISBN13: 9783030126568
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Length: 101 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 8.3"