ABSTRACT
Much attention has been paid to the ‘production of landscape’: as ‘social formation’ (Cosgrove 1985); as a physical and semiotic creation in the hands of the powerful to naturalize dominant discourses; and as a screen, decoded to reveal unequal power-relationships (Duncan 1990; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988).1 From this last critical perspective, the aesthetic dimension of landscape has been charged with duplicity. Don Mitchell’s The Lie of the Land, for example, offers a materialist interpretation of ‘landscape production’ in the context of early twentiethcentury California, which aims to uncover the ‘other side of the California Dream’ (1996: 14). Idylls of California’s agricultural scenery hide inequities of capitalist agriculture and migrant labour exploitation. Mitchell’s work is echoed by the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell, who characterized landscape as ‘the dreamwork of imperialism’ and ‘the medium by which this evil [colonialist exploitation] is veiled and naturalized’ (2002: 10 and 30). Similarly, Kenneth Olwig’s The Body Politic (2002), part of a larger project aimed at rescuing ‘landscape’s substantive nature’, illustrates how scenic landscape was used as a technological device by
early seventeenth-century Stuarts to unify Britain under the ‘natural’ authority of divine right.2
