ABSTRACT
The narrowing and expanding choreography of scripturalizing 1 becomes especially apparent when one group uses scripture—broadly construed—to marginalize another based on a lack of qualities that scripture putatively privileges. I say “putatively” because scripturalizing involves selectivity in service to power. Spillover potentials of a scriptural corpus that elude this narrowing often offer the means closest to hand to disrupt received meanings and assemble untainted fundaments for living. This essay explores one vector of scripturalization and resistance to it: the encounter between white European Christian invocations of the garden, backed by biblical Eden as an ideal type for landscape design, and the diverse approaches to designing landscapes that black sub-Saharan Africans employed prior to and during European colonization and in its aftermath (Gundaker, forthcoming). These approaches flow back into a wider performative epistemology that has resisted containment by oppressive biblical scripturalization for more than 400 years. Although landscape design, and especially garden design, may seem peripheral branches of the arts, the design of land—the purposeful shaping of swathes of territory—is an enormously consequential matter. From this angle the garden plays a surprisingly large role in assigning backwardness to Africans and providing a rationale to conquer, colonize, and reform(ulate) black African land and ways of life.
