64 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
gradually privatized to make way for
an economic reordering centered on
wage labor and the personal amassing
of capital. An alternative reading of
history might hold that Winchester’s
two Bronze Age farmers didn’t recognize
each other as rivals at all, or see their
parcels as being in any way divided.
But Winchester quickly dismisses such
possibilities, assuring us that the ap-
propriation of land has been “an inher-
ent human trait for a very long while.”
Our current moment, as many schol-
ars have suggested, might be under-
stood as a new age of enclosure. The
British geographer David Harvey ar-
gues that post-seventies neoliberalism
has breathed new life into many of the
mechanisms of primitive accumulation
identified by Marx. This time, an “ac-
cumulation by dispossession” is being
propelled by international credit sys-
tems and personal debt. The feminist
historian Silvia Federici posits that en-
closure extends to the body, too, espe-
cially female bodies, long appropriated
for unpaid housework and the repro-
duction of future wageworkers. Today,
she argues, we are even witnessing an
enclosure of interpersonal relationships
as they are replaced with monetized
online and social-media interactions.
It’s a pattern that has now been exac-
erbated by the pandemic.
Throughout “Land,” Winchester does
offer examples of alternative modes of
land use, with chapters on rewilding
efforts, Aboriginal fire management,
and the Netherlands’ momentous drain-
ing of the two-thousand-square-mile
Zuider Zee, which carved out an en-
tirely man-made province from tem-
pestuous waters while effectively dis-
placing no one at all. He also writes
about new modes of ownership, chron-
icling the affirmation of Indigenous land
rights in New Zealand, the untangling
of colonial models of possession in Af-
rica, and the resurgence of land trusts
in the United States. But, even as he
discusses the adoption of coöperative-
friendly legislation in places like the
Scottish Isles, he criticizes the political
unpleasantness that has been necessary
to achieve it. On the whole, he seems
rather disengaged from the messier, more
radical elements of resistance that often
precede meaningful change.
It is a shame, for there are grand
narratives here as well. What of the
Zapatistas of Mexico, Indigenous reb-
els in the southern state of Chiapas
who, in 1994, rose up against five cen-
turies of peonage, implementing com-
munitarian management and establish-
ing autonomous control over huge
swaths of the state, and who have, to
this day, managed to keep the military
and powerful landowners at bay? In
this case, a hunger for access, not own-
ership, has shaped history.I
n one of Winchester’s most memo-
rable chapters, he narrates the story
of Akira Aramaki, a farmer who spent
two years interned in Idaho’s Minidoka
Relocation Center, where more than
nine thousand Japanese-Americans
were held during the Second World
War. Akira’s father arrived in the Pacific
Northwest at the dawn of the twenti-
eth century, and sought respite from
rampant anti-Asian sentiment in Se-
attle by carving out a tract of farmland
from a then remote woodland on the
other side of Lake Washington. Prior
to the outbreak of the Second World
War, the Aramakis seemed to have
achieved a version of the American
Dream against great odds, acquiring
ten acres that yielded lucrative straw-
berry harvests year after year. But it
was the American-born Akira, not his
father, who legally held the title to the
farm, thanks to “alien land laws” that
excluded Asian immigrants from own-
ing property. In telling Akira’s story,
Winchester focusses not so much on
his time at the Minidoka concentra-
tion camp as on the period after his
return, when well-worn structures of
dispossession still churned against him
and the other hundred and twenty
thousand newly freed Japanese-Amer-
icans. Winchester writes, “The houses
they had left behind had often been
vandalized and their possessions sto-
len; and in many a case the title to the
land a Japanese family had once pos-
sessed had somehow vanished, like a
will-o’-the-wisp, and they found them-
selves just as landless as when their
parents had arrived, decades before.”
During the years of Japanese intern-
ment, the Gadsden scrublands, too,
played host to several concentration
camps. Recently, I drove to the ruins
of one such facility, tucked away amongan expanse of citrus orchards and cot-
ton fields, a few miles from a busy in-
terstate and just thirty minutes from a
thriving complex of immigrant-deten-
tion centers. The barracks that once
packed the desert floor, housing thir-
teen thousand inmates, had been re-
duced to bare concrete pads, crumbled
and pushed apart as if by tectonic force.
Walking around the former camp, I
imagined the prescribed orientation of
walkways, gathering areas, and guard-
houses. At the end of one rectangular
building site, I found a half circle of
stones, the edge of what had been a
plant bed made from thoughtfully
placed rocks of various shapes and sizes,
now overgrown with creosote and dried
grasses. Perhaps it had been created by
prisoners long ago to bring some sem-
blance of beauty to the grounds they
were made to tread each day—a place
where they could briefly turn their gaze
away from the forces preventing them
from reaching into a soil they might
call their own.
Winchester muses, at one point, that
a landscape “forgives or forgets almost
all of the assaults that mankind will-
fully or neglectfully imposes upon it.”
It’s a perspective in stark contrast to
that of countless Indigenous groups,
for whom land possesses a kind of mem-
ory. Arizona’s internment sites are dis-
tinct from others, in part because they
were the only camps built within the
boundaries of active Native American
reservations. Dismissing the objections
of tribal leaders, government officials
promised that the forced labor of the
Japanese would serve to improve their
lands at no cost to them. Indeed, the
inmates, after being made to finish con-
struction of the buildings in which they
would be imprisoned, had to cultivate
farmland and pick cotton, as well as
build roads, bridges, canals, and schools.
Much of this infrastructure remains,
but the actual sites of incarceration have
been left almost entirely unused. In
some cases, their abandonment has
been a matter of joint agreement be-
tween tribal associations and descen-
dants of the interned, who sometimes
still come together to remove trash
from the long-silent ruins and perform
maintenance on the simple memorials
that stand out from the stones and the
hills above.