1 Robert Young, Landlessness in the postcolonial
2 Stephen Regan, Landless Voices in Irish Literature
3 Parvati Nair, Songs from the Ground, Groundless Song: mobility, exchange and representation in the nineteenth century cante de las minas of Almería, southern Spain
4 Sheila Khan, Faces without identity: To be a 'negro' during Portuguese colonialism
5 Richard Siddle, An epoch-making event? The 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Act and its impact
6 Frei Betto, Church and Social Movements in Brazil
7 Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Occupation as a form of access to the land
8 Plínio Sampaio Arruda, The Mística of the MST
9 Paul Heritage, Border Crossings: The ins and outs of making theatre in Brazilian prisons
10 Bernard McGuirk, Poetry and/as Protest
11 George Landow, Landless Voices and the New Technologies
12 Else Vieira, The canon and culture of dispossession

1 Robert Young, Landlessness in the postcolonial

In my recent "Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction", I argued that postcolonial theory is a discourse morally and politically committed to transforming the conditions of exploitation and poverty in which large sections of the world's population live out their daily lives, and that at a conceptual level, it represents an epistemological reorientation towards the basis and perspectives of knowledges, as well as needs, developed outside the west. Yet the issue of landlessness does not, it seems, figure in 'postcolonial' deliberations, either in terms of its typical preoccupations, or in terms of its theoretical framework. Indeed, emphasis on nomadism, migration, on the performativity of identity, all seem to endorse rather than problematize the notion of landlessness. In my talk, I will focus on the issues which arise from this contradiction.

2 Stephen Regan, Landless Voices in Irish Literature

This presentation will look at how images and ideas of the land have functioned in Anglo-Irish relations, from the early phase of colonial settlement or 'plantation', through the militant response of the Land League in the late nineteenth century, and into the troubled years of partition. It will concentrate on works of modern Irish literature (mainly by the two Nobel Prize recipients, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney) in which the imaginative recovery and repossession of lost territory is a major preoccupation.

3 Parvati Nair, Songs from the Ground, Groundless Song: mobility, exchange and representation in the nineteenth century cante de las minas of Almería, southern Spain

This paper examines the early development of the now well-established form of flamenco song known as the cante de las minas or song from the mines. My aim is to problematize the relation between landlessness and vocal representation through an analysis of the extent to which the cante minero constructs, defies and colludes with those boundaries which mark out modes of social and cultural representation.

4 Sheila Khan, Faces without identity: To be a 'negro' during Portuguese colonialism

In this paper, I will suggest that the expression landless voices has to be understood not only as a direct consequence of social, cultural, economic and political circumstances, but also as an identity metaphor. Therefore, I will argue that the notion of ethnicity has to be thought of as an 'identity strategy', individuals use to create meaning, to produce and reproduce accounts of the events related to their inner life.

In order to develop the previous argument, and my own methodological stance, I will draw upon three entangled tools. First, I shall argue that the colonial Portuguese system was an instrument of cultural silence imposed upon Mozambican people and, accordingly silence has to be thought of as a rich example of the landless voices. Second, I will depict some examples from Mozambican literature and poetry, in order to put forward vividly either the cultural caveats sprung from Portuguese colonialism and, to highlight the role of Mozambican literature and poetry as a voice against imposed cultural apathy. Finally, I will use the utterances taken from in-depth interviews that I am elaborating, mainly, in London, regarding the acculturation and identity strategies employed by black Mozambicans that left the country toward Portugal and, afterwards, toward England.

5 Richard Siddle, An epoch-making event? The 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Act and its impact

The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan. Their history has been, in part, a struggle over their discursive representation. Ideologically marginalized as a "dying race" in need of "protection", an image that shaped concrete policies which furthered their subordination to the state, the Ainu have responded since the 1970s by recreating themselves as an "indigenous people". Their voices have remained muted, however, in a Japan that continued to regard itself as "racially homogenous". This all appeared to change, however, on July 1 1997, when Japan's first national legislation to promote non-mainstream ethnic culture and encourage multiculturalism within Japanese society came into force. The enactment of the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act (CPA) was hailed enthusiastically by supporters as an "epoch-making" event. So has the Japanese government finally solved its "Ainu problem" and delivered justice and human rights to the original inhabitants of Hokkaido, dispossessed, marginalized and impoverished by the colonial exploitation of that island after 1869? Or does the rhetoric of "epoch-making" developments obscure a political reality that has actually changed very little? This paper will argue that the CPA represents only a marginal concession by a paternalistic state. Politicians continue to make "homogenous nation" claims. Critics argue that the Ainu movement has been derailed, and Ainu culture, far from being "promoted", is locked into a structure of oppression little different from the days of the official assimilation policy. The power to shape and define Ainu lives appears to have returned to the state. Although it has only been four years since the CPA came into force, this paper attempts to assess its initial impact on the Ainu movement for political and human rights and their position in Japanese society at the dawn of a new century.

6 Frei Betto, Church and Social Movements in Brazil

This paper outlines the activities of the MST (the Landless Rural Workers' Movement in Brazil), situating its demands for justice, employment and agrarian reform in the context of a country in which just 1% of land owners hold 44% of the entire country's land. The affiliation of the MST to the Catholic church is explored from the perspective of a Dominican brother who is directly involved with the Movement. The achievements of the MST over the last decade are outlined and the role of the Movement in agrarian reform is assessed. The suffering of the landless is recognised as a major political problem for a government lacking the will to act in spite of evidence of huge public support for the MST's aims. Several proposals are made for reform and the sowing of social movements within the Church is contextualized in terms of Liberation Theology.

7 Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Occupation as a form of access to the land

In Brazil, Over the past decades, occupation has become an important form of access to land in that it pressures the government in the disappropriation of latifundia and in rendering effective a policy of rural settlements. As a form of intervention by workers in the political and economic process of expropriation, occupations force an agrarian reform that the government has elaborated but failed to implement. This paper will analyse the means by which the landless, through such occupations, have come to specialize in the struggle, to conquer the land and to territorialize the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). The talk will be illustrated by images and video-documentaries on the MST.

8 Plínio Sampaio Arruda, The Mística of the MST

The MST is public enemy number one of the Brazilian elite. The Movement seeks no permission to carry out its direct action which includes the running of hundreds of schools for thousands of pupils of the settlers on the land occupied by its members. This paper argues that the MST derives its strength for its huge undertakings from its mística. This mística, it is argued, is rooted in the millenarism of rural man. The Brazilian phenomenon is set in the context of historical and cultural movements elsewhere form the 15th century to the present day.

9 Paul Heritage, Border Crossings: The ins and outs of making theatre in Brazilian prisons

The subject of this paper will be my own project: Staging Human Rights/Direitos Humanos em Cena, a drama-based project currently taking place in 37 prisons across the State of São Paulo. By December 2001, the project will have involved over 10,000 guards and prisoners in forums about human rights in the criminal justice system. The project has been funded by the UK Community Fund, and is the basis of for a research project based at Queen Mary College, University of London.

10 Bernard McGuirk, Poetry and/as Protest

Haroldo de Campos is no angel, least of all in his own poetic practice. He is unstintingly confident, certainly enough to lampoon critical and ideological rigidities and excesses, and habitually in advance of the polemicists of international academe. Acutely alert to the fact that Brazilian neo-Hegelians, no less than their counterparts elsewhere, in their determination to confront the brutality of much of Latin American society, fall precisely into the lure of a discourse too mimetic of brute reality, too mirroring ever to achieve a cutting edge, Haroldo de Campos convokes the figure of poetry itself. He knows that poetry is a master teaser, a baiter of stiff contemporary realists or the limp lamp-bearers of reflection theories past and present. Readings of his 'o anjo esquerdo da história' and my translation of it as 'the angel on the left of history' will confront the assumption of such as Roberto Schwarz regarding the (un)mediated relationship between politics and poetry, namely : a tiny élite devotes itself to copying Old World culture and becomes incapable of creating things of our own that spring from the depths of Brazilian life and history (1992:85-89).

11 George Landow, Landless Voices and the New Technologies

This talk will be a demonstration of the technological possibilities involved in the use of web-sites in the diffusion of political, ideological and cultural actions such as those of the various landless movements throughout the world. The web will be shown to extend the materials to an infinitely broader public, including, but going well beyond, the choices of poetry, song and image.

12 Else Vieira, The canon and culture of dispossession

This first-hand presentation of the pictorial and musical archives as well as of the anthology of poetry and songs of the recent culture of landlessness, produced by the dispossessed themselves, is the occasion to outline the major aesthetic and thematic tendencies of this emerging artistic canon. The construction of utopias on earth, "brushing history against the grain" (Benjamin), a rhetoric of resistance, the communal nature of artistic experience are but examples of a shift-away from an attitude of individual resignation towards such a "wound in the body of history" (Derrida). The hypotheses of a return to a materialist poetics and to ways of conceiving the aesthetic in revolutionary terms enables a parallel, for example, with so-called art of resistance and of national liberation struggles. Comparisons will thus be made with the revolutionary literary canon in Latin America and more specifically with the negotiation of the epistemologies of Marxism and Christianity in the artistic project of the Nicaraguan Revolution.