Workers of the Land: Representing Revolutionary Peasant and Agrarian Movements

Artistic representations of those who work the land have varied across time and space. During the 1800s, peasants were commonly portrayed in European paintings as toiling, albeit righteous, laborers. Similar depictions abound in social documentary photography of the 1900s. Agnes Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I revisited historical representations of peasants to draw connections between the poor then and now. More recently, collectives including Critical Art Ensemble, Futurefarmers, and SeedBroadcast, among many others, have examined the increasing privatization of seeds and modernity’s growing detachment from food production. Despite their varying criticality, though, none of these have necessarily engaged the peasantry as a political class. The Bolshevik, Mexican, and Chinese communist revolutions, however, actively produced a new status of the peasant as an agent of history through agitprop, posters, and murals. Campesino and fellahin movements have since advocated for agrarian reform across Latin America, the Arab region, and the Global South broadly speaking. Black and/or Indigenous efforts continue to attempt to rekindle relations with land threatened by racial colonial capitalism, while members of the transnational social movement La Vía Campesina struggle against the corporatization of agriculture by promoting agroecology, food sovereignty, and environmental justice. To cultivate a global method of agrarian art history, this panel asks: How have historical formations of revolutionary peasant and agrarian movements influenced artistic practice? And how have these artistic engagements echoed the social, ecological, and political experiments such movements represent? Submissions addressing any periods, geographies, and media are encouraged.