Agriculture produces more than physical crops and real-world landscapes: it also produces stories. From the realist novel to advertising campaigns, from colonial scientific reports to contemporary performance art, agriculture has long interacted with various forms of cultural production, forming the basis of dominant narratives and counterdiscourses about land, identity, and environments. Literary and cultural studies, which themselves engage intimately with questions of representation, narrative and storytelling, are uniquely positioned to explore the intricacies and paradoxes inherent to agricultural production and agrarian systems.

Agriculture sits at the intersection of two robust but largely separate bodies of scholarship that have rarely been brought into direct conversation. On one side, agrarian and rural studies have produced indispensable accounts of agricultural systems, land use, and peasant life. Scholars like Harriet Friedmann, James Scott, Ruth Hall, and Jennifer C. Franco have illuminated the political economy of food regimes, the everyday politics of peasant resistance, and the dynamics of land governance and rural dispossession. William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, Raj Patel's work on food sovereignty, and Judith Carney's Black Rice have further expanded this tradition to foreground questions of race, colonialism, and knowledge production. Yet for all its richness, this tradition has tended to approach agriculture through the frameworks of history, political economy, and the social sciences, leaving the question of cultural production—the stories agriculture tells, and the stories told about it—largely unaddressed.

On the other hand, the environmental humanities and ecocriticism have generated powerful frameworks for thinking about human-nonhuman entanglement and the cultural dimensions of landscape. Stacy Alaimo's concept of transcorporeality, Kathryn Yusoff's work on geology and race, Édouard Glissant's theorization of relation and rootedness, Sylvia Wynter's rethinking of the human and the plantation, Nick Estes's work on Indigenous sovereignty, Robin Wall Kimmerer's braiding of Indigenous and ecological knowledge, Malcolm Ferdinand's decolonial ecology, and Macarena Gomez-Barris's theorization of the extractive zone together constitute a rich body of thought about land, ecology, and power. And yet agriculture as a specific set of practices, technologies, and narrative formations has remained at the margins of conversations that figure on notions of land and environment.

This session proposes to bridge these two traditions, proposing agricultural as an object of humanistic inquiry in its own right. The "agricultural humanities," as we are tentatively calling this emerging space, brings the narrative analysis and attention to representation and rhetoric that characterize literary and cultural studies to bear on agriculture as a historically variable set of practices, understanding the farm, the field, the agricultural landscape, and even the crop not only as material realities but as sites of cultural production, ideological contestation, and imaginative possibility. As Jill Casid's Sowing Empire demonstrates, the boundary between agricultural practice and cultural imagination has never been stable. This session takes that instability as its starting point, proposing agriculture as fertile ground—literally and figuratively—for reimagining our relationships to land, ecology, and the stories we tell about both.

The session consists of three fifteen-minute presentations followed by a response from Dr. Karen Thornber (~10 minutes), whose work at the intersection of world literature and the environmental humanities makes her an ideal interlocutor. We envision Dr. Thornber’s response as an ideal bridge between the presentations and an open Q&A of at least fifteen minutes, providing for some time for open discussion.

The three papers presented during this session build on the ideas of agricultural representation developed above in unique ways that span geographical contexts, media and interpretative approach. Rex Nielson's paper, "Crops, Drought, and Power: Agricultural Precarity in Graciliano Ramos's Barren Lands," examines how monocultures, land concentration, and drought threaten subsistence farming and manufacture famine in Ramos's 1938 novel. He links his reading of the novel to contemporary debates about climate-induced food insecurity and environmental justice in northeastern Brazil. Amber Sackett-Hassan's "'The Locusts are Coming!'" reads the locust invasion in Jacques Ferrandez's graphic novel Carnets d'Orient (1994–2009) for the insights it offers on the relationship between French viticulture and grain farming in colonial Algeria. Poppy DeltaDawn's "Fielding" draws on Agnes Denes's interventions in agricultural landscapes (Wheatfield, 1982) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles's “maintenance” art, along with her own artwork Fielding (a multi-year land-based project on a Kansas hay meadow that combines controlled burning, rotational grazing, and prairie grass weaving), to argue that agricultural practices are themselves forms of cultural production, proposing restoration ecology as a decolonial methodology.

The panel brings together a senior scholar, an advanced doctoral student, and an early-career artist-scholar speaking about Brazilian, French-Algerian, and US American contexts, with Dr. Thornber's comparative perspective further expanding the session's scope.