Reinvestment, Resource "Rushes," and the Inalienability of Place

Land's Active Layerings in Mozambique

Bibliographic Data

ID3776004
AuthorsAlicia Hayashi Lazzarini (London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume110
Issue6
Pages1969-1992
Publication date2020-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2020.1740079
OpenAlexW3023089404
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited62

For industry proponents, the Xinavane Sugar Mill, Mozambique’s largest sugar estate, has been rehabilitated from postconflict subsistence farming to agroindustrial productivity. Such investment-oriented narratives seek to erase earlier land dispossessions and uneven accumulation. Drawing ethnographic research together with Mozambican Land Cadaster and archival documents, this article rethinks land and place to challenge the global resource “rush” literatures, taking seriously the layers of investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment that enable contemporary financial flows. The article argues to understand land in its historical layerings, to examine how colonial legacy in southern Africa configures land use today. Analyzing three waves of Xinavanian investment, the article examines dispossession, contestation, and plantation expansions and contractions, to yield two key interventions. First, rather than providing mere background to today’s investment and land transformations, Xinavane’s historical layers actively produce the possibilities and limits for making land an investable commodity. Second, through fictions of capitalist success wrought by land and labor control, capitalist state–private efforts have sought to alienate Xinavane. This has been a repeated attempt to resignify Xinavane from being a deeply rooted, heterogeneous African place, to a space of capitalist industrial placelessness. Residents assert, however, that Xinavane cannot be rent from its multivalent meanings and social fabrics, disrupting these capitalist-centric fictions. Xinavanians maintain that land, and place, are in fact inalienable

Agrarian society · Agriculture · Archaeology · Commodification · Commodity · Disinvestment · Economics · Economy · Estate · Incentive · Land grabbing · Land tenure · Market economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subsistence agriculture · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · History · Land Rights and Reforms · Law · Urban and Rural Development Challenges

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