Synopses & Reviews
Gardens contain time, culture, and nature. They are powerful symbolic spaces onto which a society can project its ideals, either to conjure or contrive cultural change, rooting them in the flow of natural processes. Five authors explore the variety of relationships between garden making and cultural change in Argentina, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. They show how gardens express popular cultural invention and attempts at political manipulation, as well as provide places of cultural resistance by subjugated people. Issues of identity and ideology; political coercion and resistance apply equally throughout the continent, inviting a renewed attention to gardens as places where cultural identities are forged and contested.
Synopsis
Five authors explore the variety of relationships between garden making and cultural change in Argentina, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. They show how gardens express popular cultural invention and attempts at political manipulation, as well as provide places of cultural resistance by subjugated people.
About the Author
?Michel Conan is the former Director of Garden and Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks.Jeffrey Quilter is Deputy Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
Peabody Museum, Harvard University
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Gardens and the Construction of Cultures in the Americas
- The Chinampas of the Valley of Mexico
- Gardens in the African Diaspora: Forging a Creole Identity in the Caribbean and the U.S.
- An Ideological-Aesthetic Approach to Buenos Aires Public Parks and Plazas
- Parks and Democracy in a Growing City: Palerno, Buenos Aires
- The Small Parks in New York City and the Civilizing Process of Immigrants at the Turn of the Twentieth Century