Politics of belonging in the construction of landscapes: place-making, boundary-drawing and exclusion

Issues of belonging, exclusion and the creation and maintenance of boundaries havesurfaced in recent considerations of the production of space, yet the relevance ofboundaries and belonging for understanding the construction of landscape hasremained largely implicit. In this paper, I wish to explore more explicitly theconnection of boundaries, belonging and landscapes by thinking about how landscapesbecome spatially bounded scenes that visually communicate what belongs and what doesnot. My focus is on understanding how landscapes are, in part, constructed through aterritorialized politics of belonging-the discourses and practices that establishand maintain discursive and material boundaries that correspond to the imaginedgeographies of a polity and to the spaces that normatively embody the polity. Toexplore this relationship, I consider a controversy surrounding the operation of aslaughterhouse in Hugo, Minnesota, which was used extensively for Ua Dab-a Hmongtradition of ritual animal sacrifice. The discourses and practices surroundingefforts to remove the slaughterhouse from Hugo, on the one hand, and to have itremain in Hugo, on the other, offer a case through which to explore the politics ofbelonging and the boundaries that this creates in constructing landscapes