Presentation short abstract

This paper articulates practices of seed sovereignty across what was once the Fertile Crescent as instances of Arab futurism: world-making and place-making practice that disrupts space-time to break open new possibilities for the future.

Presentation long abstract

Cultivators, land stewards, agroecologists, biodiversity defenders, and artists in Palestine,

Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are engaged in seed conservation and seed sharing practices that

break through checkpoints, state borders, and hegemonic narratives about the past and future

to create alternative timespace zones. Reaching into the past and future simultaneously, the

zones being created are enmeshed with counter memories, fugitivity, and experimentation to

create a sense of latent possibility about what else could be. This paper articulates practices of

seed sovereignty across what was once the Fertile Crescent as instances of Arab futurism:

world-making and place-making practice that disrupts space-time to break open new

possibilities for the future. What decolonial or anticolonial histories are cultivators digging up

in search for non-colonial ways of being with the land? What (non)sovereign futures might

we glimpse from current practices of seed conservation, archiving, and exchange in what was

once the Fertile Crescent? What can cultivators and seeds trying to survive wars teach us

about what life might be habitable amid ruin?