Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies, Markets

360 Pages·2013·2.26 MB·English

by  Rachel Slocum

Geographies of Race and Food
Fields, Bodies, Markets
Edited by
Rachel Slocum and Arun Saldanha
GeoGraphies of race and food
critical food studies
Series Editor
Michael K. Goodman, Kings College London, UK
The study of food has seldom been more pressing or prescient. from the
intensifying globalization of food, a world-wide food crisis and the continuing
inequalities of its production and consumption, to food’s exploding media
presence, and its growing re-connections to places and people through ‘alternative
food movements’, this series promotes critical explorations of contemporary food
cultures and politics. Building on previous but disparate scholarship, its overall
aims are to develop innovative and theoretical lenses and empirical material in
order to contribute to – but also begin to more fully delineate – the confines and
confluences of an agenda of critical food research and writing.
of particular concern are original theoretical and empirical treatments of the
materializations of food politics, meanings and representations, the shifting
political economies and ecologies of food production and consumption and the
growing transgressions between alternative and corporatist food networks.
Other titles in the series include:
Why We Eat, How We Eat
Edited by Emma-Jayne Abbots and Anna Lavis
9781409447252
Embodied Food Politics
Michael S. Carolan
9781409422099
Liquid Materialities
A History of Milk, Science and the Law
Peter Atkins
9780754679219
Geographies of race and food
fields, Bodies, Markets
Edited by
rachel slocuM
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, US
arun saldanha
Lancaster University, UK
© rachel slocum and arun saldanha 2013
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
rachel slocum and arun saldanha have asserted their right under the copyright, designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
published by
ashgate publishing limited ashgate publishing company
Wey court east 110 cherry street
union road suite 3-1
farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
surrey, Gu9 7pT usa
england
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
a catalogue record for this book is available from the British library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Geographies of race and food: fields, bodies, markets / by Rachel Slocum and Arun
saldanha, [editors]
pages cm. -- (critical food studies)
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-1-4094-6925-4 (hardback) -- isBn 978-1-4094-6926-1 (ebook) --
isBn 978-1-4094-6927-8 (epub) 1. food habits--social aspects. 2. food habits--
political aspects. 3. race. 4. Minorities--food. 5. Biopolitics. 6. food supply. 7. food
in popular culture. i. slocum, rachel B., 1964-
GT2850.G46 2013
394.1'2--dc23
2013000859
isBn 9781409469254 (hbk)
isBn 9781409469261 (ebk – pdf)
isBn 9781409469278 (ebk – epuB)
II
Contents
List of Figures vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Foreword by Julie Guthman xv
Acknowledgements xix
1 Geographies of Race and Food: An Introduction 1
Rachel Slocum and Arun Saldanha
2 Race in the Study of Food 25
Rachel Slocum
Part I FIelds – ecology, labor, InequalIty
3 Fields of Survival, Foods of Memory 61
Judith Carney
4 ‘The Issue is Basically One of Race’: Braceros, the Labor
Process, and the Making of the Agro-Industrial Landscape
of mid-Twentieth-Century California 79
Don Mitchell
5 Sensations of Food: Growing for the Nation
and Eating with the Hand in Bahia, Brazil 97
Susan Paulson
6 Urban Agriculture and Race in South Africa 117
Jane Battersby
7 Peas and Praxis: Organizing Food Justice through
the Direct Action of the Newtown Florist Club 137
Newtown Florist Club Writing Collective
Part II bodIes – dIet, taste, bIoPolItIcs
8 Sustaining Difference: Climate Change,
Diet and the Materiality of Race 157
Nigel Clark and Yasmin Gunaratnam
vi Geographies of Race and Food
9 Objet Petit, Eh? Consuming Multiculturalism and Superorganic
Food at the Persian Nowruz Celebrations, West Vancouver 175
Nazanin Naraghi and Paul Kingsbury
10 Dishing up Difference: Assemblages of Food, Home and
Migrant Women in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand 199
Robyn Longhurst and Lynda Johnston
11 Meatify the Weak! Cannibalism and (Post) Colonial Politics 217
Rick Dolphijn
12 Food in Australia’s Northern Territory Emergency
Response: A Foucauldian Perspective on the Biopolitics
of New Race/Pleasure Wars 227
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel and Deirdre Tedmanson
Part III Markets – exchange, coMModIFIcatIon,
eMPIre
13 Linking Food Deserts and Racial Segregation:
Challenges and Limitations 247
Hilda E. Kurtz
14 White Bread Biopolitics: Purity, Health,
and the Triumph of Industrial Baking 265
Aaron Bobrow-Strain
15 Skinning the Banana Trade:
Racial Erotics and Ethical Consumption 291
Mimi Sheller
16 Monopoly’s Violence: Georges Bataille Explains
the Early Dutch Spice Trade 313
Arun Saldanha
Afterword: Biocultural Entanglements 331
Elspeth Probyn
Index 335
List of Figures
1.1 Magnum ‘Cracking’: Magnum ice cream advertisement 15
3.1 African food and medicinal plants 63
3.2 ‘Whidah Pease’ 66
3.3 Woman with bill hook, Peru, 1780s 69
9.1 Canadian-Iranian Foundation New Year Event in North Vancouver 183
9.2 West Vancouver’s ‘Fire Festival, 2010’ 184
9.3 Jumping over the sacred Chahar-Shanbe Suri fire at
the 2010 Fire Festival 185
9.4 Traditional Nowruz Haft Seen 192
10.1 Catherine and her visitor cooking for Robyn and Lynda,
July 29, 2007 206
12.1 Food biopolitics at a community store in Hermanville, a remote
Indigenous community in Northern Territory, Australia 237
14.1 ‘Mothers here adopt new bread. Widely urged for school children’ 278
14.2 ‘Snow-white temples of cleanliness’ 282
15.1 ‘Largest Show of West Indian Fruit Ever Exhibited’,
Liverpool, 1901 295
15.2 Josephine Baker in Banana Skirt 300
16.1 Jan Pietersz Coen 323
This page has been left blank intentionally
Notes on Contributors
Jane Battersby is an urban social and cultural geographer with a particular
interest in food security and food systems. She is the Cape Town Partner of the
African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), head of the Programme in Urban
Food Security at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Additionally, she is
a researcher on the Ways of Knowing Urban Ecology Project, a South African/
Swedish project at the African Centre for Cities, also at UCT. Having researched
post-apartheid hip hop, education, racial identity, and land restitution, Jane
connects food security to broader questions of spatial and social transformation.
Aaron Bobrow-Strain is Associate Professor of Politics at Whitman College in
Walla Walla, Washington, USA. He is the author of White Bread: A Social History
of the Store-Bought Loaf (Beacon, 2012) and Intimate Enemies: Landowners,
Power, and Violence in Chiapas, Mexico (Duke University Press, 2007).
Judith Carney is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los
Angeles, USA. Her interests lie in gender, the African diaspora, West Africa,
and agricultural development. Her book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice
Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001) won the 2002
Melville Herskovits Book Award from the African Studies Association and the
James M. Blaut Publication Award from the Association of American Geographers.
She co-wrote In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic
World (University of California Press, 2009), which won the 2010 Frederick
Douglass Book Prize.
Nigel Clark is Professor of Social Sustainability at the Lancaster Environment
Centre, Lancaster University, UK. He is author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life
on a Dynamic Planet (Sage, 2011) and coeditor of Material Geographies (Sage,
2008), Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time (Edinburgh University
Press, 2009), and Atlas: Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent
World (Black Dog, 2012). Nigel is interested in the political, ethical and corporeal
dimensions of inhabiting physically turbulent worlds and is currently working on
a project merging speculative realism with earth science.
Rick Dolphijn is Assistant Professor in Cultural Theory at Utrecht University,
the Netherlands and Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities at the same
university. He has written extensively on food and cultural issues in journals like
Angelaki, Gastronomica and Collapse. Fieldwork on eating habits in Indonesia,