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Unsettling Food Politics

Unsettling Food Politics

Christopher Mayes

(2018)

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Abstract

Over the past 25 years, activists, farmers and scholars have been arguing that the industrialized global food system erodes democracy, perpetuates injustices, undermines population health and is environmentally unsustainable. In an attempt to resist these effects, activists have proposed alternative food networks that draw on ideas and practices from pre-industrial agrarian smallholder farming, as well as contemporary peasant movements.

This book uses current debates over Michel Foucault’s method of genealogy as a practice of critique and historical problematization of the present to reveal the historical constitution of contemporary alternative food discourses. While alternative food activists appeal to food sovereignty and agrarian discourses to counter the influence of neoliberal agricultural policies, these discourses remain entangled with colonial logics. In particular, the influence of Enlightenment ideas of improvement, colonial practices of agriculture as a means to establish ownership, and anthropocentric relations to the land. In combination with the genealogical analysis, this book brings continental political philosophy into conversation with Indigenous theories of sovereignty and alternative food discourse in order to open new spaces for thinking about food and politics in contemporary Australia.

Unsettling Food Politics models a radically different conception of political responsibility. He achieves this by means of a brilliant, and wholly convincing, double movement. One the one hand, Mayes widens the net of our complicity in Indigenous dispossession beyond what many are likely to find comfortable – as he puts it, unforgettably, “If you eat, you are involved in settler-colonialism”. On the other, he insists that any credible response must proceed from the acknowledgement of the moral primacy of the First Peoples of this land, their claim on the soil, their food practices. Mayes’s book is, in effect, a startling demonstration of what it would mean to accept the invitation extended by the framers of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, for non-indigenous Australians to join the First Peoples at a table they have set, to discover what it might mean, finally, to become political companions (in the original sense of the word). And perhaps that is the best description of what Mayes sets out in this remarkable book: a politics of companionability. Unsettling Food Politics is an extraordinary achievement.


Scott Stephens, Religion & Ethics editor, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Co-host of The Minefield, on ABC Radio National
This is the book we have been waiting for. Unsettling Food Politics finally provides the critical study of settler-colonial food regimes that we so desperately need today. Historically grounded and well argued, this book is essential reading.
Thomas Nail, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Denver
Too often debates around food focus on the individual consumer and consumer choice without acknowleding the way in which those choices are determined by the culture of possibilities in which the consumer is situated. The impact of current food practices on health, the environment, and social inequity cannot be addressed merely by changing individual habits; rather, food justice will require fundamental changes in the systems of production and distribution that determine what and how we eat.

This important and timely book exposes the complicity of commodity agriculture not only in the global obesity crisis and environmental injustice, but also in the food insecurity of vulnerable populations. Drawing on the resources of Foucault, Mayes demonstrates convincingly the role of agriculture in the project of colonialism and its historic injustices. Though he focuses primarily on Australia, his analysis of the way in which contemporary agricultural practices reflect racism and the dispossesion of indigenous peoples has a global reach.

Mayes does not only offer a critique of the provision of food as a biopolitical act that privileges some bodies over others; he also offers positive strategies for transforming our current food culture in order to address the injustices inherent in it. As he argues, by recovering the knowledges of indigenous peoples and by giving the marginalized a place at the table where decisions are made, we may be able to revolutionize current food practices in ways that will not only address inequity, but also improve the well-being of each and all.
Mary C. Rawlinson, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
Christopher Mayes is a DECRA Research Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University and Research Affiliate with Sydney Health Ethics at the University of Sydney.
Mayes’ book is an important and, yes, unsettling reminder that in the Australian context, too, a return to smallholder farming as an antidote to the world’s food woes, is a return to an imaginary thick with dispossession and unfree labour.
Julie Guthman, Professor of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Unsettling Food Politics is an extraordinary rethinking of food sovereignty politics beyond formal sovereignty structures and discriminatory discourses of settler-colonial states. Fashioning a reflexive historical method to construct a substantive sovereignty of indigeneity, Mayes raises profound ethical questions for food sovereignty movements and practices within states and farming systems founded on indigenous subjugation. This is powerful food for thought.
Philip David McMichael, Professor, Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover Cover
Unsettling Food Politics i
Unsettling Food Politics: Agriculture, Dispossession and Sovereignty in Australia iii
Copyright iv
Contents v
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 19
Cultivating Sovereignty 19
Colonial Foucault and the Birth of Biopolitical Racism 21
Surviving the Hungry Years 1788–1792 26
Improvement and a Grounded Enlightenment 31
Conclusion 44
Notes 45
Bibliography 45
Chapter 2 49
Producing ‘Little England’ 49
Governing a Vibrant Territory 52
Colonial Aristocracy – Graziers and Pastoralists 55
Egalitarian Democracy – Smallholders 62
Securing a Territory, Creating a Home 68
Conclusion 74
Notes 75
Bibliography 75
Chapter 3 81
Alternative Problems, Alternative Solutions 81
Food Security, the FAO and Production 84
Food Sovereignty, Agrarianism and Sustainability 93
Conclusion 101
Note 102
Bibliography 102
Chapter 4 107
Whiteness and the Contested Spaces of Alternative Food 107
A Question of Whiteness: ‘Nobody Knows What White People Eat’ 110
Agrarianism and Urban Renewal 114
Redfern and the Eveleigh Street Farmers’ Market 120
Individual Ethics of Consumerism 125
Conclusion 128
Note 129
Bibliography 129
Chapter 5 135
Unsettling Food Sovereignty in Australia 135
The Settled Nature of Food Sovereignty 140
Unsettled Foodways 144
Destruction of Foodways and the Question of Genocide 150
Conclusion 157
Note 159
Bibliography 159
Chapter 6 165
Whose Sovereignty? 165
Sovereignty and Rights from Below 169
Foucault and the Rights of the Governed 179
Counter-Conduct and the Tactics of Rights Claims 184
Conclusion 190
Note 192
Bibliography 192
Chapter 7 197
Negotiating Relations 197
After the Uluru Statement 200
Negotiations, Play and Joyful Engagements 201
Toward an Unsettling Food Politics 205
Possibilities and Dangers 210
Conclusion 215
Notes 217
Bibliography 217
Conclusion 221
Index 225