Pages
Categories
Issues
Category Archives: Articles
GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION: Toward a Post-Manichean Left
For Christopher Hitchens—the Left at War with Himself What follows are nine essays inspired by Michael Berube’s book of 2009, The Left at War (NYU Press), prefaced by Nick Cohen’s shot at dealing in brief with some of the same issues, which he takes on at greater length in his book of 2007, What’s Left? [...]
The Political Allure of the Local: Food and Cosmopolitanism in Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park and Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
emilyjohansen[at]hotmail.com Abstract:This article considers the potential political stasis produced through the ossification of a binary opposition between the local and the global. I consider, what I term, “territorialized cosmopolitanism”(a cosmopolitanism that emerges out of simultaneous multiple global and local affiliations) in two recent novels: Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park and Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of [...]
Backyard Survivalism: The Global Politics of the Kitchen Garden
michaelmikulak[at]yahoo.ca Abstract: This article looks at the backyard garden as a political space. Michael Mikulak draws on his own experiences with gardening and small scale organic agriculture to consider the different ways in which the politics of the everyday are being complicated by various food-centred movements such as Slow Food. The growth in popularity of [...]
Terroirs as spaces of intergenerational justice: Building Communities for the “Food Citizen”
karine.vigneault.1[at]umontreal.ca Abstract: This article examines the “food citizens” naturalized in and through practices which identify themselves as “local food” through an exploration of the ways in which they conceive of food and of their subjects. More specifically, I argue that these practices contribute to a redefinition of food and eating as an issue of intergenerational [...]
Monsanto Rules: Science, Government, and Seed Monopoly
iknez[at]yorku.ca Keywords: Monsanto, regulation, seed monopoly, genetic modification THE CATALOGUE OF DOCUMENTARY FILMS exploring the ethics of global capital and corporate control has received a noteworthy addition from France. Marie-Monique Robin’s The World According to Monsanto was co-produced by the European Arte Network and the Canadian National Film Board. While the information presented in the [...]
Corn Coalitions: Struggles for Food Sovereignty in Mexico
Bethany.turner[at]canberra.edu.au MEXICO IS THE BIRTHPLACE OF CORN and it is here that the world’s greatest biodiversity of this plant exists, largely under the guardianship of diverse indigenous farmers. The Maya of Southern Mexico have a particularly close spiritual and cultural connection with this plant, as their creation story details how their flesh is made from [...]
What we talk about when we talk about biotechnology
ksb[at]yorku.ca Abstract: Genetic engineering (GE) of crops is an apogee of corporatized and industrialized farming and the technology threatens food sovereignty. A group of organic producers from Saskatchewan, Canada, has taken Monsanto to court because its GE canola has contaminated organic fields. An ethnography of case participants points to an impasse between the dominant framing [...]
On the politics and possibilities of locavores: situating food sovereignty in the turn from government to governance
This paper situates discourses of local food activism, specifically, and food sovereignty, generally, in conversation with the themes of governance, governmentality and biopolitics. Governance, in this sense, points to the movement of politics in line with neoliberal globalization which places emphasis on the individual and its self-governing capacities, on one hand, as well as new [...]
Pollanated Politics, or, The Neoliberal’s Dilemma
chadlavin[at]gmail.com Abstract: Michael Pollan has recently emerged as an informal spokesperson for the growing movement for responsible eating. This essay examines the assumptions underlying Pollan’s recent prescriptions for food reform and demonstrates how these prescriptions remain limited by the political horizon of neoliberalism. More broadly, the essay situates the recent politicization of food within a [...]
The New “Manichean” Left & the Old Far Right: Tolerating the Intolerable