Postcolonialism, Indigeneity and Struggles for Food Sovereignty : Alternative food networks in subaltern spaces

This book provides theoretically-informed and empirically-rich accounts of the ways in which formerly-colonialised peoples conceptualise and practice alternatives food networks. It explores whether and how alternatives to globalizing industrial food networks can even exist in countries and regions long characterised by externally-led forms of capital accumulation and enduring hierarchies of modernity. This book furthers our understanding of how, why and where alternatives to the globalising industrial food system emerge and thrive, or do not. The book highlights long-term ‘power geometries’ that have created opportunities for some alternative producer-consumer and state-market-civil society relations and not others. In contrast to those who would discard of the term ‘alternative’ altogether, contributions critically employ the term to enliven debates about the theoretical downsizing of capitalism and further our understanding of the complexities of alternative-mainstream relations in the postcolonial world.

This book explores connections between activist debates about food sovereignty and academic debates about alternative food networks. The ethnographic case studies demonstrate how divergent histories and geographies of people-in-place open up or close off possibilities for alternative/sovereign food spaces, illustrating the globally uneven and varied development of industrial capitalist food networks and of everyday forms of subversion and accommodation. How, for example, do relations between alternative food networks and mainstream industrial capitalist food networks differ in places with contrasting histories of land appropriation, trade, governance and consumer identities to those in Europe and non-indigenous spaces of New Zealand or the United States? How do indigenous populations negotiate between maintaining a sense of moral connectedness to their agri- and acqua-cultural landscapes and subverting, or indeed appropriating, industrial capitalist approaches to food? By delving into the histories, geographies and everyday worlds of (post)colonial peoples, the book shows how colonial power relations of the past and present create more opportunities for some alternative producer–consumer and state–market–civil society relations than others.