Christopher Mayes: Unsettling food politics: agriculture, dispossession and sovereignty in Australia
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Christopher Mayes: Unsettling food politics: agriculture, dispossession and sovereignty in Australia Rowman and Littlefield International, London, United Kingdom, 2018, 231 pp., ISBN 978-178660-096-7 Eden Kinkaid1 Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
What does food sovereignty mean in a settler colonial nation? What is the relationship between food sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty? How do contemporary alternative food movements relate to the settler colonial project? These are the questions animating Christopher Mayes’ Unsettling Food Politics, a book that examines the role of agriculture in Australia’s settler colonial project. Through his analysis, Mayes demonstrates how settlers dispossessed Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants through agricultural practices and the mobilization of agrarian imaginaries which worked to secure Australia as a white possession. He seeks to “bring contemporary alternative food discourses and practices into tension with Australia’s colonial past” (p. 7) to show how these forms of dispossession persist in contemporary discourses and practices of “alternative” food and agriculture. To make these connections, Mayes employs Michel Foucault’s genealogical method. By tracing a genealogy of alternative food through the settler colonial project, Mayes unsettles the political assumptions, as well as the silences and violences, surrounding contemporary discourses of agriculture in Australia. Throughout Australia’s history, Mayes shows how agricultural practices and agrarian imaginaries have operated as part of a larger biopolitical project that has displaced and dispossessed Indigenous people while simultaneously justifying and enacting violence against them. In Chapter 1, “Cultivating Sovereignty: Agriculture, Racism, and the Problem of Settling Australia,” Mayes examines the role of agriculture in the settler colonial possession of * Eden Kinkaid [email protected] 1
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Australia and the dispossession of its Indigenous inhabitants. For Mayes, agriculture is a practice and discourse in which Enlightenment ideals of improvement, ownership, and civilization come together with the physical occupation of land. Drawing heavily upon Foucault’s concept of biopower, Mayes demonstrates how agriculture was a part of an Enlightenment evolutionary discourse that functioned “as a vehicle for biopolitical racism to sort the population into those lives to be cared for and the lives to be disallowed” (p. 25). While this discourse cast settler farmers as valuable citizens worthy of protection, it justified the killing of Indigenous populations who were seen as a threat to an emerging social order organized around private land ownership and settler agrarian ideals. Chapter 2, “Producing ‘Little England’: Farmers, Gaziers and the Creation of Home,” deepens this analysis by examining the related, yet distinct, roles of grazing and farming in the settler colonial project. While grazing was
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