October 16 - 18, 2007 

Eating Empire: Race, Gender, and Class in Global Food Politics

Geeta Chowdhry
Department of Political Science
P.O. Box 15036
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5036

& Anna M. Agathangelou
Department of Political Science
York University
Toronto, Canada

The racialized, gendered and class politics of Empire can be revealed through the telling of global and local “stories.”  Empire here is construed as the site in which global capitalist ventures, protected and sustained by military might but also through the constructions of race, gender, class, and nation (among other things) attempt to order the “chaotic” world of international relations.  The following venues provide distinctive vantage points of story-telling from which to foreground Empire and its discontents around the global and local politics of food:

1.      A village in South East Asia where the production of rice and other local foods has been replaced by potatoes for consumption (and under contract) for fast food chains in the United States

2.      A fast food chain restaurant in the United States where both the service providers and consumers are disproportionately poor and people of color.

3.      A Tyson chicken factory in Arkansas, United States, where most of the workers are poor, black southern women.

4.      Farmer suicides in Warengal district in Andhra Pradesh related to the production of BT cotton

5.      The standoff  (reminiscent of Doha) at the most recent WTO talks held in Germany between the G8 and Brazil and India over issues of liberalization and subsidies in the agricultural sector.

6.      Globally, women have played various roles as the “makers” and producers of food.  Yet they have a very tenuous relationship with eating food ranging from being the last to intake food in cases of food shortage to constructing femininity around scarce consumption of food.

In this paper, we will use these and various other stories to understand the dynamic of power around the gendered and racialized empires of global politics of food.  In addition, we will highlight the issues of power and empire through discussions of access and control, as well as production and consumption/distribution. 

 

About Geeta Chowdhry

Geeta Chowdhry (PhD: Political Science, University of Florida) is a Professor of Political Science and previous Director of Ethnic Studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.  Chowdhry is co-editor, along with Sheila Nair (NAU), of Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, Class (London: Routledge, 2002), as well as several journal articles and chapters in anthologies.  Chowdhry’s research has focused on, among others, issues of race and ethnicity in immigration and India’s nuclear policy. 

About Anna M. Agathangelou

Anna M. Agathangelou (PhD: Political Science, Syracuse University) is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada.  She is also the director of Global Change Institute, headquartered in Nicosia.  Author of The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), Agathangelou is currently working on a book project with L.H.M. Ling titled, From Empire to Multiple Worlds: Violence, Desire, and Complicity in Contemporary World Politics.  Agathangelou’s research interests include feminist and postcolonial theories, empire and globalization, critical security studies, the global political economy of sex and race, militarization of social relations as well as feminist postcolonial epistemologies and ontologies.  Currently, she is the Conversations editor of the International Feminist Journal and Politics (IFjP).  She is also on the editorial board of Globalizations. Agathangelou’s geopolitical area of focus is Eurasia and her publications have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, American Political Science Review, Cyprus Review, Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Journal of Public Affairs, Education on Social Equity, and Public Affairs Education as well as various anthologies.  She also writes and has published poetry in Greek and English. 

 

 

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