Zapruder World, Volume 5 (2018)
Kashia Amber Arnold, Brian J Griffith, and Timothy Paulson eds.
Introduction
Over the past three decades, scholars and activists engaged in agriculture, food systems, and consumerism have demonstrated food’s significance to the human experience, particularly during the modern epoch. The subject of food provides scholars with an attractive interpretive lens for examining the dynamics of globalization and transnationality by shedding light on a wide range of hitherto unexamined processes and diverse political, economic, and cultural relationships. Drawing upon insights from History, Anthropology, and Sociology, as well as food policy studies and urban planning, a number of interdisciplinary studies have demonstrated the central role of food in the formation and disintegration of ethnic and cultural identities, the industrialization and commercialization of food production and consumption, and the consequences of both for elite power and subaltern agency on both national and international scales of analysis. However, while such studies have often employed food as a proxy for examining the politics and economics of power relations in various places and regions, historians and scholars of other fields are only beginning to advance our understanding of the direct intersections between food and the global history of transnational power structures and instances of popular resistance.
Aims and objectives
This volume of Zapruder World will focus on how the production, distribution, and consumption of food—as well as its scarcity—have assisted or resisted the spread of state and commercial power in an increasingly “globalized” marketplace. We call for studies which move beyond the utilization of food as a proxy for analyzing (inter)national political or economic relationships, focusing indstead on food’s contributions to the construction of global commercial or imperial systems and the ways in which global power dynamics have engendered forms of popular mobilization and resistance via food, food systems, and food cultures.
Topics and Themes
Thus, we invite contributions focusing on any area of the world since the eighteenth century which address one or more of the following themes:
Food, Power, and Capital
● Food and the State
● Food and Capitalism / Global Markets
● Food and Empire / Globalization
● The History of Famine, Food Deprivation, & Starvation
● The Politics of Food Abundance
● Welfare State Food Programs
Food, Conflicts, and Movements
● Food and War / Revolution
● Food Riots
● Food Security / Sovereignty
● Food and Identity / Community / Movement Building
● Food and Social / Political Activism
● Black Markets as Acts of Resistance
In addition to scholarly articles, we invite submissions of non-essay form original work, such as photo essays, videos, interviews, drawings, comics, songs, hyperlinks to online resources, multimedia, etc., both accompanying the articles themselves and as standalone contributions. We encourage authors to think about incorporating multimedia both into their pieces proposed for Zapruder World and in the sections we have created on the journal’s website (e.g. "Yesterday" and "Today"—see http://www.zapruderworld.org/past-volumes/ for more information).
For further information on the timeline, click here.