Though numerous academic fields – from anthropology and archaeology to history, economics, and political science – have long been interested in the cultures of food, “food cultural studies” is a recent phenomenon. It was not until the 2004 volume Food and Cultural Studies that the intersections of the cultural studies research on culture-as-power and power-as-culture, on the one hand, and the food studies exploration of foodstuffs and foodways, on the other, started to receive the theoretical attention that they deserve. Going beyond the examination of the food systems themselves, food cultural studies uses the knowledge of these systems to glean insights into the gender, mobility, and power dynamics behind the production, distribution, preparation, consumption, and representation of food and its sources. With the current growing awareness of the mutual impact of food and nature in the Anthropocene, opening food cultural studies to environmental concerns is a logical next step.

Such an analysis would begin by tracing the environmental consequences of the food/power setup to provide a new language for questioning the impact of food on land use, the allocation of resources, and climate change. Yet, as a part of cultural studies, this questioning would also focus on the interdependence between environmentalism, power, and the cultures of food. Drawing on the work on the environmental economy of capitalism – a system of production that changes the nature of agricultural labor and applies extractivist practices to promote the foodscapes where capital can freely flow – environmental food cultural studies incorporates the idea of the Capitalocene, a distinct epoch during which nature becomes not just a source of sustenance but also the raw material, the byproduct, and the residue of the capitalist production cycle. Environmental food cultural studies traces the processes through which premodern practices and discourses related to food begin to change in order to reflect the interests of economic growth, thus showing not only the modernization of food cultures themselves but also the ways in which these cultures reveal the social effects of capitalism. Ultimately, environmentally-informed food cultural studies views the continuum of actions and representations concerning what foods are made of all the way to how they are thought of as a force that both shapes and reflects the environment.

Han Beiping’s comment captures the paradox of dominant Chinese perceptions towards Africa and its people. A journalist and member of China Writers Association, he had visited Africa twice in the early 1960s, which made him a rare first-hand Chinese observer ofnewlyindependent African countries. Han vividly recalled the moment he stepped down from the aeroplane in Cairo: ‘a cold gust of wind hit my face and I started to shiver … Did you presume everywhere in Africa was hot?’ Another kind of warmth he went on to be impressed by was that with which he was received by the locals, who had made him feel at home and at ease. He portrays the bond between Chinese and Africans as forged through a shared struggle against imperialism and colonialism along with courageous nation-building efforts. Such claims, which tend to be dismissed as mere propagandist slogans by today’s media, in fact reflect the historical baggage that contemporary actors in China-Africa relations must shoulder in their engagements with each other.

Few topics on China’s remarkable ascension to the status of global superpower have captured the interest and imagination of both popular and academic audiences more than China’s renewed levels of engagement with the African continent. Africa has become a major platform from which to analyse and understand China’s growing influence in the global South. Since the mid-2000s, research on ‘China in Africa’ has generated a wide body of scholarship ranging across a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including political science, international relations, economics, anthropology, and sociology. Even so, the history of Chinese relations with Africa remains largely under-represented. Considered either too recent to constitute ‘factual history’ or insignificant to the formation of contemporary metanarratives, historical relations between China and Africa during the Cold War are often discussed briefly and in reductionist ways before paying lip service to the presence of ongoing changing dynamics.

Trash is a complex reality that constantly shifts from the abstraction of philosophy to the concreteness of everyday life and back (Amago; Bennett; Douglas; Ferrell; Hawkins; Humes; Pardo; Prádanos; Strasser; Thill; Zubiaurre). The concept of the “discarded” is deeply subjective. More than anything, it is in the eye of the beholder. And it is the eye and modes of perception of Basurama – a longstanding Spanish collective devoted to the study of contemporary waste production and the implementation of collaborative artistic practices around the reuse and recycling of urban refuse – that will direct the thoughts of the pages that follow. Here is how Basurama describes itself and its mission:

In the eighteenth century, churches were an environmental hazard site. A principal culprit was the tradition of burying the dead inside churches, under their floors, and in adjacent graveyards. Sepulchral fumes turned the sacred interior humid and putrid, and the lack of ventilation stagnated the foul air, creating a serious health crisis for the clergy and their congregations. The situation was no better outside. The narrow streets and the density of eighteenth-century urban centers were hardly conducive to a ventilated cemetery within city walls. Moreover, graveyards were not enclosed spaces but rather accessible and mixed-use areas. Alongside the dead, the living reunited, celebrated assemblies, danced, put on theatrical representations, and organized open-air markets. At other times the cemetery was turned into a workshop to thresh wheat. The spiritual and popular defense of this cohabitation produced a massive accumulation of putrefied cadavers that contaminated the air with toxic discharge. By the eighteenth century, the smell of the decaying corpses was a constant reminder of a persistent problem that everyone, both laypeople and clergy, caught a whiff of but easily avoided.

Odors form part of daily life. We know little about what commoners thought of the foul odors in general and in churches, but Spain was not a clean country, and visitors quickly detected the stench and recorded it in their writing. In 1735, the Prussian traveler Charles Louis von Pöllnitz experienced first-hand “the unpleasantness of walking about the streets of Madrid:”

No sooner had the Italian writer Joseph Baretti, en route from London to Genoa in 1747, entered the Spanish capital than he was overwhelmed by the “horrible stink” and “fetid vapours exhaling from numberless heaps of filth lying all about.

In the last decade, based on a reductionist framework of ‘China in Africa’, politicians, journalists, and academics alike have deployed the rhetoric of a Chinese ’scramble for Africa’, ‘empire’ building, or simply neocolonialism, to characterise what is a much more complex relationship. This vast body of literature, while demonstrating China’s renewed interest in Africa, has a striking tendency to engage simplistically with the historical aspects of this complex relationship. Most recently, Ching Kwan Lee has proposed that the unavoidable, spontaneous series of ‘events’ related to ‘China in Africa’ are embedded in powerful self- reinforcing logic and an abstract temporality of capitalism. But does this momentous global China involve the expansion of capital alone?

If capitalism has become one agent of change, so have ‘non-interference, mutuality, friendship, non-conditional aid and analogous suffering at the hands of imperialism’. China’s renewed economic interest in Africa, while certainly driven by its own ‘variety of capital’, co-exists with other historical orbits. 4 This chapter will analyse the - often blurred - boundaries between ‘Communist China’ and the capital-driven global China within the official rhetoric of China-Africa relations. Three key sectors (mining, health, and construction) will be discussed with reference to specific projects: Chinese copper mining in Zambia, Chinese medical practices in both Kenya and Zambia, and the recent Chinese-built Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). It is evident that in all these cases the historical legacies of brotherhood and solidarity have remained, despite the dominant contemporary narratives which have come to surround China’s capitalist expansion. In a nutshell, one could say that there is a significant degree of hybridity between ‘capitalism goes global’ and ’socialism goes global’. Indeed, the hybridity between ‘centralised control’ and ‘decentralised improvisation’ determines the nature of Chinese state company operations in Africa. This chapter diverges from the previous chapters: its goal is to articulate the meaning of this recent past through the lens of present-day narrators. A wide range of Chinese, Kenyan, and Zambian actors exhibit the strong tendency to narrate the past in the service of a particular reading of the present, as they reproduce and reconstruct historical narratives surrounding China-Africa relations in the new millennium.

A key scene in the film El verdugo (The Executioner) by Luis García Berlanga shows the main characters in the Drach Caves of Mallorca – a time-honored site for the tourist usage of the island’s natural heritage – just when a member of the Spanish Civil Guard (Guardia Civil) instructs the main character, an executioner, to do his job and execute a prisoner. From the camera’s perspective, the magnificent site of the cave serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it is an allure that conveys the island’s beauty, beckoning a peaceful visit; on the other, it is the stage of a moral conflict. Hence, the site is a framework for both tourism promotion and the critique of the dictatorial regime that governs such promotion. Cultural presentations of nature at tourism sites are never gratuitous or unambiguous. They generate a point of view that affects not only the tourist gaze, but also the reproduction of the manner in which the space is perceived and socially used by the local residents.

In this chapter, we analyze the intersection between tourism, culture, and the natural environment in Spain from a perspective that takes in the historical processes, as well as the diverse cultural practices and products involved. Beyond confirming the difficulty of defining the connoted limits among the three categories under study (for example, the difference between a tourist and a traveler, between culture and tourism consumption, between environment and natural setting), this study explores the manner in which their intersection generates a complex conceptual network that also determines the definition of other key terms such as landscape, heritage and even progress. Moreover, it fosters the normalization of terms of habitual use in this field – natural monument, rural tourism, green tourism, ecotourism – that can sometimes be conceptually antithetical. For this reason, we are not only interested in analyzing the cultural products of tourism and their imbrication in the natural environment, but also the semantic shifts among the places where the three categories are conceptualized. We postulate that in Spain, those shifts have materialized throughout history in at least three directions that are linked to the ideological planning of the land, the commercialization of the natural setting, and the overlapping between cultural and tourism practices.

This chapter reflects on the actualities and possibilities of understanding modern and contemporary Iberian history at the culture-environment interface. This perspective seeks to transcend the divisions between two sets of historical study fields: on one hand, the fields that traditionally have focused on the production, circulation, and consumption of texts, images, and ideas, and on the development of symbolic or discursive practices (cultural and intellectual history); on the other, and across the historiographical aisle, those fields centered on environmental transformations and practices with a profound impact on the environment and socio-environmental relations (environmental history and history of science and technology). I think this integration is demanded by both material and intellectual developments that are taking place in the twenty-first century: first, the widespread recognition that fossil-based processes of regional modernization and capitalist globalization have given rise to a new geological era (the Anthropocene or Capitalocene) that includes global processes of severe biodiversity loss and mass extinction of species; and second, the recent materialist and ecological turn that is transforming the ways the humanities and social sciences understand historical change (seen not as the consequence of either human action or environmental factors but as the result of evolving socio-environmental entanglements).

The first part of this chapter traces the basic contours of historical work at the culture-environment interface, work which, in my view, should integrate the study of material/environmental processes and practices with semiotic/cultural ones. In order to do that, I will review and discuss well-known theoretical proposals made by leading Anglo-American cultural and environmental historians. The second part of the chapter comments on some interdisciplinary historical works (such as Casado de Otaola’s Naturaleza Patria and Erik Swyngedouw’s Liquid Power) which, in my view, have succeeded in studying modern Iberian history at the culture-environment interface. The third part of the chapter will be a reflective summary of my own ongoing contributions to Iberian cultural environmental history. This work is based on the idea that “nature” and the “environment” in modern Spain is something ontologically unstable and epistemologically heterogeneous and, as such, must be historically understood as an evolving and conflict-ridden ecology of cultures of nature. That is, the distinct modes in which particular human groups (connected by their class, profession, productive, and reproductive practices, etc.

On 8 March 2018, approximately five million – or one in five – working women in Spain struck for a full day, withholding their paid and unpaid labor across all sectors, with the most notable impacts felt in education, healthcare, as well as in the mostly unrecognized provision of care for children and the elderly. 8M marches have seen large-scale participation across the Iberian Peninsula since 1975, the year in which both Spain began its transition to democracy following thirty-six years of fascist dictatorship and, coincidentally, in which the United Nations formally recognized March 8th as International Women’s Day. However, the Huelga Feminista of 2018 took on new meaning as ecofeminist concerns more formally qualified the calls to action, making front and center the long-standing and inextricable links between the capitalist and heteropatriarchal energy models that have historically subjugated women (and invisibilized their labor) and that are responsible for the decimation of our biosphere. Across the country, women and allies mobilized to make clear that femicide and ecocide have a direct correlation: women are those who reproduce life (yet, their reproductive rights are continually managed and legislated within patriarchal systems of oppression); most of the world’s agricultural production is carried out by women (yet, capitalist agroindustrial systems continue to overtake local, traditional farming, leading to extraordinary rates of soil nutrient depletion and of starvation); and women’s provision of care is that which sustains life (yet women’s labor is devalued within the neoliberal myth of perpetual economic growth and the monetization of wealth, which prioritize the coffers of a few over the collective health of the planet and its vegetal and animal inhabitants).

Ecofeminism in Spain, therefore, is a crucial and growing field of thought and of political activism that in recent years has been gaining momentum for its extraordinary potential to inform and inspire transformative social and economic change that will improve global and local ecological health. As with the rebirth of democracy in Spain, ecofeminism began to develop in the 1970s following the coining of the term by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne, for whom the disenfranchisement of women, people of color, and the poor is correlative to the degradation of the natural world as a result of patriarchal dominance.

Writing in the 1970s, Alan Hutchison proclaimed his conclusion with confidence: China’s foreign policy goals in Kenya had failed. However, many contemporary observers would be surprised by this verdict. The standard account of Sino-Kenyan relations begins in December 1963 when China became the fourth country to open an embassy in Nairobi, then leaps abruptly to September 1980 when President Daniel arap Moi paid his country’s first state visit to Beijing. This leaves the period of time between 1963 and 1980 almost entirely out of the picture. Terence Ranger has discussed how the ‘the usable past’ can be effective in legitimising nationhood, but it could be said that most of what took place in the 1960s and the 1970s did not conform to the preferred nationalist histories of either Kenya or China. This chapter tackles this omission through an attempt to answer the following questions. Did African countries such as Kenya always submit to powerful Cold War actors? What role did ideology play in Kenyan foreign policy and its relations with Communist China? To what extent did domestic and local politics play into the dynamics of Sino-Kenyan relations? And, driven by Mao’s radical outlook, did China attempt to orchestrate a regime change in Kenya?

This chapter will provide a comprehensive study of the relationship between Kenya and China from 1964 to 1975. Shortly after independence, Kenyan elites continued to develop and deepen relations with China. Nairobi dispatched two delegations, the first to the US in late December 1963, and the second to the USSR and PRC in April-May 1964. Both Communist giants signed economic and technical cooperation agreements with Kenya in the wake of these visits, the Sino-Soviet competition for global influence enabling a relatively small country like Kenya to negotiate a better overall aid package for its own development.

The second part of this chapter will analyse the tri-dimensional nature of post-independence Kenyan politics through the lens of party factions and their respective foreign backers. China’s preference for the most ‘advanced/progressive’ forces in the ‘Third World’ influenced its decision to finance the faction within KANU led by Oginga Odinga.