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12 - Spain’s Gastronomy: Capitalism and Reproductive Labor
- Edited by Luis I. Prádanos, Miami University
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- Book:
- A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 17 January 2023, pp 135-145
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Summary
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.
El ciberántropo, la tecnocracia y el desvío situacionista en la obra subnormal de Vázquez Montalbán
- Edited by José F. Colmeiro, Michigan State University
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- Book:
- Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2023
- Print publication:
- 19 November 2007, pp 53-74
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Summary
El détournement es el lenguaje fluido de la anti-ideología. Aparece en la comunicación que sabe que no puede pretender guardar ninguna garantía en sí misma y de forma definitiva.
Guy Debord, La sociedad del espectáculoEn la presentación de la Internacional Situacionista al público inglés en 1964 explicaba Michèle Bernstein, la compañera del fundador de la organización, Guy Debord, que la creación del grupo se debía a la necesidad de oponerse a la “ineficacia y la mistificación de la especialización política como medio de transformación del mundo” (781). Hacia 1968, Vázquez Montalbán expresaba una preocupación similar en el ensayo “Experimentalismo, vanguardia y neocapitalismo”: la izquierda política se estaba aislando de la población, con la que ya no podía comunicarse debido a su programa estético rígido y negador de la experimentación artística. En este contexto, el escritor citaba el nombre del situacionista Gianfranco Sanguinetti como alternativa al camino único del “realismo con fronteras” (107). La alternativa, sugería Vázquez Montalbán parafraseando el famoso lema del crítico Roger Garaudy (D’un réalisme sans rivages), no había que buscarla en el cuestionamiento estructuralista del realismo, sino en la experimentación: “Entendámonos. No es que se exija a Gabriel Celaya que se instruya sobre lingüística estructural, simplemente se exige a López Salinas que lea al Sanguinetti con un respeto profesional” (114). La apreciación de la innovación artística como deber político animó la estética experimental de la etapa subnormal de Vázquez Montalbán e inspiró bastantes páginas dedicadas al análisis del papel de la vanguardia artística en la agenda política de la izquierda. Puesto que la Internacional Situacionista (IS) recibió el ímpetu inicial de la vanguardia histórica —especialmente el Dadá y el surrealismo— cuyas ideas estéticas los situacionistas se proponían aplicar a las tareas políticas, era lógico que Vázquez Montalbán utilizara estrategias situacionistas para recuperar el ímpetu político de la experimentación vanguardista.