"Desde Abajo, Como Semilla": Puerto Rican Food Sovereignty as Embodied Decolonial Resistance
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Date
2020
Authors
Wilms-Crowe, Momo
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This thesis explores the power, possibility, and agency embedded in food in the contemporary Puerto Rican context. Building from participatory ethnographic fieldwork with activists, chefs, and farmers engaged in food sovereignty work, I examine the concepts of political agency and subjectivity as they relate to embodied experiences of politics and highlight the generative potential of work occurring in unconventional locations for political participation. This approach is made possible with the understanding that the food we consume directly connects our individual lived experiences to broader structures of power in intimate and material ways. Through food, I offer a grounded critique of US colonial violence, inherently linked to ecological destruction, cisheteropatriarchy, and disaster capitalism. I also document dynamics of radical prefigurative politics as visible in people’s generative reimagining of relationships with their bodies, each other, and the land. This analysis is supported theoretically by Indigenous, anarchist, and queer/feminist perspectives which similarly connect the personal to the political and offer examples of political action that extend beyond state-centric formal politics.
Description
93 pages
Keywords
Political Science, Food Sovereignty, Social Movement, Political Agency, Food, Puerto Rico, American Colonialism, Mutual Aid