Re-reading Africa through food: introduction

Abstract

Humanities-oriented scholarship and research on food has rapidly expanded in the global Humanities-oriented scholarship and research on food has rapidly expanded in the global North. Marion Nestle and W. Alex McIntosh (2010), for example, remarked that food studies had grown as a “new field”, with the humanities steadily consolidating interdisciplinary work on food. Their remarks respond to the way in which food studies were previously disparaged in humanities disciplines, despite Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and Roland Barthes’ pioneering of interdisciplinary work about food. In the global South, however, such work remains limited. The relative invisibility of African humanities-oriented work is not a result of a paucity of research or critical interest but rather is due to the stranglehold of dominant paradigms. Existing publishing platforms, sources of research support and influential paradigms shaping food research privilege func- tional and technical as well as market-driven understandings of African peoples’ relations to food. The neoliberal capitalist framework underpinning research is especially noteworthy North. Marion Nestle and W. Alex McIntosh (2010), for example, remarked that food studies had grown as a “new field”, with the humanities steadily consolidating interdisciplinary work on food. Their remarks respond to the way in which food studies were previously disparaged in humanities disciplines, despite Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and Roland Barthes’pioneering of interdisciplinary work about food. In the global South, however, such work remains limited. The relative invisibility of African humanities-oriented work is not a result of a paucity of research or critical interest but rather is due to the stranglehold of dominant paradigms. Existing publishing platforms, sources of research support and influential paradigms shaping food research privilege functional and technical as well as market-driven understandings of African peoples’ relations to food. The neoliberal capitalist framework underpinning research is especially noteworthy.