In recent years, Peru has transformed from a war-torn country to a global high-end culinary destination. Connecting chefs, state agencies, global capital, and Indigenous producers, this “gastronomic revolution” makes powerful claims: food unites Peruvians, dissolves racial antagonisms, and fuels development. Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race critically evaluates these claims and tracks the emergence of Peruvian gastropolitics, a biopolitical and aesthetic set of practices that reinscribe dominant racial and gendered orders. Through critical readings of high-end menus and ethnographic analysis of culinary festivals, guinea pig production, and national-branding campaigns, this work explores the intersections of race, species, and capital to reveal links between gastronomy and violence in Peru.

In recent years, Peru has transformed from a war-torn country to a global high-end culinary destination. Connecting chefs, state agencies, global capital, and Indigenous producers, this “gastronomic revolution” makes powerful claims: food unites Peruvians, dissolves racial antagonisms, and fuels development. Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race critically evaluates these claims and tracks the emergence of Peruvian gastropolitics, a biopolitical and aesthetic set of practices that reinscribe dominant racial and gendered orders. Through critical readings of high-end menus and ethnographic analysis of culinary festivals, guinea pig production, and national-branding campaigns, this work explores the intersections of race, species, and capital to reveal links between gastronomy and violence in Peru.

Taking on existing interpretations of "Peruvian exceptionalism," this book presents a multi-sited ethnographic exploration of the local and transnational articulations of indigenous movements, multicultural development policies, and indigenous citizenship in Peru.

This book provides an interdisciplinary examination of Peruvian cuisine’s shift from a culinary to a political object and the making of Peru as a food nation on the global stage. It focuses on the contexts, processes and protagonists that have endowed the country’s cuisine with new meaning, new coherence and prominence, and with the ability to communicate what was important for Peruvians after decades of political violence and economic decline. This work unfolds central processes of the culinary project ranging from the emergence of gastronomy, to the refiguring of indigenous people as producers, to the use of cultural identity as an authenticating force. From the Plate to Gastro-Politics offers a critical reading of what has been called a “gastronomic revolution”, highlighting the ways in which claims to national unity and social reconciliation smooth over ongoing inequalities. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of food studies, cultural anthropology, heritage studies and Latin American studies.

Examines the cultural politics and poetics of appetite and food in post/colonial South Asia.

Mămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of mămăligă has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade. The story of maize and mămăligă provides an accessible way to revisit many key questions of Romanian and broader regional history. More generally, the book links the history of production, consumption, and representation. Analyses of recipes, literary and popular depictions, and key vocabulary complete the work.

Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform reveals the human drama behind the radical agrarian reform that unfolded in Peru during the final three decades of the twentieth century. That process began in 1969, when the left-leaning military government implemented a drastic program of land expropriation. Seized lands were turned into worker-managed cooperatives. After those cooperatives began to falter and the country returned to civilian rule in the 1980s, members distributed the land among themselves. In 1995–96, as the agrarian reform process was winding down and neoliberal policies were undoing leftist reforms, the Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer traveled throughout the country, interviewing people who had lived through the most tumultuous years of agrarian reform, recording their memories and their stories. While agrarian reform caused enormous upheaval, controversy, and disappointment, it did succeed in breaking up the unjust and oppressive hacienda system. Mayer contends that the demise of that system is as important as the liberation of slaves in the Americas. Mayer interviewed ex-landlords, land expropriators, politicians, government bureaucrats, intellectuals, peasant leaders, activists, ranchers, members of farming families, and others. Weaving their impassioned recollections with his own commentary, he offers a series of dramatic narratives, each one centered around a specific instance of land expropriation, collective enterprise, and disillusion. Although the reform began with high hopes, it was quickly complicated by difficulties including corruption, rural and urban unrest, fights over land, and delays in modernization. As he provides insight into how important historical events are remembered, Mayer re-evaluates Peru’s military government (1969–79), its audacious agrarian reform program, and what that reform meant to Peruvians from all walks of life.

Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe explores the role of earthquakes in shaping the deep timeframes and multi-hemispheric geographies of American literary history. Spanning the ancient world to the futuristic continents of speculative fiction, the earthquake stories assembled here together reveal the emergence of a broadly Western cultural syndrome that became an acute national fantasy: elsewhere catastrophe, an unspoken but widely prevalent sense that catastrophe is somehow "un-American." Catastrophe must be elsewhere because it affirms the rightness of "here" where conquest, according to the syndrome's logic, did not happen and is not occurring. The psychic investment in elsewhere catastrophe coalesced slowly, across centuries; varieties of it can be found in various European traditions of the modern. Yet in its most striking modes and resonances, elsewhere catastrophe proves fundamental to the invention of US-America--which is why earthquake, as the exemplary elsewhere catastrophe, is the disaster that must always happen far away or be forgotten. The book's eight chapters and epilogue range from Plato to the Puritans, from El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Voltaire to Herman Melville and N.K. Jemisin, examining along the way the seismic imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Jose Martí, among other writers. At the core of the book's inquiries are the earthquakes, historical and imagined, that act as both a recurrent eruptive force and a provocation for disparate modes of critical engagement with the long and catastrophic history of the Americas.

This book reconstructs and extends sociological approaches to the understanding of food consumption. It identifies new ways to approach the explanation of food choice and it develops new concepts which will help reshape and reorient common understandings. Leading sociologist of food, Alan Warde, deals both with abstract issues about theories of practice and substantive analyses of aspects of eating, demonstrating how theories of practice can be elaborated and systematically applied to the activity of eating. The book falls into two parts. The first part establishes a basis for a practice-theoretic account of eating. Warde reviews research on eating, introduces theories of practice and constructs eating as a scientific object. The second part develops key concepts for the analysis of eating as a practice, showing how concepts like habit, routine, embodiment, repetition and convention can be applied to explain how eating is organised and coordinated through the generation, reproduction and transformation of a multitude of individual performances. The Practice of Eating thus addresses both substantive problems concerning the explanation of food habits and currently controversial issues in social theory, illustrated by detailed empirical analysis of some aspects of contemporary culinary life. It will become required reading for students and scholars of food and consumption in a wide range of disciplines, from sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to food studies, culinary studies and nutrition science.

Sovereignty Unhinged theorizes sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state. Rather than engaging with the geopolitical realities of the present, the contributors consider sovereignty from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures. In a series of ethnographic case studies ranging from the Americas to the Middle East to South Asia, they examine the means of avoiding the political and historical capture that make one complicit with sovereign authority rather than creating the conditions of possibility to confront it. The contributors attend to the affective dimensions of these practices of world-building to illuminate the epistemological, ontological, and transnational entanglements that produce a sense of what is possible. They also trace how sovereignty is activated and deactivated over the course of a lifetime within the struggle of the everyday. In so doing, they outline how individuals create and enact forms of sovereignty that allow them to endure fast and slow forms of violence while embracing endless opportunities for building new worlds. Contributors. Alex Blanchette, Yarimar Bonilla, Jessica Cattelino, María Elena García, Akhil Gupta, Lochlann Jain, Purnima Mankekar, Joseph Masco, Michael Ralph, Danilyn Rutherford, Arjun Shankar, Kristen L. Simmons, Deborah A. Thomas, Leniqueca A. Welcome, Kaya Naomi Williams, Jessica Winegar