Doing Justice to Bodies? Reflections on Food Justice,Race, and Biology

Abstract: The food justice concept takes disproportionate prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes among people of color as evidence of injustice. Yet several measurements of obesity are based on norms derived from white bodies, which can also be a source of injustice. Part of the conceptual problem lies with reticence to discuss questions of material bodily difference as it relates to race given the legacy of racial science. Noting the distinction between racialism and racism, this article explores ways to think about biological difference in raced bodies, without reducing it to genetics. It draws on insights from Foucauldian notions of race and the new science of epigenetics to suggest that biological difference is more an effect of racism than a cause. Several pathways to obesity exist that have less to do with current day food access or genetic inheritance than with differential exposures that are somatized epigenetically.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

Idylls of the piney woods: health and race in southeastern Louisiana, 1878–1956

Scholars have investigated the important connections between racial identity, geography, and environment. Frequently these studies have focused on the location of noxious industries, questions of environmental justice, or segregation of racialized groups in areas of deleterious environmental conditions. In this paper, I argue that beneficial environmental conditions can also be closely tied with racial identity and that racial identity in turn can influence perceptions of the environment. These connections are evident in southern Louisiana—specifically St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. St. Tammany Parish, located in the piney woods of southeastern Louisiana, served as a health resort for New Orleanians seeking refuge from yellow fever and for other Americans attempting to restore their health. Residents and medical specialists understood the healthful qualities of the parish to emanate from the fragrance of the pine trees and the restorative waters. St. Tammany Parish's reputation for health, however, only applied to people with a white racial identity, despite the fact that St. Tammany Parish had a significant black population. White residents within the parish reserved tuberculosis sanitaria, health clinics, and access to natural springs for white patrons only, even amid fears concerning illness among black residents. Additionally, late nineteenth and early twentieth century medical specialists pointed to morality, criminality, and racial characteristics in their determination of the causes of illness.     

RACE AND ANIMAL‐BREEDING: A HYBRIDIZED HISTORIOGRAPHY

Because it associates animals with one of the most vital topics in human history, the historiography of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding is at once controversial and inspiring. This article wishes to position this historiography in a more systematic framework than has been done thus far by examining both its merits and failings along with the more and less appropriate ways to write on the subject. The article identifies two main narratives in race–animal‐breeding historiography: the influence narrative and the projection narrative. The first reveals how perceptions of animal breeds and livestock‐breeding practices influenced the rise of racialist and eugenic worldviews. By contrast, the second shows how conceptualizations of human racial segregation contributed to the construction of ideas about the subdivision of domestic animal species into different breeds. The article argues that despite the projection narrative's inherent anthropomorphism, this perspective renders it possible to draft a nonanthropocentric history of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding with a focus on human–animal relations rather than on human society.     

THE PROVENANCE OF OBSIDIAN ARTEFACTS FROM THE WĀDĪ ATH‐THAYYILAH 3 NEOLITHIC SITE (EASTERN YEMEN PLATEAU) BY LA–ICP–MS

The geological sources of obsidian in the Red Sea region provide the raw material used for the production of obsidian artefacts found in prehistoric sites on both sides of the Red Sea, as far afield as Egypt, the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia. This paper presents the chemical characterization of five obsidian geological samples and 20 prehistoric artefacts from a systematically excavated Neolithic settlement in highland Yemen. The major element concentrations were determined by SEM–EDS analysis and the trace element concentrations were analysed by the LA–ICP–MS method, an almost non‐destructive technique capable of chemically characterizing the volcanic glass. A comparison of archaeological and geological determinations allows the provenance of the obsidian used for the Neolithic artefacts to be traced to definite sources in the volcanic district of the central Yemen Plateau.     

环境保护与可持续发展中的社会问题——中加国际学术研讨会综述

如果不能实现社会公正,包括社会性别平等和代内代际公平,我们就不可能实现环境保护与可持续发展。本文对环境保护与可持续发展背景下社会公平的实现途径,如公众参与、生态补偿、文化适应、体制创新、健全法制、性别平等及解决三江源环境保护与可持续发展中社会问题的关键环节进行了梳理和评价。