Countermovement,Neoliberal Platoon,or Re‐Gifting Depot? Understanding Decommodification in US Food Banks

In this paper, I explore the decommodification that takes place in US food banks. I argue that food banks are neither Polanyian countermovements re‐embedding the market in society nor tiny platoons of neoliberalism that advance market relations and state withdrawal. Rather, food banks are best understood as re‐gifting depots that are part of the capital accumulation process. Recent scholarship on primitive accumulation, the disarticulations approach, and waste suggests that the devaluation of food products and the exclusion of human labor are everyday elements of capitalism. I conclude by examining the potential for progressive politics in US food banking.     

Writing,Immigration, and Sex in Dany Laferrière and Kim Thúy

ABSTRACT

Québécois immigrant writers Dany Laferrière’s and Kim Thúy’s first novels, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) and Ru (2009), both thematize the process of coming-to-writing and autofiction in parallel with the tropes of the sexualization of the nonwhite “other” in a global (post)colonial context. This article examines Laferrière’s and Thúy’s starkly different novels to begin to account for the connection between the act of entering literature and the indictment of racial inequality and sexual exploitation.     

Domestic Secrets: women and property in Sweden, 1600–1857

This article explores and analyses narratives in social report-books in the context of structural rationalization during the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden, which entailed large movements of people both in Sweden and Finland (as it did in other countries of Western Europe). The characteristics of the report-books are that they claim to depict the truth and to give voices to marginalized people with the aim to contribute to social change. The analysis dwells not only on the content of the books, but also on the narrative techniques employed. It is discussed how the authors were tied to their political context and the general discourse of social critique in their rendering of voices. The main questions of this article are: whose voices were paid attention to and how was home narrated and represented?

One kind of narrative content links home attachment to roots in a rural context, where home centres on reproduction of families, territorial claims and nature hugging. It is established through rhetoric of nature and timelessness, fathers passing inheritance on to their sons and a desire for a non-alienated existence in an archaic landscape. The narrative techniques used are based on an invisible narrator and on a travel narration with questions and answers. It is mainly male voices that are paid attention to. Female voices are to some extent heard but marginalized. Female bodily practices and habits are connected to positions as wives and daughters. The fisherman, the hunter, the woodlander and the farmer, are (re)presented as threatened male positions and therefore male bodies will in a near future be out of place. These narratives are framed by a patriarchal discourse where bodies are naturalized and made straight.

Quite another kind of narrative content is forward-looking, dealing with voices in a suburban context. The montage as a narrative technique is systematically used there, combining text and image. The didactic montage is intended to be educational, to enlighten people with the aid of pointers. This calls for activity on the part of the reader/observer, who is supposed to be given the impression of having interpreted the meanings independently. It is based on consciousness-raising as a feminist method for change. This narrative of home is about societal participation and resenting and resisting patriarchal distinctions such as public/private. It is framed by a feminist discourse where bodies are denaturalized and orientated at finding space for the displaced body to expand.