Food is a defining feature in every culture. Despite its very basic purpose of sustaining life, it directly impacts the community, culture and heritage in every region around the globe in countless seen and unseen ways, including the literature and narratives of each region. Across the African continent, food and foodways, which refer to the ways that humans consume, produce and experience food, were influened by slavery and forced labor, colonization, foreign aid, and the anxieties prompt...

In the first Quarterly Essay of 2003, Tim Flannery launches an attack on the various lies that we tell ourselves about our resources, our past and our future. The lie of terra nullius that made us ignore the Aborigines' knowledge of the environment. The lie of the Snowy Mountains Scheme that did untold damage to our river system for the sake of white immigration. The lie that rushing to preserve wilderness will save endangered species. Tim Flannery is also skeptical about the myths of mult...

In Quarterly Essay 64, Stan Grant takes a deep and passionate look at Indigenous futures, in particular the fraught question of remote communities.In a landmark essay, Stan Grant writes Indigenous people back into the economic and multicultural history of Australia. This is the fascinating story of how fringe dwellers fought not just to survive, but to prosper. Their legacy is the extraordinary flowering of Indigenous success - cultural, sporting, intellectual and social - that w...

A collection of newspaper articles about Dust Bowl migrants in California's Central Valley by the author of The Grapes of Wrath, accompanied by photos.Three years before his triumphant novel The Grapes of Wrath—a fictional portrayal of a Depression-era family fleeing Oklahoma during a disastrous period of drought and dust storms—John Steinbeck wrote seven articles for the San Francisco News about these history-making events and the hundre...

What is democracy? For many of us, it simply involves having periodic elections to decide which political party forms the next government. Yet, democracy is more than just elections. It involves the existence of a space which allows for people to freely debate on public issues and government policies as well as present alternative ideas without the fear of repercussions. If the health of a democratic society is dependent on the existence of such a space, how can we ensure a free and vibran...

Rainforest Warriors is a historical, ethnographic, and documentary account of a people, their threatened rainforest, and their successful attempt to harness international human rights law in their fight to protect their way of life—part of a larger story of tribal and indigenous peoples that is unfolding all over the globe.The Republic of Suriname, in northeastern South America, contains the highest proportion of rainforest within its national territory, and the most fores...

Examines the ways our conceptions of Asian American food have been shapedChop suey. Sushi. Curry. Adobo. Kimchi. The deep associations Asians in the United States have with food have become ingrained in the American popular imagination. So much so that contentious notions of ethnic authenticity and authority are marked by and argued around images and ideas of food.Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader collects burgeoning new scholarship in Asia...

A 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center reported that Asian Americans are the best-educated, highest-income, and best-assimilated racial group in the United States. Before reaching this level of economic success and social assimilation, however, Asian immigrants' path was full of difficult, even demeaning, moments. This book provides a sweeping and nuanced history of Asian Americans, revealing how and why the perception of Asian immigrants changed over time. Asian migrants, in large part ...

Covering 500 years of Ghana's history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation. Whether discussing the Asante kingdom and the Gold Coast's importance to European commerce and transatlantic slaving, Ghana's brief period under British colonial rule, or the emergence of its modern democracy, the volume's eighty selections emphasize Ghana's enormous symbolic and pragmatic value to global relations. They al...

In this clear and detailed reading guide, we’ve done all the hard work for you!The Grapes of Wrath is an award-winning novel by American writer, John Steinbeck. It tells the story of the Joad family and their arduous journey to the West after they were evicted from their farm and replaced with industrial machinery. This tale of economic hardship, hunger and solidarity offers a valuable insight into history and how it affected individuals.

While interest in the relations of power and identity in food explodes, a hesitancy remains about calling these racial. What difference does race make in the fields where food is grown, the places it is sold and the manner in which it is eaten? How do we understand farming and provisioning, tasting and picking, eating and being eaten, hunger and gardening better by paying attention to race? This collection argues there is an unacknowledged racial dimension to the production and consumption...

This volume provides an important entrée into the current thinking and rethinking on Caribbean heritage. Included are several topics that represent the rich plurality of the Caribbean experience, such as symbolism, popular culture, literature, linguistics, pedagogy, philanthropy, natural history, land tenure, townscapes, archaeology and museology. Given its multidisciplinary approach, Caribbean Heritage will have considerable appeal to a wide range of scholars such as folklorists,...