If you are interested in the theoretical approach of the project, here is a (long) blog post that begins to explain the basic premise.
The name of this project is “Future Food Imaginaries in Global Climate Fiction”. Unfortunately, the time allocated to the project, and the language skills of the PI, do not allow for a comprehensive study of literature from all parts of the globe. However (and as described here) the project does investigate fiction from three different parts of the world: North America, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Nordic region. Studying texts from different parts of the planet is important since the socio-ecological crisis that is routinely referred to, in the Global North, as the ‘climate crisis’ is lived very differently depending on where you are. Although parts of the Global North have been flooded and/or burnt by extensive forest fires, extensive socio-ecological upheaval is – for now – an anticipated event among the well-to-do. By contrast, and as influentially described by Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) severe socio-ecological breakdown has long haunted the poor; in some regions for hundreds of years. In these spaces, the emergency has already happened. It seems reasonable that these differences will produce different types of stories about the future of food.
This assumption, that the place where literature emerges from matters, has been robustly theorized by what can be called world-literature studies (note the hyphen). This school of literary study can be traced back to early Marxist understandings of how culture is produced and performed, and to Fredrick Jameson’s suggestion that literature is a “socially symbolic act”, but it was most immediately developed by the Italian literary historian Franco Moretti in the late 1990s. His contribution builds on the sociological and historical work performed by Immanuel Wallerstein who proposed the concept of the capitalist world-system. To make a very complex material, colonial, cultural, social and economic history short, Wallerstein argues that various capitalist actors in European nations began reshaping the world according to its needs during the sixteenth century, after the “discovery” of the New World. In the centuries that followed, capitalism created global flows of resources, labour, knowledge and capital across the world, thus reshaping societies and land according to its needs. This has resulted in the production of three processual spaces: the core into which refined commodities flow and where the excess capital this process creates is accumulated; the periphery where resources are sourced cheaply with the help of similarly cheap labour, and the semiperiphery where a bit of both occurs.
Environmental historian Jason W. Moore has since revisited the idea of a world-system and, in a number of influential publications, observed that capitalism has re-organised not only social and economic worlds, but the very ecology of the planet. When you burn rainforests to clear land for palm oil plantations or cattle farming, extract rare earth minerals and fossil fuels from the underground, fish from oceans, and release a million years’ worth of CO2 into the atmosphere, you are reshaping the ecology of the planet. Thus, Moore refers to the existing planet-scale system as a capitalist world-ecology. It should be noted that the existing and erosive world food system, organized around, and disseminating, a meat, palm oil and sugar-heavy Western diet, is an integral part of this world-ecology.
Wallerstein’s and Moore’s work shows how the world-system is combined but uneven. The world is united by the same system, but it produces very different life-worlds and experiences depending on where you are. To take an example, the establishment of industrial and extractive palm-oil plantations is experienced in parts of South America via the clearing of rainforests, the consequent erosion of biodiversity, and the obliteration of indigenous ways of life dependent on rainforest ecologies (see Vijay et al. 2016). In parts of Northern America and Europe (and also, of course, in certain parts of South America), the same development is experienced, as Max Haiven (2022) has described, through cosmetics and other skin products, through new types of fuel, via computers manufactured with the help of palm oil, through the privileges made possible by accumulated wealth, and, of course, through the consumption of a variety of foods (bread, pizzas, sauces, instant noodles, cereal, spreads, ice cream, cookies, chocolate bars, various drinks and so on. See this list for brands and companies that use palm oil).
With Wallerstein’s world-system model in mind, Moretti proposed a new way of reading and comparing world literature. World literature, according to Moretti, needed to be considered as the literature of the world-system. In other words, the literature that emerged from different parts of the world-system would be profoundly influenced by the social reality produced by the capitalist world-system in that specific location. Texts emerging from peripheral spaces where cheap labour was employed to extract resources destined for the core would record the experience of being peripheralized and extracted, while texts written in the core would register the privileges and pleasures that these resources made possible in the core. These texts would thus be profoundly different, but they would emerge out of, and narrate, the same basic system.
The Warwick Research Collective (WReC) has since developed Moretti’s concept in their book Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. One way in which they advance Moretti’s original concept is by discussing how fiction from the peripheries often employs “irrealism” to describe their life worlds. The WReC uses this concept to show how the frequently violent and profoundly disturbing experience of being extracted is difficult to narrate using the tools supplied by the conventional, realist Western novel. As Amitav Ghosh (2016) has influentially argued, the realist novel emerged alongside capitalist modernity, and is engineered to describe the world as inherently stable and anti-catastrophic. This makes it an inefficient tool to describe worlds that are dissolving and falling apart. Thus, the speculative register is essential in fiction that narrates the collapse of social and ecological worlds.
The point here is this: when reading fiction from three different regions, it is crucially important to remember that these fictions emerge out of three different positions of the world-system. North American fiction is produced in the hegemonic core of the world-system, fiction from the Nordic nation comes out of the core, but not the hegemonic core, and African fiction is produced within the peripheries of the world-system. The form that climate fiction texts take is not simply because of the aesthetic choices made by authors, but a consequence of the life-worlds they erupt out of. For the past 500 years, cultures have been profoundly shaped by the emergence and proliferation of the capitalist world-system. The fiction studied in this project testifies to this. They respond differently to the pressures and possibilities of a combined and unequal world-system and they have to be studied with this in mind.
This is complicated, but in no way altered, by the fact that the colour of an author’s skin often determines their position with local economic/social hierarchies and also by the observation that authors often travel, are uprooted and relocate. Many of the most widely read authors of African climate fiction (Tochi Onyebuchi, Nnedi Okorafor) do not live and publish in Africa. Some, such as Onyebuchi, were not even born on this continent. In addition to this, quite a few authors who live in Africa and write cli-fi are sons and daughters of white settlers (Nick Wood, Alistair Mackay), and come out of worlds far more privileged than those whose parents are black. This does not mean that these various authors do not qualify as African authors, but it does mean that they are likely to register the world-system in different ways. As Ashleigh Harris demonstrates in her book Afropolitanism and the Novel: De-realizing Africa (2020), conditions for writing and publishing fiction in (or about Africa) are profoundly different depending on who you are and where you are writing from.
In other words, the Future Food Imaginaries that I map and analyse in this project spring out of very different social and cultural worlds and they record very different experiences of planetary-scale socio-ecological breakdown. This, as is becoming increasingly clear in the literature I am studying, profoundly informs how they imagine food, eating and the food system of the future. Also, it is when climate fiction from very different parts of the world is read as speaking about the same combined and uneven (food) system that questions of food justice and food security rise to the surface.
Illustration by Joshua Rawson-Harris at Unsplash.