Unsettling Food Politics

Agriculture, Dispossession and Sovereignty in Australia

Christopher Mayes

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786600981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Over the past 25 years, activists, farmers and scholars have been arguing that the industrialized global food system erodes democracy, perpetuates injustices, undermines population health and is environmentally unsustainable. In an attempt to resist these effects, activists have proposed alternative food networks that draw on ideas and practices from pre-industrial agrarian smallholder farming, as well as contemporary peasant movements. This book uses current debates over Michel Foucault’s method of genealogy as a practice of critique and historical problematization of the present to reveal the historical constitution of contemporary alternative food discourses. While alternative food activists appeal to food sovereignty and agrarian discourses to counter the influence of neoliberal agricultural policies, these discourses remain entangled with colonial logics. In particular, the influence of Enlightenment ideas of improvement, colonial practices of agriculture as a means to establish ownership, and anthropocentric relations to the land. In combination with the genealogical analysis, this book brings continental political philosophy into conversation with Indigenous theories of sovereignty and alternative food discourse in order to open new spaces for thinking about food and politics in contemporary Australia.

Chapter 1

Cultivating Sovereignty

Agriculture, Racism and the Problem of Settling Australia

The Land naturly produces hardly anything fit for man to eat and the Native knows nothing of Cultivation.

– Captain James Cook, 1770 (1963, 50)

The farmer, the surf lifesaver and the soldier: these are Australia’s icons. Resolute, yet good-humoured. Bronzed and lean. Masculine by definition. These men carved out a nation from the bush, the beach and the battlefield. Their heroic acts, whether resulting in success or miserable failure, combined to make Australia what it is. Or so the story goes. In recent years, the hagiographic quality of some of these narratives has been questioned. There have been numerous critical reappraisals of the soldier in Australian nation-building myths. The surfer and farmer, however, have not received comparable attention.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the beach provided a space for the birth of a new white race and a new egalitarian politics. According to historian Grant Rodwell, ‘the healthy, virile masses gathering at Manly, Bondi, Coogee, and the other famous surfing attractions’ helped to establish the myth ‘about the egalitarianism of the developing Australian racial type’ (1999, 60). On the beach, a person’s wealth, class and clothing did not matter. What did matter however, was their strength, health and virility. Rodwell contends that ‘early advocates of surf culture were attracted to this culture because of its perceived eugenic attributes’ (1999, 60). Harvey Sutton, a leader in racial hygiene and preventive medicine in Australia during the 1930s (Anderson 2002, 168–69), helped establish surf lifesaving clubs and was also a judge at a Manly beach beauty pageant in 1931 (Rodwell 1999, 62). Sutton and other eugenicists encouraged beach culture as it not only strengthened ‘the physical side of the Australian racial development but also because of its unique contributions to mental hygiene’ (1999, 63).

Aileen Moreton-Robinson has critically examined the figure of the surf lifesaver in the popular imaginary of Australian beach life to disrupt and question the white nation. Emerging in 1907, the surf lifesaver policed the beach to ensure the safety of swimmers while disciplining their own bodies through military training drills. The surf lifesaver literally and figuratively regulated the bodies that belonged on the beach and how they were to act. Like Rodwell, Moreton-Robinson suggests that the ‘surf lifesaver’s discipline, strength, bravery, mateship, loyalty, and rigor embodied the attribute of white national identity’ (2015, 38).

The surf lifesaver is also part of a wider network and history that has possessed the beach as a place of belonging for white bodies. Racial tensions over what bodies belong on the beach violently erupted in the 2005 Cronulla Beach riots. Bodies of ‘Middle-Eastern appearance’ and foreign practices such as soccer provoked fearful and possessive responses. The white Australian rioters marked their bodies with slogans – ‘Respect locals or piss off’ and ‘We grew here: you flew here’ – and etched ‘100% Aussie Pride’ into the sand of Cronulla beach. It is not only the bodies of nonwhite migrants that provoke possessive responses; Aboriginal bodies also trouble the order of the Australian beach. As Moreton-Robinson notes, ‘Aboriginal surfers are out of place; they are not white in need of a tan, they belong in the landscape in the middle of Australia’ (2015, 45). From the landing of the First Fleet to the sunbathers at Bondi or rioters at Cronulla, the beach ‘remains a heteronormative white masculine space entailing performances of sexuality, wealth, voyeurism, class, and possession’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 37). These historical and contemporary performances function to make the beach home, a place of belonging, and to establish ontological proprietorship for white Australia.

This chapter extends Moreton-Robinson’s analysis of white possession of the beach, to examine the role of the farmer and agriculture in possessing the continent. Although farming and rural life occasionally attract derision in popular discourse (Brett 2011), its role in the settler-colonial myth of nation-building is repeatedly celebrated in film, music, literature and politics. The countryside and the bush, writes Don Watson, is where ‘the real Australians live’ (2014, 94). The existence of these real Australians – the bushman and the farmer – authenticates and deepens urban-dwelling Australians’ claim to the continent. As will be shown below, the taming of bush and cultivation of the land not only furthered sovereign possession, but also transformed Australia into a new home for white Europeans.

The celebration of the farmer’s possessive and home-creating work, however, has masked their role in settler-colonial violence. As such, they have not received sufficient critical attention in popular or scholarly analyses. This silence is striking considering the special place Patrick Wolfe gives agriculture in his influential account of settler-colonial violence. Wolfe argues that agriculture, unlike extractive industries, has ‘a rational means/ends calculus that is geared to vouchsafing its own reproduction, generating capital that projects into a future where it repeats itself’ (2006, 395). Although mining only lasts as long as minerals remain to be extracted, agriculture has a permanence. Farmers put down literal and metaphorical roots. They don’t flee to Canada when the British come, as was Thomas Jefferson’s concern with urban workers, or rush from Victoria to Queensland in search of new gold deposits. Furthermore, agriculture ‘enables a population to be expanded by continuing immigration at the expense of native lands and livelihoods’ (Wolfe 2006, 395). In so doing, agriculture ‘progressively eats into Indigenous territory’ for its own reproduction while simultaneously curtailing ‘the reproduction of Indigenous modes of production’ (Wolfe 2006, 395). This dynamic forces Indigenous people to either enter the new economy, usually in the form of unfree labour, or raid farms for food, which Wolfe notes is ‘the classic pretext for colonial death-squads’ (Wolfe 2006, 395). However, the violent dispossession of Indigenous Australians did not occur simply because they were ‘in the way’ of agriculture or killed a few sheep. The violence towards Indigenous Australians and disregard for their prior claim to possession of lands also was enabled through a new form of racism.

Colonial Foucault and the Birth of Biopolitical Racism

In the Society Must Be Defended lectures (1975–1976), Foucault introduces the notion of ‘state racism’. This is distinct from the age-old racism that hates ethnic others. State racism certainly uses old ideas of race hatred, but it emerges with, and deploys, medical and evolutionary discourses to justify the death (or exclusion) of the biologically weak in order to strengthen and protect a specific population. Foucault defines state racism as that which ‘justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or population’ (2004, 261–62). Rather than use state racism, I prefer to use biopolitical racism. First, using ‘state’ as a qualifier on ‘racism’ is too state-centric and does not account for the plurality of relations, knowledges and mechanisms that Foucault himself identifies as contributing to the racism of biopolitical societies. The phenomena that ‘state racism’ describes occur through networks of relations and modes of government that operate beyond the narrow juridical confines of what is often thought of as ‘the state’. For example, in his lectures from the previous year, Abnormal (1974–1975), Foucault charts the way psychiatry instituted a new ‘racism against the abnormal’ (2003, 316). He elaborates that ‘this neoracism’ operates as ‘the internal means of defense of a society against its abnormal individuals’ (2003, 316). A second reason why I prefer biopolitical racism to state racism is that the idea of the state in colonial context is ambiguous. The authority and strategies of governance in the colonial period came from a plurality of sources, including the Crown and British Parliament, but also the military, the Church, medical societies, administrators, pastoralists, journalists, bankers, and so on. Each of these sources contributes to racialised rationalities of governance that seek to protect and foster a specific population from internal and external threats. As such, I will use biopolitical racism rather than state racism or just racism to designate the way the life of a population is regulated and normalised via the identification and exclusion of weaker, abnormal or inferior others.

Whereas Foucault was primarily focused on the rise of biopolitical racism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social reform movements in Europe, biopolitical racism was deeply enmeshed with colonialism. The development and implementation of biopolitics in Europe is intimately connected to colonial expansion. Yet it would be a mistake to think that these ideas and practices were simply exported from Europe to the colonies. Foucault, and others such as Arendt (2017), described a ‘boomerang effect’ where the exported European jurdico-political structures were transformed in the colonies and that a ‘whole series of colonial models’ were ‘brought back’ (2004, 103). Despite these remarks on colonialism in the Society Must Be Defended lectures, Foucault did not fully account for the interconnection between Europe and the colonies in his analyses of racism and sexuality. Ann Laura Stoler righty critiques Foucault’s account of discourse of racism and technologies of sexuality in Europe for missing the colonies as ‘key sites in the production of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided contrasts for what a “healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body” was all about’ (1995, 7). That is, it was in the colony that white, bourgeois and healthy subjects were conceptualised. On this point, it is worth noting that Bentham, Malthus and Darwin – social reformers who influenced the implementation of biopolitical strategies – all had significant interest in the new southern colonies. Their interest not only shaped life in the colonies but life at the heart of the British Empire. Notwithstanding the limitation of Foucault’s analyses, like Stoler, I believe his work ‘offers ways to rethink the colonial order’, particularly in relation to biopolitical racism (1995, 13).

Biopolitical racism can result in the violence of colonial death squads, but its most devastating effects are less obvious and more widespread. Although the British may have established legal sovereignty over the continent through Cook’s initial claim of Possession Island in 1770 – which was subsequently reinforced by Captain Phillip hoisting the flag and clearing some land on 26 January 1788 – the occupation of the land and creation of a governable population was a much longer process. In colonial Australia, we see the emergence of the biopolitical racism Foucault describes in the­­ Society Must Be Defended lectures. Foucault argues that from the seventeenth century the mode of political power shifts from sovereignty – ‘the ancient right to take life or let live’ – to biopolitics – ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (1998, 138). According to Foucault, biopolitics exceeds the sovereign politics of the Crown, which claims possession of a territory and authority over the subjects within that territory. Whereas sovereignty is occupied with juridical questions of legitimacy and right, biopolitics is occupied with medical and scientific knowledge in managing the conditions of life and enabling the growth of healthy and productive populations. For instance, biopolitics is focused on measuring and controlling the vital signs of the population through statistics of birth rates, death, distribution of disease and population growth.

However, if biopolitics is a politics of life, asks Foucault, a politics that is entwined with the liberal-democratic project that holds freedom, reason and the rule of law as ideals (even if imperfectly enacted), then ‘how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations?’ (2004, 257). Foucault’s answer: ‘By using the thesis of evolutionism, by appealing to racism’ (2004, 257). This is not the specific evolutionary theory of Darwin, but a broader evolutionary ‘style of reasoning’ that included a constellation of ideas such as degeneracy, heredity, purity, development, improvement, all of which blur the lines between the biological, moral and political (Hacking 1992). Furthermore, the violence generated by biopolitical racism is not necessarily the bloody and intentional violence of death squads. Rather, it is structural and infuses a social reality to become the normal order of things (Mayes 2010). It is not even necessarily malevolent and may give rise to a sense of pity and sincere concern for those whose lives require exclusion from the whole. This evolutionary style of reasoning gave rise to biopolitical techniques and institutions that aimed to protect the population from the ill and dangerous – for example, sterilization via the public hygiene programs of the eugenics movement and practices of excluding sections of the population in asylums, poorhouses and orphanages.

The biopolitical management and control of the life of the population uses a generalised conception of racism. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault asks, ‘What in fact is racism?’ He responds in arguing it is ‘primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (2004, 254). Racism is a means of separating groups within a population, designating some as ‘good’ and others as ‘inferior’ based on epidemiological, medical, pedagogical and psychological knowledges. Racial interventions into a population are not simply based on ethnicity and phenotypic difference. As mentioned, biopolitical racism emerges in conjunction with the advancement of the life sciences and development of the modern nation-state.

In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault writes that biopolitical racism produced a variety of interventions designed to protect and promote the life of the population that involved

a whole politics of settlement (peuplement), family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concerning with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race. (Foucault 1998)

The racism of the Nazi regime is the most obvious and extreme example of these biopolitical dynamics seeking to protect racial purity. However, Foucault traces the same biopolitical logics to nineteenth-century social reform movements and public hygiene campaigns associated with the birth of the welfare state (2000). As such, biopolitical racism cannot be reduced to brutal authoritarian regimes, but it is pervasive in shaping the welfare institutions of liberal democracies and their involvement in settler and exploitative colonialism.

As Warwick Anderson observes in colonial Australia, nineteenth-century medicine ‘was as much a discourse of settlement as it was a means of knowing and mastering disease’ (2002, 4). Doctors would advise communities on ‘hygienic behaviour and civilized conduct’ as well as appropriate ways to ‘inhabit a place’ as a member of the white race (Anderson 2002, 4). ‘Race and environment’, writes Anderson, ‘jostled together in the civic vision’ (2002, 4). The interconnection between race, environment and civic vision is a theme to be explored throughout this book.

With this background we can examine the biopolitical racism...