Description:

While climate fiction has become privileged in the Global North, many Global South environmental texts focus not on climate change itself so much as the complex webs spun by colonialism and racial capitalism. From this vantage, climate change is one among many risk factors, distributed unevenly along geopolitical lines. Perhaps no system better expresses this concatenation of social and environmental risks than the global food system.

This talk situates food––specifically fisheries and foraging––as a point of entry to understand environmental precarity within and beyond South Africa’s Western Cape. Bustling culinary and environmental tourism coincide in this region with hunger and stratification, raising questions of how “environmentalism” connects and disconnects from struggles for social justice. Linking Zakes Mda’s 2005 novel The Whale Caller to contemporary cookbooks and restaurants, this talk follows the changing meanings of endangered mollusks such as abalone: from their role in indigenous foodways, to the 1990s “abalone wars” that entangled small fishers between conservation laws and organized crime, and to the appropriation of “indigenous foods” in eco-gastronomic cuisine. What lessons do fishing, foraging, and fine dining offer for rethinking environmental representation and the relation between hunger and taste?

Ben Jamieson Stanley is a scholar of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, food studies, energy humanities, and contemporary literature. Ben’s work explores how we understand relationships between globalization and environmental precarity, with an emphasis on G​​lobal South environmental narratives. Their first book, Precarious Eating: Narrating Environmental Harm in the Global South (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) highlights the role of food and hunger in contemporary environmental writing from South Africa and India. Ben is now working on a second monograph, tentatively titled Mobilities: Movement and Energy in a Changing South Africa.

In addition to their focus on South African and Indian environmental narratives, Ben writes and teaches on​​ comparative Global South literatures; multiethnic American literature; and topics such as food sovereignty, water access and dam projects, migration, neoliberalism, the global novel, and climate fiction.​​