Black place-making for sovereignty and survival: politicizing the distribution of food from farm to the city

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Race and Place

Abstract

The field of black geographies is at the forefront of highlighting how Black people encounter structural racism in their environments and resist racial domination through their subjective experiences and the material transformation of these places. The expression of Black agency through spatial interventions and transformations serves as a foundation for my research on food sovereignty organizing in New York State. Through 3 years of ethnographic research on two Black-led organizations—a worker cooperative oriented around sourcing and distributing food from farmers within New York City and a vegetable and grain farm located in Upstate New York—my paper explores how Black placemaking takes the form of intervention in the relations to land in food production and the infrastructures, both material and intangible, of food distribution. From the worker cooperative’s focus on establishing new distribution infrastructure that supports Black, LGBTQIA+, and cooperative farms, to the farm’s use of food production and distribution as a platform for organizing around the inhumanities of incarceration, my research demonstrates the centrality of land-based struggle for food system transformation.
This paper forms part of a larger work on how this politicization of the food system represents a legacy of a “politics of survival” in the Black Radical Tradition. Efforts to transform spatial relations are a foundation of this politicization of how basic needs like food, water, and housing are distributed. As we imagine futures for a food system grounded in solidarity and non-exploitation, political interventions in the spatial relations of the food system will remain an essential focus of research.

Author

• Olutoyin Demuren, New York University