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Alternative settlers (again, on gastro-settler colonialism): Angie Sassano, ‘Between gourds and saltbush: the politics of race, coloniality, and recognition in Australia’s alternative food movements’, Agriculture and Human Values, 43, 2026, #14

29Dec25

Abstract: Although there has been much attention paid to the racial dynamics of food movements across North America, there has been little attention paid to race and colonialism in Australia’s alternative food movements. I focus on the conflation of race and Indigeneity through cosmopolitan and multicultural food practices of recognition that comes to limit more radical possibilities for Indigenous sovereignties. Therefore, this paper asks how whiteness structures everyday alternative food relations and mediates efforts to disrupt settler logics. I draw on fieldwork conducted at urban market gardens in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, to explore how settler food actors come to understand whiteness and (de)colonization in food practices, and how such dynamics are both disrupted and (often unintentionally) reinscribed through liberal paradigms of recognition. The paper frames whiteness as a colonial construct which facilitates the political conditions of alternative food practices to organize and govern whose (and how) knowledges and practices are made to matter. I argue that while well-intentioned, participants recognize that such efforts of inclusion and recognition are bound by broader settler governmentalities which risk potentially undermining creative forms of resistance.


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