My dissertation appears at the interstices of the relatively recent explosion of cross-disciplinary and more popular talk about twenty-first century US agriculture. Whilst interdisciplinary scholarly and more commercial texts, including film representations, seek to expose a myriad of issues related to conventional-industrial agriculture and its central driver, commodity corn monocropping, I contend that many of these works also put forth a particular geography of US agriculture as inveterately geographically bifurcated a deleterious global , conventional-industrial agricultural harvest-through-consumption paradigm, set against a purportedly more healthful organic, and often increasingly local , alternative. My project thus seeks to examine, through the lens of post-structuralist geography, today's most readily available and widely accepted imaginary of US agriculture as both divided global-local and mapped with accordant values. In due course, I craft and propose a post-structuralist geography ethic, ever mindful of proposals for integrating the best agricultural tools available today, for likewise reading and representing US foodways beyond divisive mappings; for moving toward assemblage of agricultural discourse and representation.In order to perform such an analysis, my dissertation first outlines the location and function of what I argue is the most significant geographical imaginary available for understanding American agriculture through time and across geography: agrarianism. Through the lens of relational geographical precepts, I set-up the project's central rubric for understanding the shape and function of American agrarian discourse from inception through the mid-twentieth century. Thereby, my dissertation can explore the most popular geographical imaginary of US agriculture that has come to the fore since WWII, i.e., neoagrarianism . I contend that the new agrarianism, while in no way unrelated to American agrarianism through space-time, even so has been most notably and particularly reconfigured and proposed over the last thirty years by popular agrarian, Wendell Berry. Now, neoagrarianism continues to proliferate through a diverse set of writings and representations which nevertheless manage to forward a rather uniform imaginary of global-local division, and associated principles and critiques, wildly popularized and disseminated by writers like Michael Pollan. Not just in writing and discourse, by the close of the dissertation I also perform analysis of how the new agrarianism extends into other popular texts, namely the documentary film. I consider the flourishing of popular new agrarian documentaries; how the singular media of documentary, when spatialized through a neoagrarian imaginary, can inculcate significant material food spectatorships, performances and projects which, given their pervasive influence on debates surrounding consumer choice and US food labeling law, require more scholarly treatment. Ultimately, it is through such extended, post-structuralist geography analysis of the preeminent imaginary of US agriculture, altogether oriented by and informative of interdisciplinary US agriculture, cultural studies and geography scholarships, that my dissertation presents and reviews the central tenants of a novel quasi-agrarian proposal for reading and representation. Quasi-agrarianism seeks a confrontation and revision of how we imagine, see and perform American food geographies today.
Read
