Cultivating borderland food memories, from field to screen

Bibliographic Data

ID5389014
AuthorsSabiha Ahmad Khan (0000-0001-8986-9324, The University of Texas at El Paso, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume24
Issue1-2
Pages89-115
Publication date2016-04-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFood and Foodways (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0740-9710 • E-ISSN: 1542-3484
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07409710.2016.1150098
OpenAlexW2373366082
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited26

A documentary film producer situates key scenes for her work-in-progress film on youth, culture, and farming near the United States–Mexico border, Remembering How to Eat, in terms of theories of memory, place, and ecology; border studies; cinematic spectatorship; and sensory ethnography. The paper argues that documentaries about food and farming can help render a sense of place-based memory and identity, particularly on the border, which is typically characterized by mobility and transience. Such films can help cultivate a sense of food sovereignty in communities by rendering a multisensory engagement with the culinary and agricultural past. Such engagement includes not solely plants and farming processes but stories, recipes, and folktales. The paper lays the groundwork for a documentary cinematic aesthetic that gleans from these cultural materials a borderland sensorium that treats food and plants as active agents that compel us to act in certain ways. This approach can not only help transmit the multisensory, embodied knowledge of food and agriculture to future generations but sets up a politics that includes the plant world, often seen as mere background, in discussions about climate change that are crucial to our collective agricultural futures

Aesthetics · Agriculture · Art · Business · Collective memory · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Ethnography · Food security · Food sovereignty · Food studies · Futures contract · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law

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