The current and worsening international food crisis has placed food and hunger at the center of pitched debates about energy, international trade, aid and development, and cultural autonomy in a homogenizing global economy. The contemporary food crisis, manifested in spiraling commodity prices, restrictions on food exports and imports, famine, drought, and environmental degradation, is cast as a new phenomenon and a problem for the future. The lack of historical perspective in current debates obscures the roots of contemporary problems in forms of production and consumption grounded in the earliest transnational food exchanges and the policies and politics of empire. Contemporary fears of shortages, as well as of an obesity epidemic, are linked to historical practices: the rise of plantation economies, industrial foodways, gendered divisions of consumption and production, the accumulation of calories by the imperial and post-colonial North, and changing representations of the healthy body.

The Radical History Review seeks papers that work to understand these critical connections. This special issue conceptualizes a radical history of food that places food within broader histories of raced, gendered, and classed applications of power. Food history has enjoyed extraordinary popularity in recent years in the classroom as well in trade and academic publishing. This popularity is partly spurred by recent public fascination in the Global North with the cosmopolitanism and entertainment value of food – often to the exclusion of issues of empire, class, industry, gender, and transnationalism that guided foundational work in the field, including Sidney Mintz’s classic Sweetness and Power (1985).

We argue that food historians must develop their field’s public potential to foster critical engagement with fundamental issues of power, equity, and resistance. How, for example, did imperial imperatives create a nutritional shift, that is, the accumulation of the world’s foodstuffs by the Global North? How has food been politicized in the context of anti-imperial, liberation, and working-class movements? What is the relationship between nationalism, the articulation of authentic foodways, and expectations of women as food producers? How have social realities of feast or famine shaped cultural representations of health, prosperity, and poverty? How have class and ethnicity shaped “taste” over time, and to what extent can social groups with apparently different priorities (e.g., organic products vs. cheap food) ally around issues of nutrition and food safety?

We welcome submissions from scholars with historical perspectives from across the broad spectrum of food studies. We encourage contributors who might address the following issues, among others:

• Food provision and state policy
• The cultural and political economy of food aid
• Imperial foodways and famines
• Industrial food and culinary labor
• Gender, class, and the production/consumption nexus
• National cuisines; transnational exchanges
• Food, poverty, protest, and repression
• Food and the classroom
• Public histories of foodways

We invite submissions that speak to the different elements of the Radical History Review, including works that propose interviews and discussions, media reviews, public history, and historiographic essays.

Procedures for submission of articles:
By June 1, 2009, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish to include in this issue as an attachment to rhr@igc.org with “Issue 110 abstract submission” in the subject line. Authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. If selected, the due date for completed drafts of articles will be Feb. 1, 2010. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 110 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in spring 2011.

Abstract Deadline: June 1, 2009
Email: rhr@igc.org