Colonialism and Animality (Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities) by Kelly Struthers Montford & Chloë Taylor

Author:Kelly Struthers Montford & Chloë Taylor [Montford, Kelly Struthers & Taylor, Chloë]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-03-01T23:00:00+00:00

Conclusions: for a contextual, relational, and ontological veganism

According to Johanna Oksala, “Ontology is politics that has forgotten itself.”135 Building on a Foucauldian view of ontology as political, the previous sections have demonstrated that food ontologies are invested in power struggles. Specifically, we have argued that the dominant Western food ontology underpins the political logic of settler colonialism, while the food ontologies of alternative food movements such as carnist locavorisms are invested in a politics of purity and human supremacy, as well as political investments in ability, gender, race, and class privilege. Plumwood’s own food ontology—according to which everything living is food (although none of it is, or should be, meat)—is, we contend, also political, in so far as she collapses edibility and food, but draws lines between food and meat, in ways that reflect her political investments in environmental, animal, feminist, and Indigenous politics, as well as her particular ways of hierarchizing these agendas when they come into conflict.

Unlike Plumwood, we do not think that ontological veganism is necessarily imperialist or racist. Drawing on postcolonial critical animal studies scholars such as Maneesha Deckha, we would point out that veganism remains a marginalized diet in Western countries, and is thus far from a vehicle of Western imperialism. Western food imperialism has not spread veganism to non-Western countries or to Indigenous domestic populations; rather, it has imposed animal agriculture, animal foods, and factory farming on cultures whose diets have traditionally been plant-based, replacing relational hunting and sacred eating practices with the deaded life of animal agriculture. As Deckha writes, arguments about veganism as food imperialism

discount the enormous amounts of plant and land resources that are required to sustain current Western levels of flesh consumption and ignore the richness of non-Western flesh-free food traditions and ideologies of nonviolence toward all living beings. Indeed, these accusations align with the centuries-old majoritarian habit in Western cultures of deriding vegetarianism and, as it has come more into popular consciousness, veganism. What is different (and remarkable) today is that flesh-free diets are impugned for purported imperialist aspirations when they were denounced in the time of British empire-building as markers of anti-imperial and countercultural allegiance. Further… arguments that invoke multiculturalist discourse to disparage vegetarianism/veganism and otherwise sanction cruel animal practices have themselves “gone imperial” in their disregard for animal otherness, vulnerability, and marginalization.136

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