Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism. Edited by Laura Wright
2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/isle/isaa007
ISSN1759-1090
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies
ResumoIn Through a Vegan Studies Lens, Laura Wright furthers the academic field of vegan studies that she initiated in The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (2015), a book I described as “intimate and moving” in my 2016 ISLE review (645). In Through a Vegan Studies Lens, Wright provides an impressive series of essays on the field, including a new work from Carol J. Adams, “The Sexual Politics of Meat in the Trump Era.” The collection’s fourteen essays have been usefully divided into sections on “Expanding Ecocriticism(s)” (theorization), “In the United States” (contemporary/political), and “Beyond the West” (global perspectives), as well as a final section of cultural readings on “Hypocrites and Hipsters” (cultural/pedagogical). Averaging between fifteen and twenty pages each, these essays are quick-reading and engaging as they give valuable readings of culture … through a vegan studies lens. This collection has something for everyone to savor. In “Vegans in Locavore Literature,” Kathryn Kirkpatrick interrogates the locavore writings of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Novella Carpenter as they unvaryingly establish vegans as “Others” to further their own locavore messages. Tom Hertweck analyzes the film Soylent Green (1973) and vegan food replacement drink Soylent in “Soylent Veganism: A Meditation on Cannibalism, Consumerism, and Veg Politics.” In the essay, he reconsiders food and resources in a postmodern, postcapitalist world through vegan studies. In “Nonviolence through Veganism: An Antiracist Postcolonial Strategy for Healing, Agency, and Respect,” Shanti Chu explores the work of A. Breeze Harper, Franz Fanon, and Mahatma Gandhi; she argues for veganism as powerful site of resistance with which marginalized groups to cultivate their own agency. The final essay, “Meatless Mondays?: A Vegan Studies Approach to Resistance in the College Classroom,” provides a pedagogical model of a vegan studies class project. Natalie M. Dorfield candidly assesses the strengths and weaknesses of her experiment, considering what she would change in future iterations. This is a helpful addition to the collection, bridging the theoretical and applied in a way that will prove worthwhile for students and teachers alike.
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