Beth Kamunge is a black-feminist food scholar in the Geography doctoral program at the University of Sheffield. Greg de St. Maurice and Beth Forrest interviewed Beth Kamunge in March 2018.
Beth Kamunge
What first brought you into the ASFS fold?
One of my supervisors Prof. Peter Jackson (“Prof” below) informed me about Food, Culture, and Society in the first year of my PhD, after which I became a subscriber to the journal and ASFS listserv. Since then I have solicited and shared entries for bibliographies on (click on hyperlinks to view) Feminist Food Studies; anti-racist feminist work on local food politics; and feminist literatures on kitchen politics.
We’d like to hear about your PhD research.
In my thesis I am exploring what difference it would make to feminist food politics debates if we centred black women’s perspectives and experiences. Initially this was not what my research started out being about. But in the process of doing literature reviews for my question at the time, I felt a sense of facing epistemic violence in reading some works. The motive for my research therefore was personal frustration in reading academic food-related work that tended to either speak to ‘race and food’, or ‘gender/women and food’ but rarely attended to both. I remember one of the last straws (so to speak) being a time I read a book about ‘women’s food experiences’, where there was one sentence in the whole book that mentioned that no women of colour participated in the research. I remember being so upset to read a book that claimed to speak to ‘women’s food experiences’, and yet include only white women and not think to say any more than a single sentence as to why women of colour were not able or willing to participate. I remember having a very lively conversation with Prof where I was genuinely wondering how is it that we (anti-racist/feminist scholars) are still having the conversation that white women’s experiences do not speak for all women? It reminded me of the question Audre Lorde asked thirty years ago, “how many times has this been said before?” (1984: 117). But I use the distinctions Sandra Harding (1987, 1992) and others make on method, methodology and epistemology to make the case that centering black women’s perspectives is not first or only a methodological question but an epistemological question.
Theoretically, I am in complete agreement and totally sympathetic to the question Psyche-Williams Forson and Wilkerson (2011: 11) ask namely: “What happens to Food Studies if you put intersectionality at the centre?” However, they were writing in 2011, and I am coming into this question from the other side, having sat at the feet of ‘Aunty Maxine’ who taught me to ‘reclaim my time.’ I feel that my contribution is not to restate the plea for intersectional approaches (much as I support those pleas), but to ask a different question. I am therefore making the bold claim that you cannot be an academic feminist and not know the concept of intersectionality. To be clear I am not saying that everything about black-feminisms should be well known to all academic feminists—an impossible task. But conversations about intersectionality were so defining to 1980s and early-1990s feminist movements as to literally constitute a ‘crisis’ point of sort that led to a new ‘wave’ of feminisms. My starting point is therefore to say, let us instead talk about epistemologies of ignorance. I do this in two ways: first a self-reflexive discussion about the field (or discipline if you prefer) of (feminist) food studies; and then secondly looking beyond the field, to empirically think about, if we challenge various modes of ignorance in food-related discussions by incorporating black women’s voices, what difference would it make? The premise is that it is not just that you get different answers (i.e. questioning the received wisdom) but also that the questions we ask as feminist food scholars change. I have completed an interactive (though not participatory—despite major overlaps in approaches) year of fieldwork and analysis and I am currently writing up.
Your Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees were in Law. How has this academic training informed your current work? What made you migrate to geography and food studies?
This question made me laugh because I say more and more that I am not a geographer, to which Prof responds “but you are getting a PhD in Geography.” My initial move to Geography was not calculated. I was interested in using food as a lens to study what initially was a question about social justice movements. This question was informed by the six years I spent working as an Advocacy Program Officer with Indigenous East-African communities who had been displaced from their lands, and were using food and property rights to fight back.
My formal legal training was very Positivist. It is really telling, for example, that the we did Criminal Law modules and never once was the idea that the law was applied ‘objectively’ questioned. Moreover, we did not even learn about the works of people like Kimberle Crenshaw, herself a legal scholar and others, despite the fact that we had modules on legal theories. Even at the time, as a black immigrant working-class woman, I felt that there was something missing from my education, but I did not have the language or resources to articulate it. Moreover, often students of colour are gas-lit with narratives of progress (‘things are so much better now for people of colour, so why are you still complaining’).
I think my Law training served to give me a really transformative job after Graduate school that allowed me to affirm my concerns that law and justice were not the same thing, and that all knowledge is situated. The job also allowed me to begin unlearning what I got from academia in order to rebuild what I now understand. For example, it was within the context of my work that I learnt that all knowledge comes from somewhere, and is not value neutral—and recognising this makes our knowledge claims stronger rather than weaker. My experiences also make me really energised to see student movements in the UK and elsewhere like “Why is My Curriculum White?/ Why isn’t my professor black?[7]”. My legal training gives me great empathy for these questions and part of my experience as a doctoral researcher has been to mentor young students of colour who come to me with concerns about these issues (speaking to the unpaid emotional labour that academic women of colour are asked to engage with out of love and care). My legal training also gives me the transferable skills to be fluent in two canons. The basics of being a good lawyer is that you have to understand the other side’s case so well, and put it to them so fairly that they would agree with you. I find that I have to be fluent in Eurocentric, masculinist canons which allows one to be taken ‘seriously’, as well as being fluent in the canons that give my soul and my thesis life—and being able to use the latter works to critique the former.
My hesitation to identify as a food geographer without the prefix “black-feminist” (i.e. black-feminist food geographer) has to do with Geography’s unwillingness to sit with discomfort and think through colonialist tendencies. Of course there are exceptions, and scholars to whom I am indebted who are actively critiquing how knowledge is produced and legitimised in Geography (e.g. Audrey Kobayashi, Linda Peake, Patricia Noxolo, Azeezat Johnson, Katherine McKittrick), but they would all support what I am saying, and in fact most also identify as black-feminist geographers, so that itself is interesting (for example, see papers written in the lead to the Royal Geographical Society with IBG 2017 meeting’s theme of decolonisation, and the harm that comes from treating ‘decolonisation’ as metaphor in Geography).
As a black-feminist food geographer, what texts from the field have shaped your thinking the most?
In terms of Geography I quite enjoy the works of Rachel Slocum and Julie Guthman that are at the intersection of whiteness, food and space. In my work I make reference to various black-feminist and critical race scholars and philosophers (Psyche Williams-Forson, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Charles W. Mills, Kristie Dotson, Brittney Cooper and others).
We saw that in 2016 you gave a presentation titled “Eating as a research method.” Could you tell us a bit more about that?
The products are made of natural ingredients that all helpful to overcome the problem of PE. order cheap viagra Now we have thirteen years of statistics, what was suspected is confirmed. buy viagra http://secretworldchronicle.com/2015/06/ You can see the medicine facilitating with a name of the blood test which is used to determine the levels of love viagra from canada pharmacy making. Constipation is characterized by three or less than three times per week would be classed as as viagra on line having constipation symptoms. In my project, I was very heavily influenced by feminist work on visceral methods in the context of food research (e.g. see Probyn, 2002; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2010; Hayes-Conroy, 2010; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010; Brady, 2011). These works argue that food should not just be the object of research, but also the means of inquiry. They make the case that having food as part of the research is one way to negate the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy as feminist scholars. The strength of these works overall, is in the case that they make for food as part of research. The paucity is in thinking about what it actually looks like practically. The different works above either have participants engaging with the food whilst the researchers observed or helped to stir something once in a while, or the engaging with food was amongst the researchers themselves who then did autobiographical reflections of their experience. My research was in three phases: a dialogue with participants over a shared meal at a location of their choice (on average 90 minutes); the second phase where participants chose the activity for us to do e.g. visits to farmer’s markets, hanging out at participants allotments, food shopping in city council markets and so on; and finally, research within the kitchens of participants where we cooked and ate together (on average this last encounter lasted 4 hours). The conference presentation you reference was my first attempt to think out loud about it actually means theoretically and practically to lead with food in anti-racist feminist research.
Could you tell us about how your family’s background in agriculture (your parents and grandparents farmed) and your early work experience in Kenya inform your current research?
I always highlight that I am the daughter, sister and granddaughter of farmers as part of further situating where my knowledge is coming from. But I find myself, at this stage of my career, being very protective of bringing my family into academia. This is only because I have witnessed, (especially on Twitter), how trolls (including academic ones) structurally target female academics of colour in vicious ways. It is something I would like to do more in future. I really enjoy and look up to how Lisa Heldke writes about her family. As part of experience as a doctoral researcher, I set up a reading group that attracted doctoral researchers and academic staff from various departments in the university with an interest in food research. We met up monthly and would discuss an assigned paper over a meal at the home of usually one of the more senior academics. I remember the time we met to discuss Lisa Heldke’s (2016) Proust-like reflections of butter and memories of her dead father. It was so beautiful and the room was so still, and it almost felt like all we could say was “thank you” in response. In my work I think I’m beginning to make some hints about my family, in the chapter of my dissertation on kitchens as consciousness-raising spaces, for example. This is the chapter that had the most resonance for me when I think of how everything that I know about black-feminisms I learnt in the kitchens of my mama, my aunties and grandmamas—academia just gave me the shortcut language. Perhaps with the privilege of tenure, I will be able to have some of these conversations more explicitly.
Thanks for the questions!
Further reading:
Hayes-Conroy, A. (2010). Feeling Slow Food: Visceral fieldwork and empathetic research relations in the alternative food movement. Geoforum, 41(5), 734-742. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.04.005
Hayes-Conroy, A., & Hayes-Conroy, J. (2008). Taking back taste: Feminism, food and visceral politics. Gender, Place and Culture, 15(5), 461-473. doi:10.1080/09663690802300803
Hayes-Conroy, A., & Hayes-Conroy, J. (2010). Visceral difference: Variations in feeling (slow) food. Environment and Planning A, 42(12), 2956-2971. doi:10.1068/a4365
Heldke, L. (2016). My dead father’s raspberry path, my dead mother’s piecrust: understanding memory as sense. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 16(2), 87-91.
Heldke, L. M. (2003). E : ruminations of a food adventurer. New York ; London: New York ; London : Routledge, 2003.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider : essays and speeches. Freedom, CA: Freedom, CA : The Crossing Press, c1984.