TY - JOUR

T1 - Mondialisation and the immanent critical potential of food

T2 - 25 Years of French Cultural Studies

AU - Cruickshank, Ruth

PY - 2014/10/16

Y1 - 2014/10/16

N2 - Mobilising the immanent critical potential of food as well as of Derrida’s deconstruction of mondialisation with its interruption of totalising understandings of globalisation, this article reexamines Luc Moullet’s 1978 documentary Genèse d’un repas which follows how tuna from Senegal, eggs from Amiens and Ecuadorian bananas reach French plates. Eurocentric Marxist and post-Marxist analyses of these economic flows are bought at once into focus and into question. The analysis uncovers imbricated histories of European exploitation (the slave trade, colonialism, la Françafrique). Commercial (Banania) and literary intertexts (Senghor and Fanon) evoked by misleading branding reveal a world of European racism still in process. Although self-reflexive, Moullet’s filmmaking is also open to critical interruption. Nonetheless, the film emerges as an immanent critique of the specificities of historical and evolving power relations of both filmmaking and the historical, cultural and economic processes of the Eurocentric food industry, interrupting the universalising dynamics of globalisation.

AB - Mobilising the immanent critical potential of food as well as of Derrida’s deconstruction of mondialisation with its interruption of totalising understandings of globalisation, this article reexamines Luc Moullet’s 1978 documentary Genèse d’un repas which follows how tuna from Senegal, eggs from Amiens and Ecuadorian bananas reach French plates. Eurocentric Marxist and post-Marxist analyses of these economic flows are bought at once into focus and into question. The analysis uncovers imbricated histories of European exploitation (the slave trade, colonialism, la Françafrique). Commercial (Banania) and literary intertexts (Senghor and Fanon) evoked by misleading branding reveal a world of European racism still in process. Although self-reflexive, Moullet’s filmmaking is also open to critical interruption. Nonetheless, the film emerges as an immanent critique of the specificities of historical and evolving power relations of both filmmaking and the historical, cultural and economic processes of the Eurocentric food industry, interrupting the universalising dynamics of globalisation.

KW - Moullet

KW - Food

KW - French cinema

KW - globalisation

KW - mondialisation

KW - Derrida

KW - Genèse d’un repas

KW - postcolonialism

U2 - 10.1177/0957155814532198

DO - 10.1177/0957155814532198

M3 - Article

VL - 25

SP - 366

EP - 377

JO - French Cultural Studies

JF - French Cultural Studies

SN - 0957-1558

IS - 3-4

Y2 - 29 May 2013 through 30 May 2013

ER -