Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
Pages: 218
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Trim: 5¾ x 8¾
978-1-78348-606-9 • Hardback • April 2016 • $167.00 • (£129.00)
978-1-78348-607-6 • Paperback • April 2016 • $56.00 • (£43.00)
978-1-78348-608-3 • eBook • April 2016 • $53.00 • (£41.00)
Gabriela Méndez Cota is a post-doctoral researcher at Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Unidad Cuajimalpa.
Acknowledgements / Introduction / 1. Mexican Maize: A Biotechnological Story / 2. Colonial Legacies, Constitutive Disruptions / 3. Resisting Technoscience: The Nationalist Trap / 4. The People of Maize and the Technoscience of Culture / 5. The Gift of Biotechnological Disruption / Index
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The problem is complex and the authors’ ideas are stimulating. There’s no doubt, as the history shows, that growing and eating maize became a political objective for Mexican postrevolutionary governments, and that a sacredness of maize was somehow crafted to achieve that goal.
— Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
Disrupting Maize offers a detailed and innovative examination of the ways in which food both becomes heritage and a focus of political activism. In 2010, Mexican cuisine was added to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage. Méndez Cota maps the complex and dynamic field of dissent and disagreements that challenged the nationalizing narrative represented by the listing. In doing so, she argues that diversity and dissent is an ongoing and integral aspect of intangible heritage. In illustrating the ways in which intangible heritage interconnects with disputes over knowledge production and biotechnological developments and applications the book provides a rare and sophisticated glimpse into the political and cultural complexity of 'living heritage’.
— Laurajane Smith, Professor of Archaeology and Anthroplogy, Australian National University
Contamination is present in all sovereignty and identity is always necessarily transgenic. In the maize wars nationalist desire crosses biotechnical critique on its way to a posited refoundation that cannot know its limits and confuses its core. This fascinating book disrupts biological disruption itself while refusing to give in to endemic cultural moralisms. Its wager for democracy actively dislocates the compromised nostalgia of some emancipatory narratives while resisting the calculation of the future.
— Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University
A unique critical perspective on a paradigmatic case study.
Illustrates how media and cultural studies can mobilize contemporary theoretical resources in order to intervene in public debates
A strong, engaging argument for disciplinary ‘disruption’ in which the latter is not a purely negative exercise of theoretical criticism but rather a contribution to the creation of new fields in specific contexts, in this case the cultural studies of technoscience in Mexico