GHI Hosts Dr. Candace Fujikane and Dr. Anya Zilberstein for 2022 Conference Poverty and Scarcity in Global History

Poverty and Scarcity in Global History, the virtual conference organized by Queen’s University’s Global History Initiative and the University of Glasgow’s Poverty Research Network, successfully concluded on Friday, February 4th, 2022. Throughout its two-day duration, scholars interrogated the interface between poverty, scarcity, and the field of global history through three broad areas: production, power, and affect. In addition to a series of panels, the conference also featured two keynote speakers, Dr. Candace Fujikane from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Dr. Anya Zilberstein of Concordia University.  

Dr. Candace Fujikane wrapped up the first day of the event with her keynote entitled, "Mapping Indigenous Economies of Abundance against Capitalist Economies of Poverty and Scarcity." Her lecture is based on her recently published book Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi, which begins with the central premise "[that] capital fears abundance."  

Dr. Fujikane began her lecture by sketching out the rhetorical regimes and tactics of capital, which have been used to represent the abundant lands of Wai'anae as wastelands so that capital can seize control of the means of production. As Dr. Fujikane explains, despite the abundance of food grown by farmers and the wealth of the Kanaka Maoli in their familial relationships and ancestral knowledge and practices, the media and developers have depicted the Wai'anae coast as a wasteland, both geographically and culturally, to make way for urban and industrial development. Dr. Fujikane has coined this strategy employed by land developers as "mathematics of subdivision:"  

"cartographies … dismember land into smaller and smaller pieces isolated from one another to the point that each fragment is,  according to the occupying state, no longer agriculturally feasible, culturally significant, or is small enough to be a token easement that can then be built around." 

Dr. Fujikane then provides examples of the "mathematics of subdivision" used by developers to get approval in Hawaii. These are: (1) "phased" archaeological inventory surveys, (2) urban spot zoning, (3) individual sites vs. complexes, and (4) isolation of the project area. 

The latter half of Dr. Fujikane's lecture was dedicated to the ways that the Kanaka Maoli have worked to reclaim ancestral knowledge, how they continue to work against capital, plans for land stewardship, and local efforts against climate change. A major focus is on spiritual journeys and political bus tours, specifically the Huaka'I Kako'o no Wai'anae Environmental Justice Bus Tour, where bus riders learn "how they can stand for the lands and waters both within settler-state governing structures and beyond them." 

Dr. Anya Zilberstein, the second keynote speaker, ended the conference with her lecture "Poor Creatures: Food Aid for People and Other Animals Since the Eighteenth Century." Dr. Zilberstein’s current research examines the influence of animal/livestock husbandry on 18th century food welfare, subsidies, and reform for the criminalized, enslaved, or impoverished. 

Dr. Zilberstein began her keynote with a suggestion to think about "what it might mean to insert non-human animals into our considerations of the global history of indigence and of structural inequalities."  

A large portion of Dr. Zilberstein's lecture was dedicated to outlining the broader historical context of 18th century Britain and to arguments for and against food subsidies for people. Dr. Zilberstein explained that a series of military, political, economic, and ecological crises at home and abroad led many 18th century officials, reformers, natural philosophers, and others to think about whether and how the state might begin to provide food aid in a more economical way. She focuses specifically on a few figures, including Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Benjamin Franklin, and Count Rumford. Through an examination of these figures and their writings, Dr. Zilberstein drew parallels between diets for humans, specifically for the poor, and diets for non-human animals.  

In the lattermost section of her keynote, Dr. Zilberstein connected her research to modern industrial farming practices and summarized her main point. Dr. Zilberstein acknowledges that earlier efforts in the 18th century to transform human and animal diets from the top-down were not large-scale nor widespread and mostly remained in the arena of public debate, in print culture, or in private discussion. However, she emphasizes the importance of studying 18th-century food debates and experiments as they anticipate several features of modern industrial farming and food science. These include the use of laboratory animals, the ubiquity of corn and now soy derivatives in feedlots, processed foods, prison rations, ready-to-eat military meals, and emergency food aid packages for addressing global food insecurity. Dr. Zilberstein ends her lecture by concluding,  

"Looking at these policy debates over the long term highlights an enduring sentiment underlying debates about government subsidies for the poor. They reveal a moment when elites, who sought to minimize public support for social welfare programs while maximizing oversight of those most in need of them, unabashedly positioned the "wretched poor" in the lower rings of the chain of being alongside, and sometimes well beneath, domesticated animals."   

Both keynote lectures can be viewed on the Department of History’s YouTube Channel.  

Dr. Candace Fujikane is a Professor of English at The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Dr. Fujikane’s research interests include critical settler cartographies, Indigenous knowledges, climate change, and decolonial and abolitionist futures. In 2020, Dr. Fujikane won the Association for Asian American Studies’ Engaged Scholar Award, and in 2021 published her book Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi.

Dr. Anya Zilberstein is a Professor of History at Concordia University. Her research interests include the history of climate science, food sciences and the British Empire, the history of ornithology, and the history of migration and race. Dr. Zilberstein is co-editor of both “Food Matters: Critical Histories of Food and the Sciences” and the special issue “Empowering Appetites: The Political Economy and Culture of Food in the Early Atlantic World” in the journal of Early American Studies. Her current book project is tentatively titled Fodder for Empire: Feeding People Like Other Animals.  

Macy Briand is a third-year student at Queen’s University and a 2022 intern with the Global History Initiative.