Introduction

Farm media: An introduction

“…Wang argues that these agricultural development strategies perpetuate longstanding internal settler colonialism by the Han majority, subjecting ethnic minorities to increasing social control under the guise of poverty alleviation and environmentalist projects. Here and elsewhere, the farm is a critical site of intervention across developmentalist regimes not only because it anchors economic markets and social reproduction, but also because it helps stabilize the representational terrain of “reproductive futurism” across different geographies, including the nation-state (Marez, 2016: 9).…”

“…The representation and erasure of farm laborers in the United States, often precariously employed immigrants, have also been well-historicized, from US immigration policies designed to ensure deportable and thus exploitable labor (Ngai, 2004) to the documentation of deplorable labor conditions (Films Media Group, 2010; George, 2020) and the media practices of farmworker movements (Gunckel, 2015; Lopez, 2013; Mann, 2019). Curtis Marez (2016) offers a rich model for undertaking this work on farm subjects at the crossroads of media and critical agrarian studies in Farm Worker Futurism . He rehistoricizes farmworker organizing by exploring how the United Farm Workers used visual technologies to interrupt and resist “agribusiness relations of looking,” which dominate workers through scopophilia (pleasure in looking) and epistemophilia (pleasure in knowing) (86).…”