Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

In the context of food monopolies and big agri-food domination in South Africa, the “New Food Movements” in SA do not change the structures of land ownership or food production and distribution. This paper argues, however, that the subjectivities of black urban food gardeners – many of whom are young men – evokes a new “African imaginary” and a form of indigenous spirituality through their re-connection with the earth in their food gardens. In an ethnographic case study of one urban township in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape province of South Africa, this paper examines the young men who articulate this anti-capitalist sensibility or “disposition” that gestures at new subjectivities in a poorer urban neighbourhood. A new sense of time and space resides in the “cool gardener” image which negates the conspicuous consumption of fast capitalism while simultaneously producing “cool” urban imaginaries. “Cool gardeners” have a new sense of time and space that espouses “vernacular environmentalism,” distinct from middle class forms of environmentalism.