Rice, Stian2022-03-012022-03-012022-02-02Stian Rice (2022) Divide and cultivate: The role of prisons and Indian reservations in U.S. agricultural imperialism, Food and Foodways, DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2022.2030935https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2022.2030935http://hdl.handle.net/11603/24336This paper examines the spatial history of U.S. food production through the evolution of two carceral spaces: rural penitentiaries and Indian reservations. These sites have long provided opportunities to spatially fix surplus labor and capital in U.S. agriculture: from the confinement of Indians during settler colonialism, through the regulation of labor surpluses after Reconstruction, to the present-day expansion of convict leasing to backfill migrant labor shortages. This paper challenges traditional framings of prisons and reservations as peripheries excluded from core landscapes of food production and consumption. Instead, these ‘carceral fixes’ participate in specially mediated relationships with ‘free’ agriculture—relationships that respond to the crisis-driven demands of capital and currents of racism and nativism. Within the U.S. food system, this flexibility has made prisons and reservations indispensable for spatially fixing not only capital and labor, but racial violence. Through these relationships, the indirect violence of falling farm prices is translated into the direct violence of physical and mental abuse, exploitation, alienation, diabetes, and malnutrition. Critically, this state-mediated violence is redirected from white to non-white bodies.20 pagesen-USThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Food and Foodways on 02 Feb 2022, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07409710.2022.2030935Access to this item will begin on date 8/2/23Text