Review of "Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance" by Curtis Marez (University of Minnesota Press)

• Main Author: lewis levenberg
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cultural Studies Association 2019-07-01
• Series: Lateral
• Subjects: agriculture; capitalism; farm workers; labor; technology
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.25158/L8.2.13

In this focused visual-cultural history of farm work in California over the course of the twentieth century, Curtis Marez draws on a materialist and critical approach to understand the representations, in various media and formats, of farm workers, and of the activist movements that they have championed. Marez frames analyses of cultural artifacts, including speculative and science-fiction books and films, documentaries, propaganda, and studio artworks, in the historical and material conditions of those farm workers’ movements. Throughout, he foregrounds the people who shaped modern labor movements, from the vineyards of the San Fernando and San Joaquin Valleys and beyond. Marez argues that competing material interests, socio-technical mediations, and historical conditions—the animating conflicts of this account, between agribusiness and farm laborers—have shaped broader expressions of “americanism”, imagined futures, and visual cultures across North American societies, through the very contradictions that animate and constitute them.