Description
Book SynopsisFarm Worker Futurism reveals that the historical role of technology has had much to do with depicting the lives of farm laborers—Mexican migrants in particular—in the United States. This book explores the friction between agribusiness and farm workers through the lens of visual culture.
Trade Review"In Farm Worker Futurism, one comes face-to-face with the techno-fascism that was routed around daily by the collective actions of laborers who hacked the future with anticipatory illuminations and critical disturbances. This not science-fiction, but it is futurity-as-history that drives science-fiction into the present for activist, artists, and critics. Curtis Marez has written a unique and highly accessible book that calls on us to perform the speculative seeding of the future as farm workers to make new worlds grow now."—Ricardo Dominguez, University of California, San Diego
"Perhaps the greatest contribution of Farm Worker Futurism lies in its bold, creative, and apt attention to the intersections of labor and art as an inextricable dyad. Indeed, Marez’s attention to art associated with farmworker labor invites similar attention to art and discourse about a fuller range of labor-based cultural production."—American Literary History
"Farm Worker Futurism provides additional, much-needed fodder for what critical food scholars claim as the agrarian imaginary and its capacity to thwart policy aimed at increasing social and ecological justice."—H-Net
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Farm Workers in the Machine
1. “To the Disinherited Belongs the Future”: Farm Worker Futurism in the 1940s
2. From Third Cinema to National Video: Visual Technologies and UFW World Building
3. Farm Worker Futurisms in Speculative Culture: George Lucas and Ester Hernandez
Afterword: Farm Worker Futurism Now
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
