Globalizing Resistance

Abstract

This article explores how members of Slow Food perform identity, establish community, and participate in a politics of consumption through the use of new local imaginaries. Building on Arjun Appadurai's (1996) notion of “the imaginary,” new local imaginaries are contemporary sites, or culturescapes, where notions of the local are re-inscribed through discourses of the global. Through the use of new local imaginaries, members of Slow Food manage multiple identities in an attempt to resist and mobilize against the negative consequences of industrialization. Further, members of Slow Food reconfigure linear notions of time and space in their attempt to rediscover cultural moments that they perceive to be absent from traditions within the United States. Despite the creation of an innovative site of resistance, Slow Food members construct a limited notion of the local that excludes working-class and urban cultural expressions.