In 1968 the director of the US Agency for International Development, William Gaud, christened the decades long experiments with agriculture and technology as the “green revolution.” Juxtaposing it with the Red Revolution of the USSR and the White Revolution of the Shah of Iran, record harvests in Asia during the Cold War made the Green Revolution as much about food and hunger as it did geopolitics and diplomacy. This seminar explores the origins and development of the Green Revolution through its principal sites of experimentation: laboratories and landscapes. Whether hailed by some as a major turning point in the history of combatting hunger and food insecurity or castigated by others for perpetuating colonial and imperial asymmetries of power and environmental degradation, the legacies of the Green Revolution endure to this day. We attend to the global legacies of this color-coded revolution and how it reshaped the contours of the land, food distribution networks, settlement patterns, cultures of eating and cooking, as well as reconfigure the habits and habitats of the human subject. Along with weekly readings and assignments that involve eating and cooking, students develop a final project in consultation with the instructor.
