Speculative Technologies is a cultural study of technology in conflicts between California agribusiness and workers of color in California from the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond. An important practical and symbolic means of exploiting and disciplining labor, agribusiness technology also became the medium and object of struggle over the future of California agriculture. Farm workers have opposed mechanization in the fields, industrial work camps, and pesticides. They have also turned a critical gaze on agribusiness in numerous graphics, photos, films, and videos, thereby decoupling visual techn ... More

Speculative Technologies is a cultural study of technology in conflicts between California agribusiness and workers of color in California from the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond. An important practical and symbolic means of exploiting and disciplining labor, agribusiness technology also became the medium and object of struggle over the future of California agriculture. Farm workers have opposed mechanization in the fields, industrial work camps, and pesticides. They have also turned a critical gaze on agribusiness in numerous graphics, photos, films, and videos, thereby decoupling visual technology from an exclusive connection to patriarchal white capitalism. Farm worker unions inverted the hierarchical relations of looking that structured agribusiness media and promoted new kinds of activist spectatorship among farm workers and their supporters. Finally, farm workers have appropriated visual technologies to imagine better futures. Union cameras and computer screens hence constituted tools for speculative world building that put the farm worker movement in dialogue with futurist thinking and speculative fictions of all sorts. Speculative Technologies presents a cultural history from below, illuminating how working class people of color have often been early adopters and imaginative users of new media technologies. Additionally, the book forwards a completely novel analysis of speculative fiction and its historic engagements with the farm worker movement in ways that illuminate both. Although many studies focus primarily on the United Farm Workers, Speculative Technologies situates the UFW in relationship to longer histories of farm worker futurism and their wide influence across a range of cultural and social contexts. Finally, Speculative Technologies presents a new account of the historical genesis of neoliberalism in struggles between farm workers and corporate agribusiness.