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A Review of “Transfrontier Conservation in Africa: At the Confluence of Capital, Politics and Nature”

not consistently stressed, many of the chapters feel more like grand works of historical political economy, with less-defined ecological implications in the background. Moreover, because of the density of historical references throughout the chapters, it is sometimes hard to piece together exactly what Hollander wants to highlight in regard to particular concerns of political ecology, such as how to differentiate between unequal agents, who is usurping the power of others, and so forth. Another topic pushed to the book’s periphery is consumption. In chapter 1, Hollander explains that she has been influenced by food systems theory, particularly mentioning the objective of linking relations of production with patterns of consumption. Yet, in the end, the book does not leave room for many linkages to the consumption side of the food chain, except for noting increases in sugar consumption during wartime. The discursive strategies used to construct the Everglades as a region do not directly involve or implicate the consumer, nor do they speak of consumer culture directly. Readers do see the consumer in a derivative way, through mention of how sugar was historically posited as part of a nutritious diet and envisioned as essential to wartime efforts and later in Hollander’s inclusion of changing ideas about the healthiness of sugar. Within such discussion, it might have been valuable to see more “culture”: Who was the consumer? How did people at large fit into and relate to the Everglades region? Readers are largely left to themselves to envision a sense of the cultural “place” of south Florida and a sense of the culture of the United States at each historical juncture; yet more attention to these aspects might have enhanced the reader’s grasp of the complex politics detailed in the book. This is especially true in regard to Hollander’s expressed desire to examine Florida’s “identity” (or “self”) in relation to Cuba as the regional “other” (p. 11) as well as to other sites of sugar production. Despite these omissions, which perhaps were intentional, Raising Cane in the ’Glades is a remarkable accomplishment. This is true not only for what the book contains but also for what it suggests in regard to new connections and future work. First, Hollander’s emphasis on the region as “relational” brought to mind recent engagements with relational philosophies and ontologies within our discipline at large as well as within agrofood studies (e.g., see Goodman 2001). Whereas Hollander does not complexly develop the idea of the relational herself, she leaves room for future analyses to engage with multiple kinds of relationality in regard to both sugar-growing regions and sugar as a food commodity. With respect to the latter, another fascinating place into which the book leads is the body: In her introduction, Hollander highlights that sugar (cane) involves considerable impacts from the “micro level of individual metabolism to the macro level of global restructuring” (p. 16). Although Hollander discusses the “microlevel” of the body only parenthetically, she indicates that there is an entire microside of sugar politics worth exploring (e.g., how sugar as “nutritious” eventually gets replaced by antisugar sentiments and how the sugar industry attempts to battle artificial sweeteners and high-fructose corn syrup). Furthermore, such bodily explorations could be fruitfully tied to regional analyses, revealing how the production of both body and region are interconnected. Finally, Hollander’s timely discussion of the ethanol issue and the politics of growing food for biofuel inevitably point the reader toward the future, questioning a new series of political desires and a set of emerging ecological issues and arguments. In the end, this book succeeds not only because it carefully and thoroughly documents the political economic history of the Everglades region but also because it leaves the reader curious about the newest forces that will inevitably shape the persistently evolving “sugar question.”