A Reflection on the Internal Fluctuation of Vegan Fields in Johannesburg

Abstract

When entering the field of veganism in Johannesburg, I found it to be a contested field, instead of the homogeneous community I expected to find. When I entered the field, I focussed on how vegans create communities through commensal pratices, leading me to explore the field through participant observation at vegan markets, get-togethers, through conversations with vegans, and noting how my own vegan practice shaped my interactions with the people around me. With the focus on vegan foods, commensality, and the creation likeness, I found that the field centred nostalgic diacritics, like vegan boerewors, that recreated a sense of belonging for a white consumer base. This highlighted how the market was spatially and infrastructurally organised to exclude vegan praxes that differed from the dominant animal-rights position; how both the markets and the "plastic proteins" that carried the nostalgic flavours relied on racialised cheap labour; and how this caused vegans in the field to deploy "counter-narratives" as a means of dealing with the contradictions inherent to the field of veganism in Johannesburg. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the field of veganism in Johannesburg actively reproduces Maldonado-Torres' "coloniality of being" through the moral experiences it offers vegans, revealing that the narrative resources it provides keep them in a constant cycle of narrative repair.