We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
Roses from Kenya: Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers (Culture, Place, and Nature)
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Roses From Kenya: Labor, Environment, And The
Product Description Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry―which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women―is lucrative but enduringly controversial. More than half the flowers are grown near the shores of Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake northwest of Nairobi recognized as a Ramsar site, a wetland of international importance. Critics decry the environmental side effects of floriculture, and human rights activists demand better wages and living conditions for workers. In this rich portrait of Kenyan floriculture, Megan Styles presents the point of view of local workers and investigates how the industry shapes Kenyan livelihoods, landscapes, and politics. She investigates the experiences and perspectives of low-wage farmworkers and the more elite actors whose lives revolve around floriculture, including farm managers and owners, Kenyan officials, and the human rights and environmental activists advocating for reform. By exploring these perspectives together, Styles reveals the complex and contradictory ways that rose farming shapes contemporary Kenya. She also shows how the rose industry connects Kenya to the world, and how Kenyan actors perceive these connections. As a key space of encounter, Lake Naivasha is a synergistic center where many actors seek to solve broader Kenyan social and environmental problems using the global flows of people, information, and money generated by floriculture. Review "In addition to an exploration of controversial labor practices, the book is also about a lake and the confluence of wildlife, commerce, power and politics surrounding it. . . . Styles' book helps contextualize the labor that goes into a gift many will receive."― Illinois Times "Styles has produced an insightful work filled with evocative analysis."― H-Net "Styles' vivid ethnographic descrip-tions draw attention to the myriad local contestations refashioned and created byoriculture. This approach enables the reader to not only learn about the problem-atic sides ofower production in Kenya but to also get to know Naivasha as a site of possibility that has an important place in political and moral imaginations."― The Journal of Modern African Studies "Styles succeeds in conveying the complexities and contradictions of global commodity production: work in floriculture, in spite of the possibilities it affords, is no bed of roses."― Exertions "An ethnographically rich exploration of the cut-flower industry on the shores of Lake Naivasha, clearly situated within a fascinating reading of Kenyan political and cultural history."―Sarah Lyon, author of Global Tourism: Cultural Heritage and Economic Encounters "An engaging and very well-written work that gives impressive texture and context to the complicated world of the Kenyan flower industry."―Sarah Osterhoudt, author of Vanilla Landscapes: Meaning, Memory and the Cultivation of Place in Madagascar "Through Styles' meticulous and well-historicized ethnography of Naivasha's "nerve center," we see many jostling aspirations: profiting, showcasing technological know-how, cultivating environmental consciousness, decolonizing the nation's industries, even branding "Kenya" itself."―Janet McIntosh, author of Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans "Flowers are contradictory things. In this impeccably researched ethnography, Styles explores how flowers from Kenya collapse notions of precarity and possibility, forms of aesthetic and agricultural commodity, and senses of past and future."―Sarah Besky, author of How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet "Megan Styles invites readers to a place that is many places: Naivasha as a "nerve center" of globalizing floriculture. This convergent location is also a palimpsest of anti-colonial struggle, indigenous territory, conservation, commodity chains, development, neoliberalism, and white belonging. Styles' polyvocal e
