After the Bounty: Botany and Botanical Tropes in Caribbean Writing (original) (raw)
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EnterTEXT, 2013
From General Introduction to Special Issue: 'Rounding out the scholarly contributions, Sarah Lawson Welsh’s work contributes to the growing body of research concerning the culture(s) of food and taste in postcolonial and Caribbean studies. In “‘A Table of Plenty’: Representations of Food and Social Order in Caribbean Writing: Some Early Accounts, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song,” she examines the relationship between writing and cooking in historical documents of slavery as well as neo-slave novels, considering the significance of food hierarchies and the creolisation of food cultures in Caribbean contexts. Building on Richard Wilk’s analysis of food status and respectability in Belize, she argues that both Levy and Phillips employ “narrative strategies which deliberately decentre the hegemony of the white Creole accounts upon which they draw.”4 She argues that Levy’s novel is more radical than Phillips’s in its subversive potential due to its ability to “disrupt the intertextual field”5 and realign our reading of archival sources. Bringing archival texts into dialogue with fictional sources, Lawson Welsh offers innovative readings that shed new light on the interpretation of past-present texts and practices related to food culture. She skillfully decodes subversive practices as well as calls attention to the culture of respectability that led the plantocracy to value imported foodstuffs and recipes over the (more) local and indigenous. This innovative article opens up new perspectives and reading practices in Caribbean studies through its careful analysis of the consumption of food and narrative.' Abstract: The Caribbean is in many ways, as Richard Wilk has shown in his 2006 study of food and globalization in a Belizean context, the perfect example of the mixing of ethnicities, cultures and culinary practices as well as a region with one of the longest histories of global connectedness and globalizing processes in relation to food. However, there have been surprisingly very few studies of the relationship between food and culture in a Caribbean context (see Higson 2008 for one valuable exception). This article builds and extends upon Wilk’s important work on food status and respectability in Belize (2006, 2008) by considering the textual representation of food, food patterns and foodways in some earlier – and crucially, in some wider - Caribbean contexts. The main focus is on the relationship between food and social order in a Caribbean plantation context and, in particular, on responses to food and social hierarchies of food status (e.g. between indigenous, naturalized or imported foods), as they are explored and mediated in a number of Caribbean and diasporic Caribbean texts contemporary to, or set in, the colonial plantation period. A related focus is the shift from food practices which perform a version of the culinary nation, constructing national identity, whether Caribbean or expatriate European, and the establishment of a more creolized identity through food. The paper acknowledges that foodways and food practices have been richly represented in and through Caribbean writing since the earliest colonial period (earlier if we include oral tradition and food practices) and across a number of different genres: plantation accounts, memoirs, fiction, poetry, essays, recipes [oral and written] and cookery writing. As such, the paper considers attitudes to food cultures and social order in a range of written sources: early traveller and planter’s accounts and two more recent literary texts: Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge (1991) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010). It is argued that the latter, as historiographic metafictions, not only draw upon some of the early sources in some interesting ways, but stage and re-present, in a more self-consciously ambivalent way, early attitudes to food and social order in a Caribbean context.
The Caribbean's Windward Islands Banana Industry: A Heritage of Dependency
2012
While the era of Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song (day-o) has faded into the annals of history, the challenges facing the small banana farmer in the Windward Islands of Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines still loom in an entrenched 'culture of dependency. Throughout the years, banana farming for export in the Windward Islands has been encumbered by contradictory political economies and value systems, products of an Afro-Caribbean slave heritage. On the one hand, small farmers and other members of Windward Island populations have valued protected markets from former colonisers as an entitlement, while on the other hand they are steeped in a historical dependence on powerful actors located far from the farm gate. This paper explores the cultural, historical, political economic and environmental effects of the Windward Island banana industry's responses to several threats from the outside, and focuses on farmers' need to retain their marke...
Sugar Rush: Sugar and Science in the British Caribbean
Britain and the World, 2021
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