Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Muse Suppress the Tale’: James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane and the Poetry of Refinement
- 2 ‘Stained with Spots of Human Blood’: Sugar, Abolition and Cannibalism
- 3 ‘Conveying away the Trash’: Sweetening Slavery in Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica
- 4 ‘Sugared Almonds and Pink Lozenges’: George Eliot's ‘Brother Jacob’ as Literary Confection
- 5 ‘Cane is a Slaver’: Sugar Men and Sugar Women in Postcolonial Caribbean Poetry
- 6 ‘Daughters Sacrificed to Strangers’: Interracial Desires and Intertextual Memories in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge
- 7 ‘Somebody Kill Somebody, Then?’: The Sweet Revenge of Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Muse Suppress the Tale’: James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane and the Poetry of Refinement
- 2 ‘Stained with Spots of Human Blood’: Sugar, Abolition and Cannibalism
- 3 ‘Conveying away the Trash’: Sweetening Slavery in Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica
- 4 ‘Sugared Almonds and Pink Lozenges’: George Eliot's ‘Brother Jacob’ as Literary Confection
- 5 ‘Cane is a Slaver’: Sugar Men and Sugar Women in Postcolonial Caribbean Poetry
- 6 ‘Daughters Sacrificed to Strangers’: Interracial Desires and Intertextual Memories in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge
- 7 ‘Somebody Kill Somebody, Then?’: The Sweet Revenge of Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[S]ugar calls up the binary rhythm of law and work, of patriarchal hierarchy, of scientific knowledge, of punishment and discipline, of superego and castration; it is the space … of production and productivity, of rule and measure, of ideology and nationalism, of the computer that speaks and separates; it is, above all, the signifier that offers itself as center, as origin, as fixed destination, for that which signifies the Other.
– Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island[T]hey have no leisure for the cultivation of aught but their estates, – & limit the alphabet to 5 letters, S – U – G – A – R.
– John Anderson, A Magistrate's Recollections, or St. Vincent, in 1836White/Black
Towards the beginning of her autobiography, Harriet Martineau recalls a mysterious dream occurring in early childhood. Given the nature of its content – a return to the domestic space and to the mother – it might be assumed that the dream would engender a sense of well-being, an expectation increased by the additional oneiric presence of the commodity to which all children are automatically drawn: sugar. In the event, however, the dream has the opposite effect, bringing neither comfort nor pleasure, but a chilling disquiet:
By the time we were at our own door, it was dusk, and we went up the steps in the dark; but in the kitchen it was bright sunshine. My mother was standing at the dresser, breaking sugar; and she lifted me up, and set me in the sun, and gave me a bit of sugar. Such was the dream which froze me with horror!
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Slaves to SweetnessBritish and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar, pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2009