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
2 - ‘Stained with Spots of Human Blood’: Sugar, Abolition and Cannibalism
- 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
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism [sic], racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho' good eatin'.’
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White MasksI am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.
– Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’Against the Grain
Samuel Johnson's uneasy comments on the blasé evocation of the transatlantic slave trade in Book IV of The Sugar-Cane were clearly prescient: within little more than two decades, his remarks were being echoed and expanded in the campaign for the abolition of the trade, which officially began in 1787, but did not finally realize its aims for a further twenty years. This chapter examines some of the writings which emerged in the early phases of the movement, focusing on what might be called the politics of consumption and, in particular, the provocative identification of the sugar-eater as cannibal, a common discursive motif during the period.
Two texts in which this identification is set in play are William Fox's classic anti-sugar pamphlet, ‘An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum’ (1791), and Andrew Burn's far less familiar response to Fox in ‘A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar. By an Eye Witness to the Facts Related’ (1792).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Slaves to SweetnessBritish and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar, pp. 33 - 51Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2009