Abstract
This chapter focuses on the Caribbean plantation regime and African-diasporic food cultures. Through a reading of the work of the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols, it explores the racialized and gendered violence surrounding the sugar frontier and its brutal re-making of human and nonhuman relations. The chapter shows how Nichols’ collections I Is A Long Memoried Woman (1983) and The Fat Black Women’s Poems (1984) script black women’s painful and pleasurable associations with food, and in so doing manifest the horrors of the plantation system. Not only that, they also furnish a literary mode of dissent against the continued brutalities of the contemporary world-food-system, underscoring the latter’s origins in capitalism’s genocidal ransacking of the globe in the colonial era.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Keys texts from this period include David Dabydeen’s Slave Song (1984), Fred D’Aguiar’s, Mama Dot (1985), and Caryl Phillips’s, Higher Ground (1989).
Works Cited
Baderoon, Gabeba. 2018. Surplus, Excess, Dirt: Slavery and the Production of Disposability in South Africa. Social Dynamics 44 (2): 257–272.
Baucom, Ian. 1999. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Blake, William. 1993 [1808]. Milton a Poem, and the Final Illuminated Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brown, Vincent. 2008. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge: University of Harvard Press.
Campbell, Chris, Michael Niblett, and Kerstin Oloff. 2021. Introduction: Plotting the Crisis—World-Literature, World-Culture, and the World-Food-System. In Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, ed. Chris Campbell, Michael Niblett, and Kerstin Oloff, 1–17. Leiden: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dawes, Kwame. 2005. Black British Poetry: Some Considerations. In Write Black, Write British: From Post-Colonial to Black British Literature, ed. Kadija Sesay, 282–289. Hertford: Hansib.
De Barros, Juanita. 2004. Setting Things Right: Medicine and Magic in British Guiana, 1803–38. Slavery and Abolition 25 (1): 28–50.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2011. Yam, Roots, and Rot: Allegories of the Provision Grounds. Small Axe 34: 58–75.
Donnell, Alison, and Sarah Lawson Welsh. 1996. Nation Language: New Soundings in Caribbean Poetry. In The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 288–298. London: Routledge.
DuBois, W.E.B. 1935. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
“FAO Addresses Gender Inequalities in Caribbean Farming.” 2019. Land Portal, January 2. https://landportal.org/news/2019/01/fao-addresses-gender-inequalities-caribbean-farming. Accessed 16 March 2020.
“FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean.” n.d. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. http://www.fao.org/americas/prioridades/seguridad-alimentaria/en/. Accessed 16 March 2020.
Federici, Silvia. 2009. Silvia Federici: On Capitalism, Colonialism, Women and Food Politics. Politics and Culture, November 3. https://politicsandculture.org/2009/11/03/silvia-federici-on-capitalism-colonialism-women-and-food-politics/. Accessed 4 March 2020.
Fryer, Peter. 2018 [1984]. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press.
Green, Emily. 2018. Melanie Klein and the Black Mammy: An Exploration of the Influence of the Mammy Stereotype on Klein’s Maternal and Its Contribution to the “Whiteness” of Psychoanalysis. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 19 (3): 164–182.
Hall, Stuart. 2006. Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-war History. Britain History Workshop Journal 61: 1–24.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2016. The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors. Souls 18 (1): 166–173.
Holmes, Colin. 1991. A Tolerant Country? London: Faber and Faber.
Johnson, Hume N. 2009. Ode to ‘Quasheba’: Resistance Rituals among Higgler Women in Jamaica. In On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions, ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, and Debashish Munshi, 22–37. Oxon: Routledge.
Kinnahan, Linda A. 2000. Now I am Alien: Immigration and the Discourse of Nation in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. In Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, ed. Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones, 208–225. Hampshire: Palgrave.
Kinoti, Kathambi. 2008. Women Worst Hit by Food Crisis. Monthly Review, June 21. https://mronline.org/2008/06/21/women-worst-hit-by-food-crisis/. Accessed 18 March 2020.
Lopez, Bingas Ana. 2003. Representations of Black Omen in Grace Nichols’s Poetry: From Otherness to Empowerment. Revista Estudios Ingleses (16): 6–47.
Marx, Karl. 1976 [1876]. Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist. In Capital Volume One. London: Penguin.
Mbuagbaw, Lawrence, and S.G. Noorduyn. 2012. The Palm Wine Trade: Occupational and Health Hazards. The International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 3: 157–164.
McElya, Micki. 2007. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
McKittrick, Katherine. 2014. Mathematics Black Life. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 44 (2): 16–28.
Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking Press.
———. 2011. Plantations and the Rise of a World Food Economy: Some Preliminary Ideas. Review 34.1 (2): 3–14.
Moore, Jason, and Raj Patel. 2018. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. California: University of California Press.
Morgan, Jenifer. 2004. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Morris, Kadish. 2020. Poetic Justice: Black Lives and the Power of Poetry. The Guardian, June 28. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/28/black-british-poets-black-lives-matter-linton-kwesi-johnson-grace-nichols-raymond-antrobus-kayo-chingonyi-malika-booker-vanessa-kisuule. Accessed 10 January 2021.
Nichols, Grace. 1983. I Is A Long Memoried Woman. London: Karnak House.
———. 1984. The Fat Black Woman’s Poems. London: Virago.
———. 1990. The Battle with Language. In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, ed. Selwyn Cudjoe. Amherst: Calaloux Publication.
Olusoga, David. 2016. The Reality of Being Black in Today’s Britain. The Guardian, October 30. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/30/what-it-means-to-be-black-in-britain-today. Accessed 23 March 2020.
Philip, M. NourbeSe. 1989. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Charlottetown: Ragweed.
Procter, James. 2016. Recalibrating the Past: The Rise of Black British Historical Fiction. In The Cambridge Companion to Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010), ed. Deidre Osborne, 129–143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramey, Lauri. 2008. Slave Songs and the Lyric Poetry Traditions. In Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry, 17–56. New York: Palgrave.
Rollman, Hans. 2018. What’s Wrong with Our Food System? Capitalism. Pop Matters, January 12. https://www.popmatters.com/foodies-guide-to-capitalism-interview-2518372029.html. Accessed 15 March 2020.
Samuelson, Meg. 2008. Lose Your Mother, Kill Your Child: The Passage of Slavery and Its Afterlife in Narratives by Yvette Christianse and Saidiya Hartman. English Studies in Africa 5 (2): 38–48.
———. 2018. Thinking with Sharks: Racial Terror, Species Extinction and Other Anthropocene Fault Lines. Australian Humanities Review 63: 31–47.
Scanlon, Mara. 1998. The Divine Body in Grace Nichols’s ‘The Fat Black Woman’s Poems’. World Literature Today 72 (1): 59–66.
Shahani, Gitanjali G. 2018. Introduction: Writing on Food and Literature. In Food and Literature, ed. Gitanjali G. Shahani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sheller, Mimi. 2003. Consuming the Caribbean. London: Routledge.
Shiva, Vandana. 2009. Women and the Gendered Politics of Food. Philosophical Topics 27 (2): 17–32.
Smallwood, Stephanie. 2007. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from African to American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Smith, Fredrick H. 2001. Alcohol, Slavery, and African Cultural Continuity in the British Caribbean. In Drinking: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Ed Igor and Valerie de Garine, 212–227. New York: Berghahn Books.
Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81.
Stearn, Michelle. 2016. Growing Justice: Transcending Racism in the Food System. The Next System Project, July 27. https://thenextsystem.org/growing_justice_transcending_oppressive_history_of_our_food_system. Accessed 12 December 2019.
Stuart, Andrea. 2012. Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire. London: Portobello Books.
Tate, Shirley Anne. 2009. Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. Surrey: Ashgate.
———. 2018. The Governmentality of Black Beauty Shame: Discourse, Iconicity and Resistance. London: Palgrave.
Tyler, Imogen. 2010. Designed to Fail: A Biopolitics of British Citizenship. Citizenship Studies 14 (1): 61–74.
Weedon, Chris. 2016. British Black and Asian Writing since 1980. In The Cambridge Companion to Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010), ed. Deidre Osborne, 40–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weinbaum, Alys Eve. 2019. The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wills, Clair. 2000. Marking Time: Fanny Howe’s Poetics of Transcendence. In Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, ed. Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones, 119–139. London: Palgrave.
“Women Feed the World.” n.d. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. http://www.fao.org/3/x0262e/x0262e16.htm. Accessed 16 March 2020.
Wynter, Sylvia. 1971. Novel and History, Plot and Plantation. Savacou 5: 95–102.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hugo, E. (2021). Pain, Pleasure, and the World-Food-System: Plotting the Afterlife of the Plantation in the Poetry of Grace Nichols. In: Campbell, C., Niblett, M., Oloff, K. (eds) Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-76154-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-76155-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)