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5234940-12509500-205740-21336000 Legacy of Slavery and Indentured LabourLinking the Past with the FutureConference on Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora and Identity Formation.June 18th – 23th, 2018 , Paramaribo, Suriname Org. by IGSR, Faculty of Humanities, IMWO, in collaboration with National Archives Suriname , NAKS, Federasi fu Afrikan Srananman CUS, NSHI and VHJI.Address: IGSR , Phone: 490900; 8749865E-mail: diasporaconfsuriname2018@; mauritshassan@Sugarwork: The Afro-Asian Gastropoetics of CoolitudeAbstractEncoded in recipes and food across the Americas there is a presence of what I’m calling a gastropoetics of coolitude, the creation of new cuisines produced in the wake of enslavement and indenture. Food is an archive of human desires and appetites. The European colonial palate and its desire for sugar and spices determined the demand for labouring black and Asian bodies on Caribbean and South American plantations. Fragments of the legacy of chattel slavery and indentured labour in the Americas is eaten in curry goat, patties, roti, ackee and saltfish, and fried rice, to mention just a few dishes common to Caribbean cuisine in which the influence of West Africa, India, and South China is present. Focusing on sugar, the crop planted, harvested, and refined by labouring black and Asian people, I examine the politics of its production and denial. In the artwork of visual artists who use sugar as a medium for capturing the essence of colonial entanglements of nutrition and labour I chart a poetics of the stomach. This paper takes a hemispheric approach through food to examine what is digested in the recipes of Asian indenture and what remains undigested. I look to intimate materiality in the shared diets of Africans and Asians transported in the same boats. Sugarwork: The Afro-Asian Gastropoetics of Coolitude“I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth.”-Stuart Hall (1991) “Old and New Identities: Old and New Ethnicities”“My name is sweet thing.” -Nina Simone (1965) “Four Women”Food is an archive. More than simple subsistence or sustenance, food is a record of colonial friction (Tsing, 2004). It is a record of adapting ecologies and evolving techniques and technologies of cookery. Beyond new age or hipster fusion, dishes such as curry, roti, ackee and saltfish, are born out of imperial intimacies. Food is history. The enmeshed flavours of East, South, North, and West narrate a story of the imperial palate and thus of human history. The politics of volition are embedded in food its preparation, doling out, and the way it’s eaten. The food of and after indenture is the result of the entanglement of Afro-Asian labour on new world plantations. As Lowe (2015: 84) reminds us, we must “reconstellate a world that neither assumes the history of global capitalism to be even and inevitable, nor conceives of empire as a monolithic project.” As such, this essay traces the heterogeneity of empire through an alternative archive to the traditional contours of historiography. I read digestion as part of what I am calling a sensate archive of Afro-Asian poetics after the plantation. When Stuart Hall (1991) wrote, “I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea” he gestured to the long history of colonial modernity. The poetry of his metaphor speaks to the materiality and embodiment of the bourgeois intimacy of plantation labour, or what Lisa Lowe (2015) refers to as the “fetishism of colonial commodities.” Hall’s embodiment of sugar also speaks to the orientation of narrating history from the vantage point of the “bottom up.” The sugar is, in part, a solution of glucose and water. It is also the residue at the bottom of the teacup. Hall names himself as the colonial residue of being a colonial subject. The sugar is, importantly, not fully dissolved or assimilated. Though a non-human actant, the sugar exerts agentive capacity on the teeth of English children gestures to the gradual rotting effect on the Britain’s futurity. These cavities are part of the erosion of imperial aftermath not only on the colonized but the colonizer who cannot be exempt. Not only is the English tea Asian, from Ceylon or Sri Lanka as Hall points to, so too is the colonial materiality inscribed in the Chinese porcelain, that contains the hot beverage. This is part of the bourgeois intimacy of European modernity and materiality Lowe (2015) traces in her reading of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and the forgetting of racialized labour. In artistic and cultural forms, rituals and practices, fragments of the afterlife of the transatlantic slave trade and Asian indenture can be sensed. The aesthetics of Negritude and Coolitude, coined by poet Khal Torabullly, are entwined in cuisine across the Americas. If food is a fossil of the Anthropocene, what can be read about the aftermath of the institutions of transatlantic enslavement and indentureship? Cuisine is as much imbued with tradition as it is with invention and thus is future-oriented, or concerned with futurity. I begin my investigation with introduction of Asian indenture to the Caribbean because it marks a pivotal moment in global history of the entanglement of black emancipation. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution as a focal point for this analysis centres liberation rather than the moment of European capture. As Lowe (2015) describes the colonial project in the West Indies, a formal end to slavery in the empire, introduced Asian contract labor in the West Indies, and expanded ‘free trade imperialism.’ The threat of black freedom to the sugar economy was intimately hinged to the importation of the Indian and Chinese contract labour to the Americas. This history is partially legible in the accounting of empire, from the European colonial archive, documents produced and mediated by colonial officials and planters. In contrast to these documents, food offers an alternative narration of modernity, unmediated by the European gaze.A single grain of sugar is instilled with the human traffic of the long history of globalization. In order to fully consider the metabolic and nutritional logic of the plantations of the Americas, I propose sugarwork as a way to understand the cycle of energy production. The term “sugar work” usually refers to confectionary techniques developed during the Victorian era. Confectionary is also defined as “a collective term for sweetmeats and confections.” Sweetmeats are defined as “Sweet food, as sugared cakes or pastry, confectionary; preserved or candied fruits, sugared nuts etc.; also, globules, lozenges, ‘drop’ or ‘sticks’ made of sugar with fruit or other flavouring or filling.”The moulding, blowing, and manipulation of sugar to make luxurious desserts is a craft of dessert-making intimately linked to the ready availability of sugar in Europe because of chattel slavery. As the sugar industry began to crumble, indentured Asian labour became a critical last grasp to bolster the economy. I take up the confectionary resonance and definition of sugar work to give texture to the cycle of the production of sugar—the planting, harvesting, and refining of sugarcane—in tandem with the digestion through which glucose was metabolized as fuel for the labour of black and Asian bonded workers. Beyond the extraction of labour, sugarwork is also essential to considering the poetics and potentiality of sugar in the way that contemporary visual artists are utilizing it in all of its malleability as a medium to narrate a history of global capitalism, diaspora, and exploitation. Through moulding, blowing, and manipulating they rework sugar to narrate the entanglements of colonial modernity. The freedom to eat as and when and what one pleases is no small matter. Food and what we choose to eat is an intimate part of human identity. The colonial accounting of food—who was afforded food, and how it was meted out and rationed—is critical in giving texture to the degrees of unfreedom of the plantation structure. The politics of who was given access to different types of food was part of the process of racialization and the racial determinism, the logics of which were ordered by the plantation diet. There are accounts of labourers refusing certain foods or refusing to eat at all, which I read as a type of dietary resistance against a form of alimentary colonization. Workers attempted to preserve their cultural and often religious customs of eating. For those coming from South Asia diet was carefully managed by caste and the threat of pollution by those of a lower caste. For instance, Hindus would refuse beef, and Muslims would refuse pork. The perversity of what labourers were forced to eat is only more complicated by the fact that hunger was often a determining factor for those choosing to sign indenture contract. The desperation of famine and starvation pushed people to cross the kala pani (dark waters) and lose caste. In what ways though were the rigidities of caste and hierarchies re-inscribed and retained in the diaspora? How much choice did workers have in what to eat in the new world? I ask, how does the subaltern eat? How do we imagine the food intolerances that enslaved and indentured people may have had? The term dietary restriction takes on a new resonance in imagining the limits of nutrition on the plantation. Many were forced to adapt to a new colonization of their gastrointestinal tracts by new flora, new bacteria. Cooks innovated and improvised with new locally sourced and cultivated ingredients. The conversion of food into energy, glucose, in order to harvest crops for European consumption cannot be underestimated. Here, I consider the mastication of food broken down by teeth and by saliva transformed into boluses. We must also consider the process of peristalsis, or “the involuntary contraction of muscle of the intestine or other canal, creating wavelike movements that push the canal forward.” We must consider the breakdown of protein in the stomach by acids and enzymes such that it can become carbohydrates (sugars and starches) and then finally another type of sugar, glucose before entering the bloodstream. Parama Roy (2010) describes gastropoetics in relation to South Asian cookery and cookbooks. I take up this term in a slightly different manner to examine the failure of the archive to digest certain colonial subjects, the enslaved and the indentured. How were these racialized subjects assimilated and absorbed in the political economy of nineteenth century Europe? The Greek root “gastro” means stomach. The stomach, or gut, has millions of neurons, and has been described as the second brain. In centring the gustatory, which includes taste as well as eating, I look to the next stage, digestion in order to attend to the utilitarian as well as the poetic by examining the bodily process through which energy is derived from sustenance. What is digested in the recipes of Asian indenture and what remains undigested about the Afro-Asian presence in the Americas? I ask, how national identities and nationalisms across the hemisphere can be defined so utterly against blackness, Asianness, and indigeneity, when these influences are so apparent yet invisible in national cuisines? What is it about the food of the “other” that can be embraced as representing the nation, while the people cannot be digested? Next, I examine the transnational economy of sugar, an important link between the plantation economies of the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean plantation in the artwork of two conceptual contemporary Afro-Chinese artists work in the United States, Andrea Chung and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Chung is of Trinidadian-Jamaican parentage and Campos-Pons is Cuban. I contextualize the poetics of what each artist gestures to through historicized accounts of food management on the Caribbean plantation. While there are a number of artists across the hemisphere that draw on sugar to examine the intimate materiality of afterlife of slavery, Chung and Campos-Pons employ a cross-racial, global lens that joins the historiography of Asian indenture with African enslavement by using sugar as the connective conceptual thread of diasporic poetics. Chung and Campos-Pons repurpose sugar as the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured Chinese. They employ performance, sculpture, and narration to mediate the histories that live in the sugary texturality of their art. That these two women are part of the human legacy of what Lowe describes as global intimacies is important because not only is the belly the centre of digestion, it is also imagined as the stomach and womb together. As such the belly as womb or uterus is a critical space of creation. Not only is it the locus of genesis, it is also the site of transmission of nutrition through the placenta of food digested into glucose and transferred to the foetus. The umbilical connection is critical to the futurity and future issue of plantation production and womanhood as Jennifer Morgan has argued (2004). The belly and the boat are intertwined as Glissant (1990: 6) writes, “First, the time you fell into the belly of the boat. For, in your poetic vision, a boat has no belly; a boat does not swallow up, does not devour; a boat is steered by open skies. Yet the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. It generates the clamour of your protests; it also produces all the coming unanimity. Although you are alone in this suffering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know. This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death.” Chung and Campos-Pons’ use of sugar as art is part of a shared language of the materiality of the slave trade and indenture in the present, the gastropoetics. It is part of shared vocabulary of sugarwork as a colonial residue connected to the United States, too, employed for visual artist Kara Walker, Ian Deleón, and Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer to name a few. The plantation economy is one that engages viscerally with the human sensorium in olfactory, gustatory, auditory registers. The texture, the grittiness of the sugar becomes pliable when water is added. Experiencing the work in person is a sensory experience that includes the cloying smell of the worked sugar. Andrea Chung’s Sugar BoatsChung produced Bato Disik in 2013 during a year spent in Mauritius for a Fulbright Fellowship. It is of significance because Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius was chosen as the first site for the so-called great experiment of Asian indenture in 1834. The installation features a rectangular basin of water filled several boats made of Demerara brown sugar. Overtime the boats disappear dissolving into the water, representing the dying Mauritian fishing industry (Figure 2). Chung classifies this and other artwork as foodstuff. The ephemerality of the melting sugar of Bato Disik is paired with Bain de Mer an eight-minute video projection inspired by the tragic story of Le Morne in Mauritius where a village of escaped enslaved people leapt to their death to avoid being recaptured. The dissolving sugar represents the obscured and fleeting archive of Asian indenture in the Caribbean. The water, symbolizing the connectedness Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, is as important as the sugar substrate. The water is part of the generative poetics of the plural visions of coolitude. Figure 1: Andrea Chung, Photograph of installation of sugar boats Bato Disik, 2013. Figure 2: A close-up of the Bato Disik installation. Chung says, “My practice is an exploration into the relationship between materials, location, and cultural processes. I focus primarily on island nations in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean Sea, and I am interested in labor and its complicated relationships with culture descending from people who were coerced into inhospitable colonial workforces.” Chung says, "My work is very labor intensive and I like to think that my labor is, in a way, an homage to their labor," Chung says. "I mean, I can't compare it obviously, but it's one way of honoring them in a way that I can."?She considers the stakes of her labor as a descendent of the sugar colonies, Trinidad and Jamaica, as part of the personal work of the installation. To give some context to the politics and management of food in the plantation space of the British West Indies, I turn to David Dabydeen’s reading of Guyana. He points to moments on the Caribbean colonial plantation where the poetics and politics of eating are critical. In his (2003) analysis of Edward Jenkins’s woodblock print of a Guyanese plantation published in The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs centres the rhetorical symbolism of the starving Indian worker (1871) (Figure 3). Dabydeen notes, how the farm animals—cows, pigs, chickens—are depicted as being fat and well fed, meanwhile the Indian and Chinese workers are depicted as gaunt. The starving workers hoe the grounds to reap grain in a visual parable for the evils of indentureship. In the carved tableau the upstairs room features indentured workers lying in hospital beds barely able to consume soup that is being given to them to restore their health. In the ground level beneath the plantation barracks Asian women cook in large cauldrons. Malnutrition was the order of the day. European planters resented having to spend money to provide food on the plantation. They often commented on the difference between Chinese and Indian indentured labour by contrasting their appetites. Indians were typically characterized as having meagre diets, while the Chinese were portrayed as having more refined diets and demanding more. The comparative policing of appetite was used to apply value to order a determinist notion of industriousness and racialization. On a visit to Jamaica, Anthony Trollope (1859:90) remarked of emancipation” that it was “To lie in the sun and eat breadfruit and yams is his idea of being free.” Eating and being hungry was viewed as an encumbrance to the labour that needed to be performed. Figure 3: Woodblock print from Edward Jenkins’ The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs (1871)Hunger was intimate to the management of the plantation, used as a means of control and ordering of fixed racial types. Freedom is tied to the belly. In her path breaking work on materiality, Vibrant Matter, political theorist Jane Bennett (2009) writes, “eating [is] the formation of an assemblage of human and non-human elements, all of which bear some agentic capacity.” What does it mean to consider food as a non-human actant? Bennett describes the way a bag of potato chips could be understood as having a power to draw the human beyond their agentive control to eat more and more. Sugar too can be read as a non-human actant. It causes a sugar rush, a temporary burst of energy. In spite of the crash, the sugar can keep the consumer coming back for more. It almost has the power of inducing an addictive behaviour, which is not unrelated to narcopolitics of the opium trade and wars of this period (Roy 2010). In what ways were the enslaved Africans and indentured Asians what they ate? In being able to grow, prepare, and cook their own food the labourers were able to retain a semblance of agency. Yet debt and hunger are inextricably bound. The payment for food was an important part of the distinction of indenture as an institution of free labour. It was a critical part of the liberal humanist performance of freedom. And yet the money spent on food and board further indebted indentured subjects who often times were unable to afford a return trip to their country of origin. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Sugar FieldsFigure 4: Photograph of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons assembling Sugar/Bittersweet, 2010.Using a similar technique of moulding sugar with water, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ site-specific 2010 installation Sugar/Bittersweet is a simulacrum of a sugarcane field, with columns of sticky raw sugar shaped as discs and cast-glass formed pierced by African spears as visual metaphors for the stalks of sugarcane field according to curator Linda Muehlig (Figure 2). Campos-Pons often refers to both her Yoruba ancestry and more recently her Chinese ancestry. One of her maternal great grandmothers migrated to Cuba from Canton. In an interview with China Daily Campos-Pons said, “I grew up aware of my Chinese ancestors, there was significant consumption of Chinese food at home. In fact one of my favorite desserts was something we called at home 'Calabazita China', still, you could find it in Matanzas.” She says, "I was aware of the Chinese influence in Santeria objects of the workshop and just was a very common layer of everyday life," the Cuban-born visual artist said, noting that the Chinese side of her family worked as indentured servants in sugar mills in Cuba. In Sugar/Bittersweet, roped Chinese weights allude to the weighing of the crop after the harvest. Like Chung, Campos-Pons employs a video component. It features singer Omara Portuondo of the Buena Vista Social Club who is also of Afro-Chinese descent. She says, “Sugar makes me cry, and the tears are salty and bitter.” Sugar is also a home for Campos-Pons whose childhood home was the former slave barracks in the town La Vega, where a defunct sugar factory was a landmark. Sugar is still today the principal agricultural economy of Cuba. The colonial residue of the sugar plantation economy weighs heavy on the present in Cuba. In Cuba, where slavery was not abolished until 1886, sugar was the economy. Afro-Asian plantation intimacies can be traced and are etched in sugar. Chinese contract labourers and the enslaved Africans alike were treated confined to the barracon and fed in a collective trough. Under both regimes of forced and voluntary labour, new diets with agentic capacity had to be adapted to. Kathleen Lopéz (2013) notes, “Chinese were forced to adjust their diet in Cuba, as a typical meal in South China consisted of rice with meat and vegetables.” Lopéz quotes Richard Levis’ description of standard meal on a sugar estate in Cuba with African slave and Chinese labourers in his 1872 Diary of a Spring Holiday in Cuba. The white American observer writes, “The breakfast for the labourers was brought to the field at eight o’clock, and consisted of boiled jerked beef and boiled sweet potatoes, in a large wood box or trough.’” The fact that both enslaved Africans and Chinese contract workers were served their food in a collective trough speaks to the collective degradation of their positions, clearly intended to demoralize. Both were treated like animals, like livestock being fed and being forced to fend food that was not even portioned out. The repurposing and fashioning of tools from the sugarcane is part of the gastropoetics of coolitude. Continuing to describe the Cuban plantation tableau Levis writes, “Folding some cane leaves into a sort of basin, each labourer supplied himself liberally with the food, and sitting in the shade of the uncut cane, ate large quantities. This diet is varied at other meals with plantain and rice, with sugar and water for a drink; and at all moments of idleness the negroes are seen gnawing and sucking the sugarcane.” Idleness is set against industry in this management of food on the plantation. While the description is intended to animalize and to emphasize the profligate indulgence of the black and Asian labourers, it actually says more about the versatility and resourcefulness of the workers. There is a poetics in what was created out of sugarcane that was being harvested, not for their consumption, but for those drinking tea and eating sugary desserts in Europe. Coolitude: Repurposing and the Aesthetic Materiality of Slavery and IndentureThe sugarwork is the bittersweet gastropoetics of coolitude. In Chung and Campos-Pons’ sculptures the past demands a place in the present and thus an entangled temporality is critical for meditating on the history of enslavement and indenture. Nalini Mohabir (2016) writes of the resonance of “the afterlife of indenture,” echoing Saidiya Hartman’s (2002) conception of the time of slavery to explore the haunting insistence of Asian indenture in the present moment. Mohabir looks to the visual presence of Indo-Caribbean indenture in the material form of contemporary art. To this, I add the aforementioned artists because as much as the experience of slavery and indenture are racially they are a narrative that should be analysed in a way that does not as starkly enforce racial and national lines when this is precisely the type of racial ordering that sustained the plantation. The residue of the institution of 19th century Asian indenture is enmeshed with the transatlantic slave trade. Coined by literary critic Torabully in the 1990s, coolitude is a generative framework and critical lens for understanding the interlocking structures of enslavement and indentureship. While the institutions are not equivalent they are related. Torabully’s French Mauritian Trinidadian diasporic and national affiliations speak to the inter-archipelagic connections in the aftermath of indenture. Named after the global black solidarity invoked in Negritude by Francophone intellectuals Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon, artistic production and an aesthetic of resistance is critical to digesting the violent legacies of bondage.In a letter to Amitav Ghosh published online, Torabully mused about how the ideology of coolitude came into being. He writes,…I wanted to pay homage to the “forgotten voices of the voyage,” the coolie. At that time the word coolie was thought as base and derogatory, and it was a pleasure and duty for me, as a poet of plural visions and of the peripheries, to reclaim the coolie, and from this derelict history and identity, I used the term coolie to coin coolitude, very much as Aimé Césaire did for negritude (though I took my distance with any essentialist view from the outset). The very naming of coolitude is an act of Afro-Asian intimacy (Carter and Torabully, 2002). The derogatory and base “coolie” used to dehumanize, like nègre, becomes repurposed and reclaimed by descendants of the experience. Torabully’s poignant use of the word derelict describes not only the lost history but also the loss identity. He speaks to a sense of being outside of history and outside of, or excluded from, personhood, like “a person without a job, home, or property.” In the other resonance of derelict as being in “a poor condition of neglect and disuse,” Torabully speaks to the neglect and disuse. To counter the shame of the marking and branding of the base word “coolie” he calls for a new hieroglyphics. Thus in its poetics coolitude pays homage to the forgotten and is kindred with poetics of Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, an imagining of the intimacies of indenture in the belly of the “coolie” ship. Like Glissant says, it speaks to the “clamour” of the “suffering, you share in the unknown with other whom you have yet to know.” In Ghosh’s novel, the food eaten aboard the Ibis is central. At its core, coolitude is concerned with heterogeneity because the very defining of the aesthetic practice is against erasure. Coolitude is set in relief against the flattening of subjectivity that institutions and archival production perform. Continuing in his explanation to Ghosh, Torabully says, I carved it as the basis of a humanism of diversity born from the mosaic India migrating through indenture. I played with languages and archive, moved to silences of archives sketched the centrality of the voyage of the coolie as a space of construction/deconstruction of identities, giving a primordial role to the ocean so as to move away from the “kala pani petrification.”Here, Torabully identifies how in India, migration overseas is imagined as a staining, and as, in fact, a blackening or darkening because of the kala pani. He reframes the ocean as a space of origin and genesis rather than as a space of loss and death. The duality of construction/ destruction is critical to the aesthetics of cooking, eating, and digesting. Campos-Pons and Chung craft a mosaic of the global indenture experience. Their response to the lacuna in the historical archive regarding Asian indenture is one that it is necessarily compounded, made of multiple parts in their sugar installations. The sweetness of the sugar is also accompanied by a bitterness. The word “coolie” is indeterminate in its origins and in Mandarin, kuli means “bitterly hard (use of) strength.” This definition speaks to the bitterness of the exploitations that Asian migrant laborers endured in the 1800s and early 1900s for which they were compensated with subsistence wages, if at all. Against constructs of purity, looking to the mixture of foods across the Western hemisphere is part of the shared legacy and diet both attendant and transcendent of violent orders. There would not be spicy Indian food if not for Portugal’s colonial project of imperial extraction and importation of chillies from present-day Mexico and the Caribbean. This foodway loop of the 1490s is travelled full circle when chillies return to the Western hemisphere in the new form of spicy Indian cuisine cooked on the plantations of indenture in Jamaica and Guyana. The regional diversity of India’s plural cuisines was translated to the Americas when people from across the country departed the port cities of Kolkata (previously Calcutta) and Chennai (previously Madras). Ghosh along with Patricia Powell, invoke the intimate and conjoined materiality of repurposed ships in their novels The Pagoda (1998) and Sea of Poppies (2008) by highlighting the fact that in some instances the same boats used to transport enslaved Africans from the West Coast of Africa to the Americas were used to transport South Asian and Chinese people as well. Poetics, derived from the Greek poiesis, is the act of someone creating a concept or an object that did not exist before. There is a poetics of assemblage in coolitude. There is a poetics of assemblage in sugarwork. It is creativity and creative potential at its very essence (Glissant). Poetics are rendered in two primary forms here: recipes and artwork. In the traces of colonial plantation recipes read against the grain, alterative narratives are produced wherein we can imagine the interiority and resistance of plantation. Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2012: 97) describes sugar as a commodity repeatedly linked to blackness. She writes, “As the Industrial Revolution boomed, Europeans—including their colonist and then American cousins—developed the taste for both bitter drinks such as coffee and tea that needed the addition of sugar and sweetened goods such as candy and jam, all of them cheap and easy sources of carbohydrate energy.” She says, “This shift in the Western palate and the resultant demand for sugar was enormous, and, in the mind of abolitionists, that desire for sugar was inextricable from slavery’s moral ‘stain.’”Gastro: Belly Poetics and the Racial Order of the PlantationWhile taste is readily recognized as one of the traditional five senses, the process of digestion belies a bodily knowledge. Reading of food as an object in material relation to the human body in what it illuminates about subjecthood gives texture to the critical differences between enslavement and indenture. Ultimately because it points to the performance of volition and to the legal status of subjects made objects in differing ways. So the inclusion of set amounts of food per passenger on “coolie” ships gestures to the ways in which Europeans wanted to make a clear distinction away from enslaved and towards free labour. The gastropoetics of the coolitude can be read in recipes as primary source archives. The Greek gastro means stomach, which is the prefix of gastronomical, gastrological, and the gastropolitical. There is a belly poetics or a gut poetics in what is produced anew by digestion. Labour is powered by digestion. Digestion is a critical part of the process of labouring that is often overlooked. When the noun “stomach” is used a verb it translates to what can be withstood, what can be tolerated, usually metaphorically. In the context of plantation bondage, this speaks in two registers to the abuse that was endured to the flesh, but also to the dietary intolerances and adaptations that changed the body. Conclusion: Grandma’s HandsFigure 5: Maria Magdalena Campos-PonsFigure 6: Andrea Chung, PureUltimately, both artists consider their labour as artists as part of the performance. There are numerous photographs of the women constructing the piece, assembling, and disassembling their installations. Their presence is one that cannot be absented as much as a haunting ghostliness is imbued in the artwork. Their work is sugarwork. Chung and Campos-Pons’ work is confection. The Oxford English Dictionary defines confection as “making or preparation by mixture of ingredients; mixing, compounding; composition, preparation, making up, manufacture.” Interestingly though the term usually refers to sugar work it speaks more generally to compounding. This is the essence of gastropoetics. The stomach breaks down, but the stomach also creates. The mutilated and fragmented histories of colonial modernity are restitched, re-formed. An alternate definition of confection reads, “Sometimes esp. the making of preserves of or confectionary.” Sugar becomes a method and a means of preserving. Just as jams and preserves extend the shelf life of fruits, sugar for Chung and Campus does the work of preserving or making this history sticky. Sugar can be used to desiccate by drying fruit and packing it with lots of sugar. When sugar is added to foods it binds to the water molecules in the food. The osmotic gradient draws the water out of the food so microorganisms are unable to thrive, slowing down the process of decay. Another method is that fruit can be cooked in sugar until it crystallises. The residual history of colonialism is the sugary with the sticky fingers of time. ReferencesAppadurai, Arjun (1981) “Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8: 494-511.Bennett, Jane (2009) Vibrant MatterChang, Alexandra (2018) Chinese Caribbean Art: Circles and Circuits. Duke University Press. Dabydeen, David (2003) Introduction. Edward Jenkins, Lutchmee and Dilloo: A Study of West Indian Life, Macmillian Education. Lopez, Kathleen (2013) Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. 2015.Macinnis, Peter. Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar, Allen and Unwin, 2002. Mintz, Sidney, Sweetness and Power, The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Penguin Books, 1986. Mintz, Sidney, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions Into Eating, Culture and the Past, Beacon Books, 1996.Mohabir, Nalini (2017) “Picturing an Afterlife of Indenture” Small Axe. 81-93.Plasa, Carl. Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar. Liverpool University Press.Roy, Parama (2010) Alimentary Tracts.Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century, New York University Press, 2012.Torabully, Khal. Letter to Amitav Ghosh, “Coolitude and Khal Torabully” blog entry October 1, 2011, , James. Sugar: The World Corrupted, from Slavery to Obesity. Little Brown Book Group, 2017.Carter, Marina and Torabully, Khal eds., (2002) Coolitude: an Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Anthem.Cate McQuad (2010) “Sugar is a Bittersweet Autobiography” The Boston Globe. “Art Imitating Life: An Exploration of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora.” CGTN China Daily ................
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