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Introduction

April Merleaux

in Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness

This book chronicles the rise of a sugar empire in the United States from the Spanish American War through the New Deal of the 1930s. It considers how changing patterns of migration shaped new ... More

This book chronicles the rise of a sugar empire in the United States from the Spanish American War through the New Deal of the 1930s. It considers how changing patterns of migration shaped new meanings for sugar consumption, how sugar and sweetness reinforced hierarchies of civilization and race, and how the nation-state created divisions of labor that privileged some producers and consumers while disadvantaging others. It also examines international and imperial trade policies as a crucial link connecting workers and consumers across oceans and continents, as well as the ways that sugar helped “balance the accounts” of U.S. imperial capitalism as new territories and workers began participating in the national economy. Finally, the book analyzes commodity cultures to illuminate the comparative politics of race and economy.Less

Spectacles of Sweetness: Race, Civics, and the Material Culture of Eating Sugar after the Turn of the Century

April Merleaux

in Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness

This chapter examines how race and civics intertwined with the material culture of sugar consumption during the years before World War I. In particular, it considers the ways that diverse consumers, ... More

This chapter examines how race and civics intertwined with the material culture of sugar consumption during the years before World War I. In particular, it considers the ways that diverse consumers, including white women, male soldiers, and African American and Asian American political commentators, grappled with the meanings attributed to sugar and sweetness after the turn of the century. For middle-class people in the United States after 1898, eating refined white sugar meant internalizing a colonial and racial division of labor. African Americans and residents of the island territories were commonly associated with less-refined forms of sweetness. This chapter shows how consumers used the trope of sweetness to claim civic virtue in the face of overseas expansion and segregation, while also contesting the normative hierarchies of civilization and citizenship.Less

Epilogue: Imperial Consumers at War

April Merleaux

in Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness

This epilogue examines how the meanings of sugar consumption kept pace with ongoing negotiations over political and economic status in the U.S. sugar empire since the turn of the twentieth century. ... More

This epilogue examines how the meanings of sugar consumption kept pace with ongoing negotiations over political and economic status in the U.S. sugar empire since the turn of the twentieth century. For years after the Spanish American War, sugar consumption and production were depicted based on the contrast between civilized and primitive, which in turn legitimated both expansion and race-based exclusion. Over the next four decades, colonial administrators, reformers, policymakers, workers, and consumers remade both public policy and visual culture to conform to their notions of national and ethnic belonging. People now saw consumption and production as the consequence of social and economic policies, rather than in terms of race. This epilogue also considers how sweetness became a means for people to manage their transitions from rural to urban consumerism as well as their statuses within shifting racial and economic hierarchies.Less

Sugar Stained with Blood: African Americans, Sugar, and Modern Agriculture

Anthony Ryan Hatch

in Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America

The chapter examines how sugar has served as the site of African American biopolitics. It is not possible to provide a critical interpretation of the politics of metabolism without recognizing and ... More

The chapter examines how sugar has served as the site of African American biopolitics. It is not possible to provide a critical interpretation of the politics of metabolism without recognizing and acknowledging the synergistic relationships between food politics and metabolic health problems. The construction of African Americans’ metabolic processes as biological and genetic, and the promotion of individualist and culturalist understandings of African Americans’ consumption of sugar, often take place absent a contextualized discussion about how technoscientific and capitalist shifts in the industrial production of sugar have impacted human metabolism. The significance of food politics is also apparent in stark contrast to the deployment of killer applications and the cultural power that prescription drugs have over people’s metabolic lives. Indeed, the economic interests of food and drug companies operate in our bodies and shape the politics of metabolism in ways that go beyond posing food and drugs as disconnected political issues.Less

‘Stained with Spots of Human Blood’: Sugar, Abolition and Cannibalism

in Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar

This chapter traces a shift from colonial margin to metropolitan centre, and from the saccharophilia of The Sugar-Cane to that of the white abolitionist writings of the early 1790s, looking ... More

This chapter traces a shift from colonial margin to metropolitan centre, and from the saccharophilia of The Sugar-Cane to that of the white abolitionist writings of the early 1790s, looking specifically at the abolitionists' construction of the sugar-eater as cannibal. Its starting-point and frame of reference is Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789), a text in which the discourse of cannibalism is appropriated and rewritten, with the colonizing rather than colonized subject invested with anthropophagous tendencies. The rhetorical strategies used in Equiano' slave narrative are taken up and reworked, in turn, by his white abolitionist contemporaries, a point the chapter illustrates in readings of political pamphlets by William Fox and Andrew Burn. For both of these writers, the consumption of sugar is inseparable from the consumption of the enslaved bodies which produce it, accordingly accruing to itself a ‘horror’ akin to that signalled in Martineau. But the difference between the two writers is that, in Fox's case, the status of consumer as cannibal is purely figurative, while in Burn it is more disturbingly – and more radically – literal.Less

‘Sugared Almonds and Pink Lozenges’: George Eliot's ‘Brother Jacob’ as Literary Confection

in Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar

This chapter examines George Eliot's ‘Brother Jacob’ (1864). Set in the 1820s, this novella returns to the issue of sugar's consumption broached by the abolitionists, taking up the seemingly ... More

This chapter examines George Eliot's ‘Brother Jacob’ (1864). Set in the 1820s, this novella returns to the issue of sugar's consumption broached by the abolitionists, taking up the seemingly frivolous subject of confectionery in order to show how its delights are seriously compromised by the slavery on which they depend. Yet as well as looking back to the writings of the abolitionists, ‘Brother Jacob’ engages with a host of other texts, each of which is implicated, to a greater or lesser degree, in the history of Caribbean slavery with which Eliot herself is dealing. These range from William Shakespeare's Othello (1604) and The Tempest (1611) to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), and also include the colonial romance of Inkle and Yarico, whose story is first told in Ligon's A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657).Less

Microhistory Set in Motion: A Nineteenth-century Atlantic Creole Itinerary

Rebecca J. Scott

in Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz

This chapter describes Sidney Mintz's Worker in the Cane as a model life history, uncovering the subtlest of dynamics within plantation society by tracing the experiences of a single individual and ... More

This chapter describes Sidney Mintz's Worker in the Cane as a model life history, uncovering the subtlest of dynamics within plantation society by tracing the experiences of a single individual and his family. By contrast, Mintz's Sweetness and Power gains its force from taking the entire Atlantic world as its scope, examining the marketing, meanings, and consumption of sugar as they changed over time. This chapter borrows from each of these two strategies, looking at the history of a single peripatetic family across three long-lived generations, from enslavement in West Africa in the eighteenth century through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s to emigration to Cuba, Louisiana, France, and Belgium in the nineteenth century. Tracing the social networks that sustained these people as they moved and identifying the experiences that shaped their political sensibilities can cast light on the dynamics of the achievement of freedom and on the development of vernacular concepts of equality.Less

Principles of oral health promotion

Blánaid Daly, Paul Batchelor, Elizabeth Treasure, and Richard Watt

in Essential Dental Public Health

Dental diseases affect a large number of people, cause much discomfort and pain, and are costly to treat. Their impact is therefore considerable, to both the individual and wider society (see ... More

Dental diseases affect a large number of people, cause much discomfort and pain, and are costly to treat. Their impact is therefore considerable, to both the individual and wider society (see Chapters 3 and 21 for a more detailed overview of oral health impacts). A particular concern is the pervasive nature of oral health inequalities with the burden of oral diseases now increasingly experienced amongst less educated and socially excluded groups in society. The causes of dental diseases are well known and effective preventive measures have been identified. However, treatment services still dominate oral health systems around the world. There is growing recognition within the dental profession that treatment services will never successfully treat away the causes of dental diseases (Blinkhorn 1998). In the Lancet , one of the top medical journals, an editorial on oral health highlighted the need to reorient dental services towards prevention (Lancet 2009). What type of preventive approach should be adopted to promote oral health and reduce inequalities? It is essential that preventive interventions address the underlying determinants of oral disease and inequalities to achieve sustainable improvements in population oral health. Effectiveness reviews of clinical preventive measures and health education programmes have highlighted that these approaches do not reduce oral health inequalities and only achieve short-term positive outcomes. A radically different preventive approach is therefore needed. If treatment services and traditional clinical preventive approaches are not capable of dealing effectively with dental diseases, then other options need to be considered. In recent decades, the health promotion movement has arisen, partly in response to the recognized limitations of treatment services to improve the health of the public. With escalating costs and wider acceptance that doctors and dentists are not able to cure most chronic conditions, increasing interest has focused on alternative means of dealing with health problems. The origins of health promotion date back to the work of public health pioneers in the 19th century. At that time, rapid industrialization led to the creation of poor and overcrowded working and living conditions for the majority of the working classes in the large industrial towns and cities of Europe and North America. Less