Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment) 3030761541, 9783030761547

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LITERATURES, CULTURES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System Edited by Chris Campbell Michael Niblett · Kerstin Oloff

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment Series Editors Ursula K. Heise Department of English University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA Gisela Heffes Rice University Houston, TX, USA

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary dimension. Books in this series explore how ideas of nature and environmental concerns are expressed in different cultural contexts and at different historical moments. They investigate how cultural assumptions and practices, as well as social structures and institutions, shape conceptions of nature, the natural, species boundaries, uses of plants, animals and natural resources, the human body in its environmental dimensions, environmental health and illness, and relations between nature and technology. In turn, the series makes visible how concepts of nature and forms of environmentalist thought and representation arise from the confluence of a community’s ecological and social conditions with its cultural assumptions, perceptions, and institutions. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14818

Chris Campbell Michael Niblett  •  Kerstin Oloff Editors

Literary and Cultural Production, WorldEcology, and the Global Food System

Editors Chris Campbell Department of English & Film University of Exeter Exeter, UK Kerstin Oloff School of Modern Languages and Cultures Durham University Durham, UK

Michael Niblett Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Coventry, UK

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ISBN 978-3-030-76154-7    ISBN 978-3-030-76155-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Yavuz Sariyildiz / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the following institutions and bodies that provided financial support for a number of events and collaborations out of which the present collection arose: the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience (Durham); the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Durham); the Centre for Humanities Innovation (now the Centre for Culture and Ecology); the Durham Energy Institute; the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies (Warwick). We are very grateful to all the colleagues who participated in these events and whose ideas and arguments inspired the development of this volume. We would particularly like to thank Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Jason W. Moore. Chris and Michael also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which funded the research on which large portions of their contributions were based. The editors gratefully acknowledge the generosity of The Felice Brothers in allowing us to quote from the song “Lion” (Favourite Waitress, 2014). The cover image shows goats climbing an Argan tree in Morocco. The goats climb the tree to get to fresh fruit, spitting out the nuts which are crushed by local workers to produce Argan oil. Recently, it has been claimed that photos such as this are often staged by farmers for the benefit of tourists, with different groups of goats doing ‘shifts’ up the tree.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Plotting the Crisis—World-­Literature, World-Culture, and the World-Food-System  1 Chris Campbell, Michael Niblett, and Kerstin Oloff

Part I Imperial Appetites and the Development of the World-Food-System  19 2 Eat Meat Crave Repeat: H. Rider Haggard, Lost World Romance and the Global Growth of Britain’s Meat Markets  21 Paul Young 3 Pain, Pleasure, and the World-Food-System: Plotting the Afterlife of the Plantation in the Poetry of Grace Nichols 43 Esthie Hugo 4 “The Landscape Heaved with Unspeakable Terror”: The Weird Presence of the World-­Food-­System in the Cultural Imaginaries of England and the Caribbean 65 Michael Niblett

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Part II Cash-Crops and Agricultural Monarchs  93 5 Laurie Lee in Cyprus: Scripting Propaganda, Productivity, and Peasant Labour 95 Chris Campbell 6 Plants in the Free World Garden: Revolution and Rice in Thai Literature117 Treasa De Loughry 7 Fleeing Ilex Paraguariensis: Yerba Mate Plantations in Horacio Quiroga and Augusto Roa Bastos141 Axel Pérez Trujillo 8 “To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”: Dialectical Aesthetics in Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Banana Trilogy (1950–1960)163 Lucy Potter and Stephanie Lambert

Part III Consumed by Crisis 191 9 Alimentary Gothic: Horror, Puerto Rico and the WorldFood-System193 Kerstin Oloff 10 Made in Cod’s Image: Food, Fuel, and World-­Ecological Decline in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland215 Michael Paye 11 White Flight from Planet Earth: Reading Race, Cheap Food, and Capitalism’s Crisis State in Interstellar235 Michelle Yates Index261

Notes on Contributors

Chris Campbell  is Senior Lecturer in Global Literatures at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the intersections of world literature, postcolonial theory, and environmental criticism. He is the co-editor of What Is the Earthly Paradise? Ecocritical Responses to the Caribbean (2007) and The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics (2016). Treasa  De Loughry  is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in World Literature in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis – Contemporary Literary Narratives (Palgrave, 2020). Esthie Hugo  is completing her doctorate at the University of Warwick and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Stephanie Lambert  is a postdoctoral researcher based in Leeds. She currently coordinates ‘Growing Green Spaces,’ a project commissioned by the City of York Council. Her first monograph, Don DeLillo: The Everyday and the World, is under contract with Edinburgh University Press. Michael  Niblett  is Associate Professor in Modern World Literature at the University of Warwick. He has written extensively on world literature, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. His previous books include World Literature and Ecology (2020) and The Caribbean Novel since 1945 (2012). Kerstin Oloff  is Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham, UK. She

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writes on Caribbean and Latin American literature, gothic and monstrous aesthetics, world literature, and ecocriticism. Michael  Paye  is a Lecturer at Beijing Normal University. His articles have appeared in Green Letters, Atlantic Studies, Humanities, and The Irish University Review. His monograph, Fishery Fictions and the World-­ Ecology, is forthcoming with Routledge. Lucy Potter  was a doctoral student at the University of York, funded by the AHRC. Axel  Pérez  Trujillo is Assistant Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham. Michelle Yates  is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Humanities in the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago. Her work is situated in the environmental humanities at the intersection of film and media, critical theory, and gender and sexuality. Paul Young  is Associate Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (2009).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Plotting the Crisis—World-­ Literature, World-Culture, and the World-Food-System Chris Campbell, Michael Niblett, and Kerstin Oloff

The critics write the canon The bankers bring the famine There will always be A little crumb for you and me —The Felice Brothers, “Lion”

C. Campbell Department of English & Film, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Niblett (*) Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] K. Oloff School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Durham, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_1

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This book unfolds from two major claims that have gained widespread currency with the maturing of agro-food studies in recent decades: (1) that agro-food relations are always, already, relations of power; and (2) that these relations of cultivation and power are irreducibly cultural. These claims are neatly encapsulated in the lines from The Felice Brothers’ track “Lion” (off their 2014 album Favourite Waitress) that serve as the epigraph to this introduction. The folk-rock collective’s witty couplets not only spotlight the misery and hunger caused by the financialization of food relations under capitalism, they also imply a relationship between the iniquities of the world-food-system and the dynamics of selection, exclusion, and consecration that structure the world-literary-system. Together, those critics who have traditionally safeguarded “the canon” and the bankers who bring the famine sit in opposition to “you and me,” the masses forced to scrabble for the crumbs swept from the high-table of the world’s financial and cultural elites. This pithy diagnosis of alimentary and class inequality can be contrasted with the message of solidarity to be found in another of the Felice Brothers’ songs, “Take this Bread” (2008). Opening with a snippet from a recorded phone message that, in warning of the devastation caused by wildfires in California, conjures the spectre of climate breakdown, the song articulates a vision of community and cooperation predicated on the sharing of bread amongst the working poor. Ironically, Dow Chemical, a US multinational profoundly implicated in the socioecological violence of capitalism’s corporate food regime, offered the Felice Brothers an “absolute shitload” of money to use “Take this Bread” in a commercial for gluten-free bread (Bernstein 2019: n.p.). The band promptly rejected the offer. On the one hand, the contrast between the content of “Take this Bread” and the use to which Dow wanted to put the song indexes the tensions surrounding food under global capitalism. As a basic necessity of life and as an $8 trillion global industry, food sits at the crux of the conjoined yet contradictory logics of the reproduction of material life and the accumulation of surplus-value. It is for this reason that, historically, food has constituted a “decisive battleground of the world class struggle” (Moore 2015a: 318). On the other hand, the stand-off between the Felice Brothers and Dow over “Take this Bread” is indicative of the significance of issues of cultural representation to struggles over food-getting. More specifically, it suggests the capacity for artistic works to critique and contest the dominant socioeconomic logics governing the production, distribution, and consumption of food. For all that they, too, might be enmeshed in the

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logic of the marketplace, cultural productions—whether songs, novels, poetry, film, drama, or the visual arts—have long provided an important means of imagining alternative ways of organizing the relationship between life, land, and labour. The connections between food, social power, and cultural representation have been articulated in an equally suggestive fashion by the Barbadian author George Lamming. Commenting on the challenge posed by Jamaica’s dietary shift towards food products from the First World grain-­ livestock complex in the latter half of the twentieth century, Lamming observes: This is not only a matter of agriculture or economics. There is a crisis of the cultural sovereignty of a people when patterns of consumption bear no relation to basic needs and cannot be supported by the productive base of the society. It may sound very strange but a Minister of Agriculture in our region, whether he [sic] knows it or not, is engaged in what is essentially a cultural problem: how do you de-colonize the eating habits of a people who have surrendered their very palates to foreign control? […] Unfortunately for us, there is this enormous separation, between the head and the belly of this society. (1996: 26–27)

The problems Lamming identifies have their roots in capitalist imperialism’s violent transformation of food cultures in the Caribbean over the longue durée, beginning with the region’s forcible integration into the world market and the rapid and devastating conversion of large swathes of land to cash-crop monocultures. This is a Caribbean history, but it is also, necessarily, a global one. For as is now well-recognized, the profits from the New World sugar plantations, extracted via the brutal exploitation of enslaved peoples taken from West Africa, provided capital to finance Europe’s domestic industrialization (Williams 1944; Blackburn 1997). In addition, sugar and other plantation products such as coffee and cocoa, as well as tea from India and China, served as low-cost, high-energy food substitutes that helped cheapen the living costs of the metropolitan working classes (Mintz 1985). As Mimi Sheller puts it, “mass consumption of these Caribbean and Asian commodities fed into—and literally fed—a new capitalist world that tied together far-flung markets and created a new international division of labour, affecting the meaning of work, the definition of self, and the very nature of material things” (2003: 81).

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Such transformations, then, were a central moment in the emergence of the modern world-system, which (following Immanuel Wallerstein) can be defined as “a multicultural territorial division of labour in which the production and exchange of basic goods and raw materials is necessary for the everyday life of its inhabitants. It is thus by definition composed of culturally different societies that are vitally linked together through the exchange of food and raw materials” (Chase-Dunn and Grimes 1995: 389). Building on the work of world-system theorists such as Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, Jason W. Moore has highlighted how the rise of the modern world-economy entailed an epochal reorganization of global natures such that “varied and heretofore largely isolated local and regional socio-ecological relations were incorporated into—and at the same moment became constituting agents of—a capitalist world-ecology” (2003: 447). The world-economy, in other words, is also a world-ecology. Moore’s concept of world-ecology—the hyphenation of the phrase is intended to emphasize the systemic, world-historical character of the production of nature under capitalism—provides one of this book’s guiding threads. Indeed, it is closely connected to what we refer to as the world-­ food-­system, the hyphenation of which is similarly intended to call attention to the way the development of the capitalist world-ecology was inextricable from, and unfolded through, the development of a systemically integrated network of food production, distribution, and consumption. The nature of the change that occurred in food-getting following the transition to capitalism is neatly summarized by Harriet Friedmann. With the shift from self-renewing agronomy to regional specialization in crops and livestock, she writes, the “interdependence of species with local configurations of soil and water was, in part, substituted by interdependence of specialized regions linked by trade” (2000: 487–488). The history of the modern world-food-system can be periodized through reference to the rise and fall of successive food regimes. The concept of “food regime” was first coined by Friedmann in 1987, before being formulated more systematically by Friedmann and Philip McMichael in a 1989 article in Sociologia Ruralis. In a useful overview, McMichael describes food regimes as demarcating stable periodic arrangements in the production and circulation of food on a world scale, associated with various forms of hegemony in the world economy: British, American, and corporate/neoliberal. In its original formulation, it also posited periods of transition, anticipated by tensions between

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social forms embedded in each hegemonic order—tensions resolved by regime demise and rebirth along a different historical trajectory. Subsequently, scholars […] have further specified and/or broadened the concept of the food regime to reinterpret its historical, social, ecological and nutritional dimensions. An additional dimension is that the food regime is an important pivot on which other capitalist relations depend, across time and space. For example, the large-scale dispossession of peasant agriculture under conditions of a ‘corporate food regime’ provides a reserve labour force for export-processing, and special economic, zones across the world, as neo-liberalism deepens the phenomenon of the ‘world factory.’ (2009: 281)

To the “historical, social, ecological and nutritional dimensions” of food regimes that McMichael identifies here, we would want to add “cultural.” What role has culture played in stabilizing these “periodic arrangements in the production and circulation of food”? How have cultural forms contested or resisted such arrangements? These questions are central to the present study, which combines the materialist and world-historical approach to agro-food studies evident in the work of Friedmann, Moore, McMichael, Tony Weis, Mindi Schneider, and others, with a materialist and world-systemic approach to literary and cultural studies. Specifically, the volume builds on recent efforts by members of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) to reconstruct the concept of world literature in terms of its relationship to global capitalism. For WReC, world literature is to be understood, in the broadest terms, as the literature of the modern world-system: capitalist modernity is “both what ‘world-literature’ indexes or is ‘about’ and what gives ‘world-literature’ its distinguishing characteristics” (2015: 15). Underpinning this conception of world-literature is an insistence that modernity must be grasped, like capitalism itself, as a singular and simultaneous phenomenon, yet one that is everywhere heterogeneous and unique. In this view, modernity represents something like the space–time consciousness corresponding to capitalist modernization; it might be defined as “the way capitalist social relations are ‘lived’—different in every given instance for the simple reason that no two social instances are the same” (WReC 2015: 12). Thus, for any territory integrated into the world-system, the shared experience of capitalist modernization provides “a certain baseline of universality” (Brown 2005: 2), even as this experience is lived differently in different locations. Hence the possibility of approaching world-literature in terms of its relationship to the uneven singularity of capitalist modernity. As

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WReC puts it, the “effectivity of the world-system will necessarily be discernible in any modern literary work, since the world-system exists unforgoably as the matrix within which all modern literature takes shape and comes into being” (WReC 2015: 20). Accepting this proposition, our central wager here is that insofar as the development of the modern world-­ system necessarily implies the development of the modern world-food-­ system, the effectivity of the latter, too, will be discernible in any modern literary work. And not just literary work. The current volume expands WReC’s emphasis on world-literature to world-culture more broadly. Our use of the term world-culture owes something to Wallerstein’s suggestive concept of geoculture. For Wallerstein, geoculture is not “the superstructure of [the] world-economy,” but rather its “underside”; it represents “the cultural framework within which the world-system operates” (1991: 11). However, this concept remains a relatively under-theorized one in Wallerstein’s work and lacks both the historical motility accorded to the analogous concept of geopolitics and an attentiveness to aesthetics. Noting this deficiency, Stephen Shapiro has suggested that the concept be reconceptualized, under the rubric of world-culture, as involving “the intersection between the desired social reproduction of class identities and relations, as the attempt to reinstall the order of one generation into the next, and the range of responses to the historical changes that are structurally and inescapably generated by capitalism’s logistic” (2008: 36). World-­ culture, thus, should not be understood as representing some abstract notion of global culture or a “transcendental aesthetic” (Shapiro 2019: 16). Rather, it refers to “the manifold and many-sided culture of the capitalist world-system” (Shapiro 2019: 15). In analogy to the hyphenation of world-ecology and world-food-system, therefore, the hyphenated “world-­ culture” is used to indicate “the relationality of cultural production within a world-system that is both unifying and making unequal due to capitalist forces” (Shapiro 2019: 15). The emphasis in this collection on the imbrication of world-ecology, the world-food-system, and world-culture is summed up by the word “plot,” which can refer to a narrative device, parcel of land, cartographic practice, or conspiratorial activity. In her seminal article “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (1971), Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter identified two competing organizational models for Caribbean literature: the plantation system and the plots of the enslaved and the peasantry. Whereas the plantation system’s rationalized monocultures were

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geared towards the production of non-sustainable cash-crops for external markets, the plots or provision grounds were organized around the growing of diverse subsistence foods such as yams, cassava, and sweet potatoes, which provided both edible staples and produce for sale in the internal markets. The plots, moreover, were sites in which plots of a different sort could be formulated and resistance to the plantation regime fostered. “Around the growing of yam, of food for survival,” writes Wynter, the enslaved “created on the plot a folk culture—the basis of a social order […]. This folk culture became a source of cultural guerrilla resistance to the plantation system” (1971: 99–100). Emerging alongside and in opposition to the plantation system, therefore, the plot system’s distinctive agro-ecology was connected to a set of sociocultural practices and values different to those embodied in the plantocracy. These in turn became a resource for Caribbean writers and artists, providing a rich repository of alter/native ways of seeing and being in the world that would inform the region’s cultural production. Wynter’s essay, then, emphasizes the connections between agro-­ ecology, sociopolitical struggle, and cultural form. It is an essential reference point for the present volume’s interest in how the dynamics of the world-food-system register in the forms, styles, images, motifs, and plots of literary and cultural texts. With Wynter’s evocation of “cultural guerrilla resistance” in mind, moreover, it is important to stress that when we speak of the literary or cultural “registration” of the world-food-system, we are not suggesting that such texts merely reflect or passively record the dynamics of this system. Cultural practice is itself an ecological force, an integral pivot in humanity’s capacity to rework life, land, and the body. In this regard, it is worth recalling Raymond Williams’ exposition of Marx’s concept of “productive forces”: a “productive force”, writes Williams, is “all and any of the means of the production and reproduction of real life. It may be seen as a particular kind of agricultural or industrial production, but any such kind is already a certain mode of social co-operation and the application and development of a certain body of social knowledge” (1977: 91). Artistic works can be grasped as productive forces in this sense, then: as a species of social knowledge fundamentally interwoven with the reproduction of material life. They may well supply narratives or tropes that enable particular social groups to adjust to existing socioecological formations or relations of power. But they might also sensitize their audience to new types of social practice (including new ways of organizing food-getting) and new analytical optics that foster resistant or counterhegemonic activities.

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The chapters that follow explore these possibilities through consideration of a wide variety of literary and cultural texts. They seek to map explicit representations and critical explorations of food cultures and food chains, as well as less conscious registrations of the impact of the world-­ food-­system. They also reflect on alternatives to hegemonic food regimes as imagined by authors and activists. Writing in 1819, the radical English pamphleteer, journalist, and farmer William Cobbett declared: “if I wrote grammars, if I wrote on architecture; if I sowed, planted, or dealt in seeds; whatever I did had first in view the destruction of infamous tyrants.” Some two hundred years later, with Cobbett’s emphasis on the fundamental interconnection of culture, politics, and food in mind, what possibilities exist, today, for destroying the “infamous tyrants” of the corporate food regime and capitalist agribusiness? What alternatives are there to a world in which “the bankers bring the famine”?

Plotting the Field: Literary Food Studies and the World-Food-System If the perspective we take on literary food studies is embedded in a long view of the world-food-system, we also understand it as profoundly shaped by the particularities of the current moment. The growth of Food Studies as a discipline in the 2000s has been spectacular, not only within its traditional confines of agricultural and nutritional studies, but also through its expansion into a range of subject areas, not least literature and film (Counihan and van Esterik 2013: 1). The emergence of literary and filmic food studies as distinctive fields is attested by the recent publication of important (and sizeable) edited collections and primers, including Food and Literature by Gitanjali G. Shahani (2018), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien (2018), A History of Food in Literature (2017) by Charlotte Boyce and Joan Fitzpatrick, and Literature and Food Studies by Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth (2017). Within film studies, the appearance of a variety of individually authored texts, from James Keller’s Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study (2006) to Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film (2017), has also established food as a staple of academic enquiry. The result has been to open up several new avenues for cultural critique. Thus, in her introduction to Food and Literature, Shanani highlights a set of questions that might guide the food-oriented scholar:

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What do food words and food scenes do for the literary text? How does food function as a formal device? Can we think in terms of a food ekphrasis in which we pause to read descriptions of feasts, banquets, kitchen scenes, and fictional dishes? What are characters really saying when they say things about food—food that they don’t need to eat and food that the reader cannot really share? (2018: 3)

To approach cultural texts through this agro-alimentary optic is not, of course, to bracket the myriad other optics that we may wish to bring to the critical table. As the aforementioned volumes all emphasize, food and food-getting are thoroughly imbricated in issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, empire, and so forth. Hence essays such as that by Rita Mookerjee in The Routledge Companion to Food and Literature on the transmutation of black female bodies into objects of consumption; or that by Catherine Keyser in Food and Literature on how “US literature of the twentieth century dramatizes the process of race-making through the mouth and the stomach” (2018: 147). The complex symbolic economies that surround the production and consumption of food have been eloquently summarized by Sidney Mintz: For us humans, […] eating is never a “purely biological” activity (whatever “purely biological” means). The foods eaten have histories associated with the pasts of those who eat them; the techniques employed to find, process, prepare, serve, and consume the foods are all culturally variable, with histories of their own. Nor is the food ever simply eaten; its consumption is always conditioned by meaning. The meanings are symbolic, and communicated symbolically; they also have histories. These are some of the ways we humans make so much more complicated this supposedly “simple” animal activity. (1996: 7–8)

In light of such symbolic economies, critics have highlighted the peculiarly resonant relationship between food and literary texts, which are very directly concerned, of course, with meaning and representation as such. Piatti-Farnell and Brien have emphasized “the multi-faceted nature of food as metaphor and, in turn, the ways in which food and consumption have the ability to channel and reflect a variety of contextual and historical preoccupations” (2018: 1). Alison Carruth, meanwhile, contends that “across genres, literature is a vehicle attuned to the modern food system due to the capacity of imaginative texts to shuttle between social and interpersonal registers and between symbolic and embodied expressions of power” (2013: 5).

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Carruth’s pinpointing of the ability of “imaginative texts” to “shuttle between” different registers and contexts is significant here and, we believe, might be emulated by the critic. But our sense is that within literary food studies, the balance has often tended to tip towards the symbolic at the expense of maintaining a dialectical approach that shuttles between the ways in which food is produced, shipped, sold, consumed, and dominated by extra-alimentary global forces, and its meaning-making symbolic dimension, which often finds expression through “the eating body” (Shahani 11). The present collection seeks to pursue just such a dialectical approach, emphasizing at every turn the “contextual and historical preoccupations” that shape and frame individual acts of consumption. Indeed, it is an approach that might be applied to the field of food studies itself. The recent surge of interest in the cultural registration of foodways can be situated in the context of growing anxiety and conflict over global food production. Of the difficulties now facing the world-food-system, the effects of anthropogenic climate breakdown are surely one of the most prominent. Global warming, for example, is implicated in failing harvests and the yield suppression of wheat, maize, rice, and soy (Moore 2010: 251). Recent years have also seen a flurry of reports highlighting the threat posed by global soil degradation as a result of climate change, chemical-­ heavy farming techniques, and deforestation. In 2014, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization warned that the world on average has just sixty more years left of growing crops (Arsenault 2014). To these looming threats, we can add “rising energy costs; escalating competition for arable land from agrofuels; the proliferation of invasive species; the superweed effect; the end of cheap water, as global warming melts glaciers, rearranges precipitation patterns, and drives aquifer depletion; and the declining effectiveness of fertilizers on yield growth” (Moore 2010: 251). The crisis in the world-food-system is one expression of the ongoing crisis in the capitalist world-system, which manifested itself with particular virulence in the 2000s (its roots go back to the long downturn that began in the 1970s). Indeed, the financial crisis and onset of the “long depression” in 2007/08 coincided with, and was inseparable from, “the return of one of the oldest forms of collective action, the food riot”: Countries where protests occurred ranged from Italy, where “Pasta Protests” in September 2007 were directed at the failure of the Prodi government to prevent a 30% rise in the price of pasta, to Haiti, where protesters railed against President Préval’s impassive response to the doubling in the price of

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rice over the course of a single week. Other countries in which riots were reported included Uzbekistan, Morocco, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina, and some commentators have estimated that thirty countries experienced some sort of food protest over this period at the turn of the century. (Patel and McMichael 2009: 9)

The most obvious cause of the protests was the sudden and steep global rise in commodity prices, increases that were passed on directly to consumers, particularly those in urban areas. As Crystal Bartolovich notes, the price rises that led to the riots were “an effect of global forces, not merely local ones,” with “competition for oil, the cost of commercial seeds, fertiliser and pesticide, speculation in commodities markets, shifting of grains to use for fuel rather than food, or for livestock rather than people, all […] identified as culprits” (2010: 42). As a “site of social struggle over concrete planetary resources,” the food riots “raise[d] anew—and emphatically at a global level—the limits of the market in mediating the distribution of the most basic resources” (Bartolovich 2010: 42). We think that the realities that came to a head in the food riots pose a very particular challenge to literary / cultural food studies, demanding a serious engagement with the world-food-system and its relationship to the convulsive development of global capitalism. Hence our emphasis in this volume on the cultural registration not just of certain foods or forms of food-getting, but of the more expansive and complex set of food relations through which the modern world-system is constituted. These relations are necessarily global and systemic, even as they find irreducibly specific expression in particular localized contexts. The chapters gathered here range across a variety of such contexts, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean, and a variety of topics, from anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain to food dependency in Puerto Rico. But all do so with an eye to the totalizing matrix that is the capitalist world-food-system.

Plotting the Collection This volume is divided into three parts, each of which approaches the relationship between world-culture and the world-food-system from a different, if related, angle. Part I, “Imperial Appetites and the Development of the World-Food-System,” comprises three chapters that each in their own

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way address the literary and cultural ramifications of signal historical moments in the imperialist re-making of food relations on a global scale. Focusing on the regions enmeshed in the “triangular trade,” the bloody networks of which were central to the emergence of the modern world-­ food-­system, the chapters probe the imbrication of aesthetic practice with agro-food production and vernacular foodways. In the opening chapter, Paul Young examines the relationship between late-Victorian romance and the meatification of diets in Britain. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, he notes, Britain’s growing body of meat-eaters were increasingly devouring animals reared and slaughtered in the Americas and Australasia, the result of advances in preservation and transportation technologies that operated in tandem with extensive programmes of pastoralization. Contemporaneous with this rise in imported meat, H. Rider Haggard was entertaining his Victorian readers with lost-­ world romances punctuated by dramatically visceral acts of carnivory that were at times life-affirming, at times anxiety-inducing, and at times both at once. Accordingly, Young’s chapter turns to three of Haggard’s most popular adventure stories, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1886), and Allan Quartermain (1887), in order to argue that they worked in powerful, variously inflected ways to stimulate but also unsettle a carnivorous culinary culture that took hold within a nation looking increasingly to distant parts of the world to put meat on its tables. If Young’s chapter highlights the relationship between imperial Britain and the African continent, Esthie Hugo’s chapter on the literary inscription of the Caribbean plantation regime and African-diasporic food cultures focuses on the “second” and “third” legs of the triangular trade. Through a reading of the work of the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols, Hugo explores the racialized and gendered violence surrounding the sugar frontier and its brutal re-making of human and nonhuman relations. She suggests that we “might think of food less as a symbol and more as an ‘archive’” of the history of slavery. 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, argues Hugo, 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. The final chapter in this section, by Michael Niblett, is similarly interested in the long history of colonial and imperial agro-food relations, as

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well as the resistance engendered by capitalism’s periodic restructuring of foodways. Offering a comparative analysis of work from England and the Caribbean, Niblett explores how the traumatic legacies of enclosure and the plantation system haunt the textual registration of ongoing transformations in the production and consumption of food. The chapter provides a brief overview of the historical connections between various radical movements for land redistribution and food sovereignty, before moving to consider an eclectic range of fiction, theatre, TV, and music. From Edgar Mittelholzer to David Rudkin, Fairport Convention to Gaika, Niblett analyses the “Weird” aesthetics through which violent convulsions in the world-food-system are manifested on both sides of the Atlantic. The second part of the collection, “Cash-Crops and Agricultural Monarchs,” focuses on the socioecological devastation wrought by plantation monocultures and cash-crop agriculture, as well as the resistance movements such devastation typically spawns. Ranging across the world-­ food-­ system—from Cyprus to Guatemala, Thailand to Paraguay—the chapters cover struggles over the reorganization of farming and the commodification of such crops as bananas, rice, and mate. Chris Campbell’s chapter on agro-food relations in Cyprus in the 1940s throws light on a chapter of colonial history that remains peripheral to mainstream studies of empire in Anglophone academia. Campbell takes as his starting point the 1946 colonial propaganda documentary Cyprus is an Island (scripted by the English writer Laurie Lee), the discursive strategies of which work to obscure or symbolically contain the ecological fallout from the violent rationalization of Cyprus’s agricultural system. Reading the film alongside Lee’s journal of the film-making process, he shows how, by documenting things that fall outside the camera’s field of vision, the journal provides a purview that frequently runs counter to or complicates an understanding of the principle aims of the colonial administration. In particular, Lee’s text provides a fuller acknowledgement of the politics of anti-colonialism and a deeper engagement with the working lives of women on the island. Campbell’s analysis of Cyprus locates the island’s agricultural transformation in the context of the waning of the first global food regime, which had been established during Britain’s hegemony over the world-economy, and the emergence, post-1945, of the second global food regime, which coincided with the US’s ascent to world-economic hegemony. This latter development provides the backdrop to Treasa De Loughry’s chapter on revolution and rice in Thai literature. Here she examines the role of US imperialism in restructuring food relations in Thailand as part of a vast

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programme of military spending, infrastructural development, and ecological programming from the 1950s to the 1970s. De Loughry’s specific concern is with the literary registration of the struggle over rice as both a subsistence crop and an export commodity enmeshed in national and global circuits of distribution and consumption. Focusing on Seni Saowaphong’s 1957 novel Ghosts, Khamsing Srinawk’s short-story collection The Politician and Other Stories (2001), and Chart Korbjitti’s collection A Baker’s Dozen (2010), she shows how discontinuities in form and content index the estranging and alienating effects of disruptive changes to existing foodways. Similarly interested in the sense of disequilibrium and estrangement caused by the commodification of staple foods, Axel Pérez Trujillo’s chapter explores the material ecologies of mate plantations and their literary inscription in Hijo de Hombre (1960) by Augusto Roa Bastos, and the short story “Los Mensú” (1914) by Horacio Quiroga. Perhaps one of the most iconic plants of South America, ilex paraguariensis or yerba mate is implicated in a long history of monoculture exploitation that began with the arrival of the Jesuits at the Rio de la Plata basin in the seventeenth century and continued on through Brazil’s annexation of large parcels of land from Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870). Although the plant was first consumed by Guaraní communities—known to them by the name Ka’a—subsequent conflicts in the region turned the production of mate into a lucrative business, monopolized by the Brazilian company Mate Laranjeira. Situated in the borderlands between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, Roa Bastos’ and Quiroga’s narratives expose the nightmarish effects of mate monoculture on landscapes and labouring bodies. In light of the sheer destructive quality of this monoculture, concludes Pérez Trujillo, the ontology of the mate plantations could be said to be built on necrosis. Similarly concerned with the death-dealing logic of monoculture, Stephanie Lambert and Lucy Potter’s chapter examines the bloody history of the Guatemalan banana frontier via an analysis of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Banana Trilogy (1950–1960). The trilogy, they argue, registers and resists the latent accumulation of “negative-value” that underwrites the plantation regime in Latin America. Disjunctive temporal overlaps and recurring formal patterns capture the radical unevenness and accumulated violence of the banana enclave, whilst self-negating generic tropes and surreal motifs link cumulative toxicity and ecological exhaustion with systemic turbulence and resurgent collective uprising. In this

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way, Lambert and Potter suggest, Asturias’ work uncannily pre-empts what Jason Moore (2015b) describes as the emergence of “new limits” to capital accumulation, whose increasingly “costly, toxic, and dangerous strategies” signal capitalism’s terminal crisis but also the potential for radical alternatives. The possibility that we are now witnessing capitalism’s terminal crisis as its voracious appetite for natural resources wreaks havoc on the planetary biosphere underpins the volume’s final part, “Consuming the Crisis.” That agro-food relations are at the heart of this crisis is amply demonstrated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the emergence and spread of which has everything to do with agro-industrialization, large-scale factory farms, deforestation, and the globalization of supply chains (Wallace et al. 2020). The chapters in this section are concerned with different moments and modalities of crisis across the world-food system. Kerstin Oloff’s chapter on what she terms the “alimentary Gothic” considers the case of Puerto Rico, an island long subject to “US food power.” Organized around two key moments of crisis—that of new imperialism and of the first global food regime of the 1930s, and the crisis initiated by the global economic downturn of 2007/08—Oloff’s chapter focuses on the short-stories of one of the key members of the Puerto Rican generación del treinta, Emilio S. Belaval, alongside the recent gothic sci-fi narratives of Jotacé López and Alexandra Pagán Vélez. Across these works, the systematic exploitation of landscapes and labouring bodies, as well as the delocalization of food production and dietary underdevelopment inflicted on Puerto Rico, register in monstrous figures, dystopian environments, and disturbed psyches. In the chapter that follows, Michael Paye highlights the crisis-ridden dynamics that structure our fossil-fuelled present, examining the link between food and energy regimes via a reading of Michael Crummey’s 2014 novel, Sweetland. This novel, he argues, is part of a more general cultural recognition of the post-peak North Atlantic fishery, narrating the erasure of small island communities following the twentieth-century North Atlantic cod boom and 1992 moratorium. Paye interprets the novel as registering a moment of world-ecological breakdown: as the narrative moves from a sense of growing entropy to permanent apocalypse, its starkly articulated irrealist and gothic descriptions of individual survival in an island turned wasteland draw the connection between oil dependency and foodway decline. The concluding chapter of the volume shows how efforts to think beyond our current moment too often fail to escape from the logics of

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exploitation through which global capitalism operates. Focusing on the 2014 Hollywood blockbuster Interstellar (directed by Christopher Nolan), Michelle Yates examines the narrative strategies through which agricultural crisis is understood and symbolically managed. She shows how the movie offers a compelling and seemingly progressive visual representation of capitalism’s crisis state in the era of the end of cheap food. It does so, however, through a call to recuperate white privilege, a discursive manoeuvre that underscores the historic imbrication of food and racial regimes. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson, then, it would seem that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the capitalist world-food-system. And yet as the chapters in this volume repeatedly attest, artists, critics, and activists have time and again not only imagined what it would mean to put an end to the domination of foodways by the commodity form, but have struggled to enact new kinds of food relations in a bid to nurture alternatives to the violence and misery of the capitalist lifeworld.

Works Cited Arsenault, Chris. 2014. Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ Bartolovich, Crystal. 2010. A Natural History of Food Riots. New Formations 69 (69): 42–61. Bernstein, Jonathan. 2019. The Felice Brothers Just Won’t Quit. Rolling Stone, May 8. Blackburn, Robin. 1997. The Making of New World Slavery. London: Verso. Brown, Nicholas. 2005. Utopian Generations. Oxford UP. Carruth, Allison. 2013. Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food. Cambridge UP. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Peter Grimes. 1995. World-Systems Analysis. Annual Review of Sociology 21 (1): 387–417. Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik, eds. 2013. Food and Culture: A Reader. London: Routledge. Friedmann, Harriet. 2000. What on Earth Is the Modern World-System? Foodgetting and Territory in the Modern Era and Beyond. Journal of World-­ Systems Research 6 (2): 480–515. Keyser, Catherine. 2018. Visceral Encounters. In Food and Literature, ed. Gitanjali G. Shahani, 147–168. Cambridge UP.

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Lamming, George. 1996. Beckford and the Predicaments of Caribbean Culture. In The Critical Tradition of Caribbean Political Economy: The Legacy of George Beckford, ed. Kari Levitt and Michael Witter, 19–28. Kingston: Ian Randle. McMichael, Philip. 2009. A Food Regime Genealogy. The Journal of Peasant Studies 36 (1): 139–169. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. ———. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Beacon Press. Moore, Jason W. 2003. Capitalism as World Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History. Organization and Environment 16 (4): 431–458. ———. 2010. Cheap Food & Bad Money: Food, Frontiers, and Financialization in the Rise and Demise of Neoliberalism. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 33: 225–261. ———. 2015a. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso. ———. 2015b. Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology. Critical Historical Studies 2 (1): 1-44. Patel, Raj, and Philip McMichael. 2009. A Political Economy of the Food Riot. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32: 9–35. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Donna Lee Brien, eds. 2018. Introduction. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food. London: Routledge. Shahani, Gitanjali G., ed. 2018. Introduction. In Food and Literature. Cambridge UP. Shapiro, Stephen. 2008. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System. Pennsylvania State UP. ———. 2019. The World-Literary System and the Atlantic: Combined and Uneven Development – An Interview with Stephen Shapiro. Atlantic Studies 16 (1): 7–20. Sheller, Mimi. 2003. Consuming the Caribbean. London: Routledge. Wallace Rob, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace. 2020. COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital. Monthly Review 72 (1):1-15 Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System. Cambridge UP. Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Virginia: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. OUP. WReC. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool UP. Wynter, Sylvia. 1971. Novel and History, Plot and Plantation. Savacou 5: 95–102.

PART I

Imperial Appetites and the Development of the World-Food-System

CHAPTER 2

Eat Meat Crave Repeat: H. Rider Haggard, Lost World Romance and the Global Growth of Britain’s Meat Markets Paul Young

In King Solomon’s Mines, first published in 1885, H.  Rider Haggard’s intrepid English adventurers stave off hunger and cold when they shoot dead an antelope and “greedily” devour its raw heart and liver. The act leads the novel’s narrator, Allan Quatermain, to reflect on how this distinctly uncivilized act recharged his company’s powerful masculinity: “It sounds horrible enough, but honestly, I never tasted anything so good as that raw meat. In a quarter of an hour we were changed men. Our life and vigour came back to us, our feeble pulses grew strong again, and the blood went coursing through our veins” (2002: 105). As the novel advanced meat’s regenerative potential, it also cast carnivory in more troubling terms. Only a few pages earlier, the macabre discovery of a three hundred-year-old conquistador’s frozen corpse leads another of Haggard’s

P. Young (*) Department of English, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_2

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heroes to raise the possibility the band might cannibalize the unspoiled body: “If only the air is cold enough flesh and blood will keep as fresh as New Zealand mutton for ever, and Heaven knows it is cold enough here” (102). This grisly analogy was bang up-to-date: frozen meat from New Zealand sheep had been successfully introduced to British markets as recently as 1882, following the much celebrated voyage of the refrigerated ship the Dunedin. While Haggard’s adventure charted a perilous but revitalizing escape from modern metropolitan life, therefore, the uncanny allusion reminded his modern metropolitan readers that in a globalizing world where technologies such as the Dunedin arrested time and annihilated space, enabling them to dine on long-dead animals from faraway lands, the truth of their everyday existence was almost as fabulous as fiction. And frozen mutton from New Zealand was only part of the story. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain was confronted by what some historians have referred to as a “mid-Victorian meat famine,” caused by a growing mismatch between a fast-increasing, urbanizing population and a levelling out in domestic meat production (Perren 2006: 8). By 1873 the Agricultural Gazette despaired that Britain’s “meat supply is becoming the most important problem of the day, and its satisfactory solution is almost impossible” (qtd. in Perren 2006: 8). In the years immediately following this gloomy conclusion, however, the rapid development of farming, preservation and transportation processes rendered livestock reared and slaughtered on the colonial and ‘new world’ pastures of the Americas and Australasia economically viable and readily available to British meat-eaters. Dispatched and butchered in large volume quantities that demanded a pioneering approach to “the development of assembly line techniques,” and then steam-powered to market in canned, extracted and refrigerated form, these animals became central to the phenomenal growth of British meat-eating in the years leading up to the First World War (Perren 2006: 1). In the 1850s per capita consumption of meat in the United Kingdom averaged about 87 pounds, with 4% of it imported; by 1914, when the population had nearly doubled, the yearly average had risen to around 127 pounds, with imports at 42% (Perren 1978: 3). Imported meat and meat-related comestibles were relatively cheap but they were also new, strange and controversial. Although products such as chilled and corned beef, frozen mutton, and meat extracts including Bovril and Oxo became staples throughout British homes, many Victorian and Edwardian meat-eaters preferred home-reared animals and remained wary

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of preservation and extraction processes, especially early on in the development of these technologies. If Britain’s “urban carnivores” formed an ever more voracious customer base, notes James Belich, it is equally true that they were “particularly particular about their meat supplies, and prone to moral panics about disease and decay.” “Britons were not known for culinary adventurism,” he continues: “They were particularly suspicious of foreign meat” (2009: 438, 447). Such suspicions were exacerbated by fears over the sheer scale and pace of the operations that put non-European meat on British tables. In his history of the international meat industry Richard Perren writes that at “the end of the nineteenth century politicians and farmers were worried by the spectre of big business and the way it used its power,” with meat packers “variously accused of conspiring together against farmers, exploiting their workers, disregarding good hygiene practices, and hazarding the health and welfare of their consumers” (2006: 2). So too the increasingly intensive farming methods and industrialized slaughter techniques associated with the mass consumption of overseas meat led commentators and activists including vegetarian and animal rights campaigners to debate the impact of developing meat markets upon non-human life and planetary resources, as well as upon the nation’s human producers and consumers. While protein chains that stretched across the globe allowed Victorians and Edwardians to eat more meat for less money, their lack of “culinary adventurism” coupled with these broader ethical, industrial and ecological concerns makes clear that cost–benefit rationalization was far from the only factor at play as Britons grew accustomed (or not) to the idea of eating the flesh of foreign animals killed many months previously. Particularly given the “growing consciousness” among historians of British expansion of “culture as the matrix in which economic life occurs,” this point opens up the question of how cultural forms and forces might be understood to have shaped the global growth of Britain’s meat markets, in ways that perhaps stunted as well as stimulated their development (Magee and Thompson 2010: 14). The question returns us to the simultaneously life-affirming and anxiety-inducing representation of carnivory in King Solomon’s Mines. And it leads this chapter to consider more generally how Haggard’s three most acclaimed and widely read lost world romances—She (1886–87) and Allan Quatermain (1887) alongside King Solomon’s Mines—can be understood with regard to the contemporaneous development of the international meat trade in Britain. This move builds in materialist terms upon literary scholarship that has long linked adventure fiction to the economic

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imperatives that drove Britain’s imperial expansion into the non-European world.1 In particular, however, it heeds Margaret Cohen’s more recent call for “critics to reexamine the cultural significance of adventure forms” with a view to the way in which their “versions of heroic performance in dangerous zones, often at the edges of existing knowledge and society,” can be read with relation to repetitive, habitual practices, behaviours and values that characterize metropolitan life within the modern world-system (2010: 12). Here Cohen highlights work as “a consuming aspect of our daily lives” (2010: 12). But her call also invites attention to be paid to food, and the processes and patterns of production and consumption that render different kinds of foodstuff integral to the everyday. In what follows, I focus in particular on Haggard’s representation of preserved meat in order to propose that there are significant, highly charged connections to be drawn between the extraordinary lost world trials undergone by his distinctly carnivorous heroes and the increasingly quotidian albeit revolutionary way in which British meat-eaters found themselves looking more and more to distant parts of the earth to put meat on their dining tables. As a result of its focus, the chapter is well positioned to reflect upon Nicholas Daly’s claim that Haggard’s work resides in the best-selling vanguard of a fin-de-siècle romance revival “that provided the narratives and the figures that enabled late Victorian middle-class culture to successfully accommodate certain historical changes, notably modernizing processes.” Of especial note here is Daly’s contention that the “specifically modern and commercially successful” character of the late-nineteenth-­ century adventurous romance was bound up with its acclaimed status as a vigorously “primitive” form, held by romantic writers and critics alike to “remasculinize” modern culture (1999: 24, 22, 19). As the above-cited episodes from King Solomon’s Mines suggest, and as the ensuing discussion of carnivorous scenarios, figures and tropes will elaborate, the masculinist primitivism Daly ties to romance was particularly well served by Haggard’s adventurous meat-eating men. But if in this sense carnivory furnished a romantically compelling subject-matter, so too it takes shape as a complex, variously accented phenomenon that can be understood to have unsettled as well as to have sharpened Haggard’s readers’ appetite for overseas meat. We will see, therefore, how at times Haggard represented preserved meat, and meat-eating more generally, in twisted, terrifying ways. He even opened up narrative space to consider the attractions of a meat-free diet. Yet at the same time what emerges clearly as the chapter advances is the manner in which his penetrative protagonists gave potent, barbaric form

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to a meat-eating drive that is difficult to resist, both in terms of the physical challenges it overcomes but also in terms of the carnivorous logic it embodies. Just as meat sustains the lost world exploits of Haggard’s heroes, so too I argue overall that their quests plotted a popular, primitivist kind of culinary adventurism that worked counter to the caution Belich associates with Victorian and Edwardian meat-eaters. In my conclusion I turn to the work of Jason W. Moore in order to explicate in world-­ ecological terms the systemic relationship this line of argument posits between adventure fiction, metropolitan dietary change and the peripheral processes of ecological imperialism and pastoral re-territorialization necessary to sustain such change. * * * Another extraordinary carnivorous episode, this time from the novel She: A History of Adventure, which British audiences first read weekly between October 1886 and January 1887 in the illustrated magazine the Graphic, provides a useful starting point as we move to consider in detail Haggard’s representation of preserved meat. Early on in the novel, as they embark up an African river in search of a beautiful white enchantress with life-­prolonging as well as death-dealing powers, Haggard again has his band of explorers shoot an antelope. On this occasion it is “a beautiful water-­buck” spotted by Leo Vincey, “an ardent sportsman, thirsting for the blood of big game,” who on encountering the buck “instantly stiffened all over, and pointed like a setter dog.” With this arresting image of gentlemanly leisure and animalistic instinct at the fore, and with the antelope sighted down the barrels of two express hunting rifles, the novel’s narrator Horace Holly finds time to indulge his descriptive powers, framing the huntsmen’s prey against an aestheticized African sunset that fills the “great heaven” and flashes with “flying gold and the lurid stain of blood.” The scene’s striking impact prompts Holly to question what he and his companions are doing in this strange, primal land: And then ourselves—three modern Englishmen in a modern English boat— seeming to jar upon and looking out of tone with that measureless desolation; and in front of us the noble buck limned out upon a background of ruddy sky. (2006: 80–81)

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The tableau is broken by a “Bang!” as Leo misses his shot, prompting Holly to forget his sense of historicized alienation, re-join the action and shoot the buck “stone dead.” It is then the work of “a quarter of an hour or more to clean it and cut off as much of the best meat as we could carry,” before the companions retreat back to their boat (81). That night the adventurers dine not on raw water-buck, however, but turn to their supply of “Paysandu” potted tongue, a canned meat product that has already provided them with a “hearty breakfast” that morning, and that they have transported in “good quantity” from “the Army and Navy Stores” back in England (77). As with the above-cited extracts from King Solomon’s Mines, and in line with the generic conventions of lost-world romances more broadly, this episode is notable for staging an exciting if somewhat unsettling coming together of modernity and primitivism, civilization and savagery, the familiar and the strange. For the Blackwood’s reviewer of She this was a quality of the novel that rendered Haggard “the new avatar of the old story-teller, with a flavour of the nineteenth century and scientific explanation” (Anon., 2006: 288). Paysandu potted tongue flavoured the above encounter in just such a manner, encapsulating the way in which Haggard was drawn to deploy markers of a distinctively metropolitan modernity in order to emphasize the spatio-temporal distance of his romantic settings. Perhaps especially given the fact its commercial provenance is so carefully established, Haggard’s readers would likely have identified this canned meat as McCall’s Paysandu Ox Tongues, imported to Britain from Uruguay’s cattle-rich Rio de la Plata region and advertised contemporaneously with She’s publication. As the 1884 advert included below makes clear (see Fig. 2.1), the way the novel worked Paysandu into its mythological quest narrative had something in common with the way McCall’s interwove antiquity, modernity and muscular masculinity as it promoted its meat.2 More generally speaking, Haggard’s use of Paysandu within She furnished powerful fictional form to the manner in which late nineteenth-century pioneers and proponents of a developing canning industry invoked “the dominating rhetoric of the coloniser” as they celebrated a technology that “conquered two impediments to the modernisation of the global food industry: nature and space” (Naylor 2000: 1636). In his assessment of these rhetorical links between colonization and canning, Simon Naylor draws attention to the fact that canned food defied the natural vagaries of decay, season and climate as well as bridging spatial divides, in ways that saw its usage acclaimed and

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Fig. 2.1  1884 advert for McCall’s Paysandu Ox Tongues

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promoted in imperial, military as well as domestic contexts: “Whether it was stored in an explorer’s backpack, in a soldier’s rations, or on a kitchen shelf, the tin of canned food was thoroughly useful—not only because it was scientifically hygienic, but because it maintained the aesthetic qualities of the food” (2000: 1636–37). Haggard’s representation of meat-eating in the above encounter is far from unequivocal, not least because Leo embodies the band’s technologically enhanced killing prowess in such bloodthirsty, bestialized terms. Nevertheless, the ready consumption in She of canned South-American meat by a band of “three modern Englishmen” set upon penetrating the primitive African realms of a near immortal Arab sorceress certainly lends a fabulous aura to the promotional tropes identified by Naylor. Modern products in She, as with Haggard’s adventurous romances more generally, can thus be understood to take on an extraordinary—and an extraordinarily marketable—charge courtesy of the fantastic spatio-­ temporal juxtaposition established between these primitive lost worlds and the civilized, sanitized, straightforward nature of life lived within the circuits of commodity capitalism. There is a “magic” at work in romance fiction that means “Africa and other ‘primitive’ environments render once fungible commodities unique” concludes Daly, following discussion of the way in which “the mythical world of hunting” invoked in a twentieth-­ century context by Ernest Hemingway allows that even “icons of mass production—tinned foods—can be transformed by the right surroundings” (1999: 142, 140). And this magic was not confined to fiction. In his influential work on Victorian and Edwardian commodity culture, Thomas Richards notes how “Darkest Africa” served advertising from the period as a “proving ground” for products, highlighting the way in which Bovril utilized Henry Morton Stanley’s African expeditions in order to promote its meat extract as a “Bulwark of Empire—as both a stabilizing influence and a major weapon in England’s struggle against a bewildering variety of enemies” (1991: 142). Interestingly the advert to which Richards refers to here appeared in The Graphic Stanley Number, some three years after the journal had featured She. Whether they were enjoying fact or fiction, then, readers of the Graphic were becoming familiar with the idea that the trailblazing meat products they could find in their local stores were one and the same as those eaten (or drunk) by trailblazing British men struggling to penetrate the dark places of the earth. Haggard’s inclusion in She of Paysandu potted tongue should thus be read with reference to a wider relationship between adventure, imperial

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expansion, print culture and advertising that characterized the way particular meat-based commodities gained and maintained brand recognition at the end of the nineteenth century.3 But as Julia Reid notes, while Haggard had fun peppering She’s strange world with “references to commodities, brand names, and commercial outfits,” his writing was criticized for the manner in which such “nascent product placement” diminished the epic, occult pretentions of his mythopoeic vision (2011: 168, 161).4 “The Athenaeum reviewer found elements of She ‘downright commonplace’”, she remarks, before citing the review more fully: It strikes a hopelessly jarring note to be dragged down suddenly from the heights of the supernatural, the immortal and the divinely fair, by the sudden and superfluous mention of Gladstone bags, shooting boots, and Bryant & May’s matches … The equipment of the African expedition at the Army and Navy Store may be a very good advertisement, but … [it does not work as] literary art. (Qtd. in Reid 2011: 168)

Writing in Time, Augustus M. Moore was similarly unimpressed by Haggard’s “jocose references to ‘Gladstone bags,’ ‘Paysandu tongues,’ ‘Bryant and May matches,’ ‘The Army and Navy Stores,’ etc.”. They might raise a smile, he observed, but they were “about as appropriate in the tombs of Kôr as would have been the mention of ‘Day and Martin’s blacking’ by Dante in the Inferno, or of ‘Pears’ soap’ by Milton in his Paradise Lost” (2006: 300–01). Significantly, therefore, Reid suggests Haggard was wounded by the accusation his fiction served to advertise more than it did aestheticize, noting that when he revised his novel for the numerous book editions that followed its initial serialized publication he “gradually erased the brand names from the text,” with Paysandu potted tongue becoming “an excellent potted tongue” by 1896 (2011: 168). While Haggard attempted to appease his critics by removing brand names, the fact the potted meat itself remained as a crucial component of She’s quest points to the continued significance of preserved meat to Haggard’s lost-world romances. As such, it also signals the need to go beyond such obvious “product placement” in order to understand more fully how this fiction was caught up in the global growth of Britain’s meat markets. The key point to underscore here is that preserved meat is essential to the way Haggard’s protagonists penetrate the remote spatio-temporal realms they encounter. But unlike the Paysandu potted tongue, which is sealed in an airtight and—theoretically at least—“scientifically hygienic”

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can, this meat is typically transported in a dried or cooked state; and it is primitive not modern, sparse not plentiful, and unpalatable not appealing. Thus the “beautiful water-buck” killed and butchered by the resourceful but increasingly imperilled adventurers in She finds rather sorry culinary form as some of the flesh is cooked—“not in a very appetizing way”—on a campfire, before the remainder of the carcass is cut and dried in the sun to produce long-lasting and lightweight strips of “biltong”. In King Solomon’s Mines Quatermain and company’s attempt to cross a “burning desert” sees them pack “Twenty-five pounds’ weight of biltong (sun-dried game flesh)” (84) alongside an advanced technological arsenal including Winchester repeating rifles, Colt revolvers, Cochrane’s water-bottles, and medicines and surgical instruments. Once in the desert, however, where the band find themselves “baked through and through” like “beefsteak on a grid-iron” (89), the dehydrated biltong furnishes an unwelcome reminder of their own fleshly predicament, notwithstanding that so too it serves to keep them—barely—alive. In Allan Quatermain a close encounter with a subterranean “pillar of fire […] fiercer than any furnace ever lit by man,” burns and blackens the bodies of Quatermain’s band as well as leaving the water-buck they had roasted by way of preservation “tainted by the heat through which it had passed” (1998: 117, 121). When a carnivorous attack by crabs that display “the most evil passions and desires of man” leaves them bereft of even this spoiled meat, the eponymous hero and his “excessively hungry” companions find themselves with “nothing whatsoever left to eat except a few scraps of biltong (dried game-flesh)” (122, 126). Here as elsewhere in these romances, the consumption of preserved meat acts as a shorthand signal for human bodies in extremis, in a way that works viscerally to register the draining, damaging impact of the hostile environments faced by Haggard’s heroes. Somewhat ironically, as they find their own bodies subject to such environmental pressures, so too these adventurers encounter an array of preserved human bodies—dead and alive—that variously defy the ravages of space and time. Significantly too, these encounters reinforce the way in which the above episodes problematize meat-eating by troubling the notion that clear-cut distinctions might be drawn between human and non-human flesh. The aforementioned conquistador’s frozen, mutton-­ like corpse from King Solomon’s Mines provides one such striking example. And on other occasions amazing incidents of human preservation are disturbingly realized in terms more commonly associated with the preservation and consumption of food. Later in King Solomon’s Mines, then, the

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grisly process of petrification whereby the recently slain King Twala is “preserved for ever” by “silicious fluid” that drips down from a cave roof is incongruously cast as a system of icing or “pickling” (210–11). In She, a novel that revolves around the preservation of human flesh in various forms, Holly becomes so enraptured by the discovery in a crypt of an ageold yet “beautifully shaped,” “plump and fair” woman’s foot, “looking as fresh and as firm as though it had been placed there yesterday,” that he cannot resist stowing it away in his “Gladstone bag, which I had bought at the Army and Navy Stores.” While the all too lively, voluptuous figure of She (or Ayesha) looms large throughout the novel, arousing but also emasculating both Holly and Leo, this episode speaks powerfully to the fact that She plays with different forms of fleshly desire, not least because this “curious combination” (118) of modern bag and age-old foot recalls the companions’ earlier consumption of Paysandu potted tongue. The unsettling implication that Holly might want to devour the foot gains traction later on when the adventurers realize the refectory tables on which they take their meals had originally served the ancient peoples of Kôr “not to eat upon, but for the purpose of embalming bodies” (138). In stark contrast with Ayesha, who practices laboratory-­based chemistry in order to hone an occultist appreciation of Nature’s “animating spirit,” the adventurers operate in a world where their own lack of carnal knowledge and control means even the most ordinary of activities can become extraordinarily threatening to a sense of what is right and proper. “I passed into the eating, or rather embalming chamber, and had some food” (165), Holly states at one point in the novel, in a remark that bears more generally upon the way in which Haggard’s depiction of preserved flesh can render meat-eating a distinctly uncanny phenomenon. The suggestion that preserved flesh excites this sense of carnivorous uncanniness follows Nicholas Royle’s definition of the uncanny as a “peculiar co-mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar” that produces “a crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was a ‘part of nature’: one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world” (2003: 1). As the above examples make clear, Haggard’s adventurous aesthetic opens up the material as well as metaphorical scope to dramatize precisely such a “co-mingling” of the fleshy familiar and unfamiliar: human bodies are analogously confused with beef and mutton as well as positioned and described in ways that substantiate their meaty forms more literally; deep historical fissures are shown to exist between what might otherwise appear to be essentially

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contemporaneous fleshly bodies; and bestial acts of carnivory are described in “shockingly human” ways at the same time as human meat-eaters are themselves bestialized (Haggard 1998: 122). And it is important to underline the modern, metropolitan significance of this uncanny register: Haggard posed a primal challenge to the idea of meat-eating by binding it to “evil passions and desires,” beastly drives and carnal cravings that brought his protagonists dangerously close to cannibalism; but in so doing he drew disturbing points of connection between the production and consumption of preserved flesh in lost worlds and the manner in which new technologies were supplying long preserved overseas animals to a growing body of meat-hungry British consumers. If in this sense Haggard’s fiction produced its own kind of carnivorous crisis, it is a crisis that should be understood with regard to contemporary anxieties and fears concerning the history, provenance and safety of canned and refrigerated meat. Notably, then, in She Haggard not only opened up such a crisis but also allowed his eponymous heroine to propose a means of averting it: vegetarianism. Long dependent upon an exclusive diet of fruit, which she acclaims as “the only true food for man” (183), Ayesha’s rejection of meat is tied to a developed theosophical understanding of Nature’s arcane laws. And such was the appeal of this rejection, notes James Gregory, that in 1889 the newly formed penny weekly journal, the Vegetarian “advertised” Ayesha’s vegetarianism as proof, positive that a reformed, fleshless diet would engender a “higher human existence” (2007: 181, 180). As he details how Haggard’s bestselling fantasy was thus used in order to champion dietary reform, Gregory points towards the way in which the novel was drawn into metropolitan debates about meat-eating that engaged emerging anxieties about “overpopulation, environmental catastrophe, and the ethics and health risks of industrialized food production” (4). But Gregory maintains that Haggard himself was concerned only with indicating Ayesha’s “abnormality”; her vegetarian diet, he insists, “was a useful device” with which to indicate her “degeneracy or amorality” (181, 186). To dismiss She’s vegetarianism in this straightforward manner seems problematic: both because we have seen how Haggard’s novel rendered meat-eating itself uncanny; but also because scholars such as Carolyn Burdett and more recently Simon Magus have emphasized how late nineteenth-century Britons, Haggard amongst them, turned to Theosophy and other forms of esoteric knowledge in order to revitalize what was perceived to be “the spiritually moribund nature of industrial modernity” (Burdett 2004: 221; Magus 2018). When

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Ayesha rejects meat-eating, it is important to recognize that she does so from an occultist position held by some within late Victorian culture to grasp “the circulation of the life-principle” (Burdett 2004: 225). Yet while there is much more to Ayesha’s vegetarianism than degeneracy and amorality, Gregory’s stress upon her diet’s negative connotations supports his concern to make clear that the “British public never became enamoured with the [vegetarian] movement,” disturbed as they were by its radical political and religious associations as well as by the radical way in which it sought to reform their diet (2007: 4). In A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays, a collection published in 1886, the same year that She’s serialized publication began, the vegetarian and socialist Henry Salt set out a detailed case for the “moral,” “wholesome” and “economical” advantages of vegetarianism, predicting that “future and wiser generations will look back with amazement on the habit of flesh-eating as a strange relic of ignorance and barbarism” (1886: 22, 20). But even as he did so, he bemoaned what he saw to be the “deeply rooted,” “popular belief that flesh-food is the best diet for mankind,” complaining that in “ordinary society” a vegetarian was “little better regarded than a madman” (48, 7). Ayesha’s occultist and distinctly feminine—if not precisely feminist—vegetarianism must have been attractive to some of Haggard’s readers, and in fact the author himself admitted in the pages of the Vegetarian that “he was theoretically a vegetarian, but not in a British climate” (Gregory 2007: 264). However, the point to take from Gregory’s analysis, especially in light of Salt’s complaints, is that the dietary movement with which She was associated was at once limited and widely derided. Significantly, therefore, the adventurers in She not only ignore Ayesha’s dietary advice but are clearly well served by doing so. Later on in the novel, as She delivers Leo to the flaming “Spirit of Life” that energizes her own worldly being, she admonishes the group for stopping their journey to eat some cold preserved meat: “I would that I could teach thee to eat nought but fruit […] but that will come after thou has laved in the fire. Once I, too, ate flesh like a brute beast” (238). Where typically the companions are cowed by Ayesha, here they simply refuse to countenance the idea of changing their supposedly brutish behaviour, pressing on in their meat-eating ways and thereby preserving their own bodies while She’s vegetarian flesh is soon destroyed. As it plots the triumph of this kind of carnivorous common-sense over and above an exotic esotericism, the novel positions its English protagonists firmly on the side of what Salt referred to as meat’s “deeply rooted” popular appeal. And particularly

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given that we have seen how Haggard’s fiction brought the idea of meat-­ eating to something of a crisis point, it is salient in more general terms that in this regard Holly and his companions stand representative of a habitual, steadfast and empowering commitment to carnivory that marks out the way in which his heroes move through their lost worlds. While this chapter’s focus has fallen thus far on the consumption of preserved meat, it is important to recognize that preserved flesh features only as part of a routinized pattern of meat consumption that serves as a dietary marker of adventurous progress: eat meat crave repeat. Often this meat-eating takes on a distinctly dramatic charge, in ways that showcase a clear bind between carnivory and masculine prowess. Quatermain’s greedy meal of raw meat with which this chapter began provides one such clear example. But so too does the Zulu warrior Upslopogaas in Allan Quatermain, when he coolly faces down waterborne catastrophe by cutting himself a preserved waterbuck chop with his trusty battle axe before consuming it “with every appearance of satisfaction” and explaining to his companions he wanted to meet his impending fate on a “full stomach” (112). Whether the meat is preserved or fresh, it is also the case that the kinds of animals eaten and the hands-on manner in which they are killed can heighten carnivory’s dramatic appeal, notwithstanding that it is often presented as a commonplace part of lost world life. “I know of no greater luxury than giraffe steaks and roasted marrow bones, unless it is elephant’s heart, and we had that on the morrow” (73), Quatermain declares in King Solomon’s Mines, as he devours the spoils of a hunting expedition by the light of the African moon. Where John Miller has persuasively explored how “ideals of masculine identity” are tied to “exotic animal death and animal remains” in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction, we observe in the above examples how idealized manhood is bound up too with the ingestion of animal flesh (2013: 3). And we note in addition that this carnivorous masculinity is essentially barbaric, in line with Bradley Deane’s argument that Haggard’s lost world fiction cast off “mid-Victorian constructions of Christian manliness” in order to emphasize new kinds of cross-cultural, cross-racial masculine qualities: “raw strength, courage, instinctive violence, bodily size, and homosocial commitment to other men” (2008: 206). Deane’s thesis is strikingly illustrated in King Solomon’s Mines when the Zulu Umbopa compares his own near-naked body with the “great stature and breadth” of the Viking-­ like Sir Henry: “we are men, thou and I” (70). The role carnivory plays in such celebratory accounts of imperial barbarism is made clear by the way

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in which, immediately prior to this mutual recognition of shared, primitive masculinity, Umbopa announces his intention of joining Henry’s band of English adventurers: “I am a brave man, and am worth my place and meat” (69). Meat-eating in Haggard is thus frequently marked by the drama of homosocial barbarism, with muscular men hunting, killing and consuming exotic fauna. Yet it is equally the case that these carnivorous episodes occur amongst a succession of far less visceral albeit significant meaty encounters, which often take place in domestic settings amongst hospitable peoples. Consider the following indicative passages, from King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain respectively: “as soon as we had washed ourselves with water, which stood ready in earthenware jars, some young women of handsome appearance brought us roasted meat and mealie cobs daintily served on wooden platters, and presented to us with deep obeisances” (127); “Presently the food, consisting of goat’s flesh boiled, fresh milk in an earthenware pot, and boiled cobs of Indian corn, was brought by young girls. We were almost starving, and I do not think that I ever in my life ate with such satisfaction” (95); “a dozen or so of half-­ dressed women were pouring into the room […] from a cupboard some flagons of wine and some cold flesh were brought forth, and Umslopogaas and I drank, and felt life flow back into our veins as the good red wine went down” (225). Particularly given the rough and ready, hand-to-­ mouth manner in which meat is shared between men elsewhere in the novels, these episodes are notable for the way a rustic but carefully detailed culinary aesthetic takes on an erotic feminine charge. Early in King Solomon’s Mines Umbopa regales Quatermain’s companions with a chant about a wilderness that proves “not a wilderness at all, but a beautiful place full of young wives and fat cattle, of game to hunt and animals to kill” (71). While Haggard is careful that his English adventurers avoid sexual relations with the non-Western women they meet, Umbopa’s song nevertheless points towards the way his romances tend to render youthful women and non-human animals alike as fleshly objects to be desired by active male subjects. Haggard’s lost world carnivory furnishes appealing shape to homosocial barbarism, then, but so too it serves to promote the anthropocentric, patriarchal “eating and sex roles” that for Carol J. Adams define “the sexual politics of meat” (2015: 5). Certainly the young, beautiful and mute women who have been eugenically engineered by Ayesha, and who silently serve Holly and company in She with “excellent”

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goat meat and milk fresh from the surrounding pastures, do nothing to dispute this carnivorous, heterosexual masculinism. What is at work as Haggard realizes such forms of meat-based hospitality, therefore, is a politico-economic logic that decrees the bodies of women as well as animals exist to fulfil men’s needs. It is also of note, however, that as Haggard’s flesh-eating heroes are satisfied by these serving girls so too they move from a hunter-gathering to an agricultural way of life, and hence from a diet of wild to farmed meat. Although the exotic wildlife encountered—and eaten—by the adventurers generates a great deal of drama, we should not overlook the far less exciting but nevertheless extensive numbers of domesticated animals that quietly feed, breed and die throughout Haggard’s lost worlds. The following examples, drawn again from all three novels, are significant for the way in which this livestock is embedded within appealingly productive pastoral ecologies: thus the “earthly paradise” of Kukuanaland in King Solomon’s Mines, distinguished for its “natural wealth,” beauty and temperate climate, where Quatermain and companions are greeted “by a line of damsels bearing milk and roasted mealies, and honey in pot” as well as a “fat young” ox that is driven, slaughtered and butchered before them (119, 122); likewise the “rich plains” surrounding the caves of Kôr in She, which have been carefully “cultivated, and fenced in with walls of stone placed there to keep the cattle and goats, of which there were large herds about, from breaking into the gardens” (92, 133); and finally the land of Zu-Vendis in Allan Quatermain, described as “a veritable Eldorado” on account of its mineral resources but marked out too for the way in which its farmers have taken full advantage of “exceedingly fertile” soil, growing “cereals and temperate fruits and timber to perfection” as well as developing intensively managed bovine and equine breeding programmes (153). Earlier in this latter novel Quatermain surveys a “glorious country,” flecked with bright green “patches of cultivation,” that he declares “only wants the hand of civilised man to make it a most productive one.” More commonly, as in the abovecited passages, indigenous human populations are held responsible for the prudent husbandry of environments that sustain healthy numbers of wholesome farmed animals. Whether native peoples have met with agricultural success or not, the agricultural potential that distinguishes their lost world lands is clear. As Haggard’s adventurers advance their quests, we have seen how they come to embody carnivory in heroic, barbaric, patriarchal form; it is also the case, we note, that as they do so they open

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up bounteous pastoral spaces wherein the production as well as the consumption of meat becomes an appealing prospect. * * * Henry Salt concluded the first of his essays in A Plea for Vegetarianism by complaining that “most people” refused to countenance culinary change: They greatly prefer the easier and more expeditious method of shaping their ideas in accordance with the time-honoured traditions of custom and ‘society,’ and hence, on the subject of food, they cling firmly to the notion that the roast beef of England is the summum bonum of dietetic aspiration. (1886: 7, 20)

In fact, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, it was clear that some form of change was necessary, given that domestic agriculture was struggling so badly to meet the dietary demands of Britain’s growing population. For the physician and writer Andrew Wynter, writing a decade earlier than Salt, the obvious solution to the problem was not for his countrymen to cut down or give up on meat, but instead to give up on meat produced in their own country: When a leg of mutton is elevenpence [sic] a pound, it is time for the father of a family to pay attention to any means by which he may lessen the amount of his butcher’s bill. The necessity of the case sets aside all sentimental considerations in favour of the roast beef of Old England. If we can get it half the price from the other side of the globe, to the other side of the globe every sensible man will go, as men are going and will go in increasing numbers each year. (1874: 139)

Here Wynter was particularly concerned to extol the virtues of canning as a means of “preserving the vast animal resources of the New World.” But he also drew his readers’ attention to ongoing efforts to freeze the “illimitable” meat supplies of South America, lauding a “new experiment” that promised “to keep the meat sweet until it reaches this country” (145). Despite his confidence in the ultimate results of such experimentation, however, Wynter conceded that these developmental freezing technologies had thus far failed to deliver edible meat. He also acknowledged that the canning industry had been rocked by scandals involving putrified meat, as

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well as suffering reputational damage as a result of the meat’s unappetizing appearance. And in a remark that made apparent that the food choices of Britain’s urban carnivores were influenced by urban myths as well as price points, he revealed that sickening stories surrounding Australian meat had left many Victorians scared they might be “investing in ‘boiled babies,’ or offal.” Wynter was right that increasing numbers of his fellow Britons would indeed turn to cheaper imported meat as it became more readily available. But he was by his own admission wrong to suggest that these new global meat markets would take shape as a consequence of economic reasoning alone. Tellingly, then, as his article drew to a close Wynter called for figures of authority such as Canon Charles Kingsley to “disabuse people of their ignorance,” admitting “it is now necessary to educate the people to eat these bounties of Providence science has secured for our hungry multitudes” (144–45). As fin-de-siècle debates and controversies concerning British meat-­ eating raged on, thousands upon thousands of Victorian and Edwardian readers were busy devouring Haggard’s lost world romances. By focusing on his representation of preserved meat in particular, alongside meat-­ eating more generally, this chapter has revealed how Haggard’s fiction provided these readers with a fantastically rich albeit complex set of scenarios, challenges and figures with which to think about their own dietary demands and culinary habits, as well as those of their fellow-­ countrymen. On occasion we have seen how Haggard’s world of romance was overtly tied to meat-eating in modern Britain. Elsewhere, we have considered how an extraordinary range of carnivorous acts and allusions linked suggestively if not necessarily explicitly to the disquiet as well as the developments that characterized Britain’s globalizing meat markets. However, while at points in his fiction Haggard was drawn to render carnivory in a disturbingly uncanny light, it has also become clear that he consistently dramatized meat-eating as an essential, primal aspect of human life in general, and manhood in particular. Eat meat crave repeat: at a time when many Britons were facing up to the fact that the roast beef of Old England was increasingly hard to come by, and others were pushing their countrymen towards a meat-free diet, Haggard’s romances plotted a carnivorous drive that moved protein production and consumption beyond the nation-state in bountiful, empowering, exhilarating terms. Where Wynter expected education in the guise of Kingsley’s mid-Victorian Christian manliness to convince large numbers of the British public to eat

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overseas meat, this chapter argues culinary adventurism in the shape of Haggard’s late-Victorian imperial barbarism stirred them to do so. As indicated, these urban carnivores would draw American and Australasian pastoral economies into dynamic networks of agro-­ industrialized development and dependency. It bears underscoring, then, that the argument advanced is one that comprehends Haggard’s brand of popular, masculinist primitivism with regard to an expansionist process of ecological imperialism that changed the face of the planet at the same time as it revolutionized the dining habits of a nation. “By the close of the nineteenth century, British breeds of livestock had conquered the world,” notes Rebecca Woods, as she discusses how Britain’s move away from the roast beef of Old England was built around pastoralizing programmes that not only refashioned non-European landscapes but also “remade” the bodies of colonial and new world cattle and sheep to suit both the refrigerated holds of ocean liners and the tastes of British meat-eaters alike (2017: 4). “Britain’s appetite for meat and capitalism’s appetite for profit drew people, animals and terrains into a tightening web of production” (2017: 6), Woods continues, in a summary that works well with Jason Moore’s compelling definition of capitalism as a web-like “world-ecology, joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity” (2015: 3). Here Moore is centrally concerned with the appropriation of Cheap Nature, including cheap food, via expansive phases of capitalist frontier-making that mobilize “bundles of uncapitalized work/energy […] in service to rising labour productivity in the commodity sphere” (95). His world-ecological perspective is instructive because it insists that these frontiers take shape as a result of cultural as well as material forces. The appropriation of “nature’s life-making capacities”, Moore writes, “involves those extra-economic processes—perhaps directly coercive, but also cultural and calculative— through which capital gains access to minimally or non-commodified natures for free, or as close to free as it can get” (95). “Agrarian, not urban, spaces offer the most fruitful terrain for accumulation by appropriation”, he notes later, before elaborating: “But that only works if there are big frontiers somewhere ‘out there’” (144–45). Big frontiers … somewhere … out there. It would be difficult to capture better lost world fiction’s imaginative purchase. By reading King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain in relation to the global growth of Britain’s meat markets, this chapter has furnished a case-study that develops Moore’s suggestive emphasis upon the cultural significance

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of frontier space to capitalist expansion. Following Moore, we see how Haggard’s romances can be considered as part of the “earth-moving, ideamaking, and power-creating” (3) process by which technologically elongated protein chains penetrated the earth and appropriated Cheap Nature, binding together urban carnivores, genetically modified livestock and non-European plains, prairies and pampa. My attendant contention that this frontier fiction helped forge and strengthen these chains acknowledges the complex way in which Haggard’s writing played out and fuelled ongoing debates about meat-eating. But it does so without accepting that such literary complexity forecloses the opportunity to develop longstanding critical interest in culture’s capacity to drive and sustain imperialism. It is almost forty years since Martin Green proposed that “the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were, in fact, the energizing myth of English imperialism,” charging “England’s will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule” (1980: 3). Moore’s worldecological approach establishes a systemic framework within which to stretch Green’s compelling thesis, allowing literary critics and cultural historians to move beyond an anthropocentric colonizer-colonized paradigm that has dominated postcolonial scholarship and think afresh about the way in which the adventure story has shaped and stimulated capitalist expansion and the co-production of nature, human nature included. Hence I read Haggard’s lost-world romances as energizing myths of carnivorous imperialism, naturalizing “Man’s” meat-­eating appetite in the epic terms of a struggle for life at the same time as they promoted the idea that faraway frontiers—“out there”—rendered meat-rich diets sustainable as well as desirable; I hold the link thus drawn between an imperial structure of feeling and a structure of everyday Victorian and Edwardian life to be a link enmeshed within capitalism’s world-historical organization of nature; and so I conclude that King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain were powerfully, productively and profitably tied to the intensive, voracious and violent processes of imperial depredation, agropastoral advance, industrialized slaughter and dietary change that marked the world-ecological development of meat-­eating modernity.

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Notes 1. Martin Green proposed as early as 1979 that “the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were in fact, the energizing myth of English imperialism,” charging “England’s will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule.” What was at stake in geopolitical terms, he made clear, was “England’s part in the modern world-system” (Green, 1980: 3, 7). 2. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/evancoll/a/014eva00000 0000u06262000.html. Shelfmark: Evan.6262. 3. Bovril stands out here, but it is notable too that as early as 1870, some five years after the Bovril and Oxo forerunner Liebig’s Extract of Meat was brought to British and European markets, Jules Verne had his astronauts in Around the Moon begin an extraterrestrial breakfast with “three plates of excellent soup, made by liquefying, in boiling water, some precious tablets of Liebig, prepared from the best parts of the ruminants of the pampas” (2011: 238–39). 4. While Reid shows how advertising in the Graphic’s serialization of She worked in general terms to commodify empire, the periodical did not feature adverts for Paysandu Potted tongue concurrently with Haggard’s novel.

Works Cited Adams, Carol J. 2015. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Anon. 2006 [February 1887]. Review of She: A History of Adventure, by H. Rider Haggard. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Rpt. In She: A History of Adventure, ed. H. Rider Haggard, 288–290. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Belich, James. 2009. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burdett, Carolyn. 2004. Romance, Reincarnation and Rider Haggard. In The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell, 217–238. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Margaret. 2010. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Daly, Nicholas. 1999. Modernism, Romance and the Fin-de-Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 188-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deane, Bradley. 2008. Imperial Barbarians: Primitive Masculinity in Lost World Fiction. Victorian Literature and Culture 36: 205–225. Green, Martin. 1980. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Gregory, James. 2007. Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Tauris Academic Studies. Haggard, H.  Rider. 1998 [1887]. Allan Quatermain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002 [1885]. King Solomon’s Mines. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. ———. 2006 [1886–87]. She: A History of Adventure. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Magee, Gary B., and Andrew S.  Thompson. 2010. Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital, c. 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magus, Simon. 2018. Rider Haggard and the Imperial Occult: Hermetic Discourse and Romantic Contiguity. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter. Miller, John. 2013. Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction. London: Anthem Press. Moore, Augustus M. 2006 [May 1887]. Rider Haggard and ‘The New School of Romance.’ Time: A Monthly Miscellany. Rpt. In She: A History of Adventure, H. Rider Haggard, 299–301. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Naylor, Simon. 2000. Spacing the Can: Empire, Modernity, and the Globalisation of Food. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 32: 1625–1639. Perren, Richard. 1978. The Meat Trade in Britain, 1840–1914. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840. Aldershot: Ashgate. Reid, Julia. 2011. ‘Gladstone Bags, Shooting Boots, and Bryant & May’s Matches’: Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in The Graphic’s serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s She. Studies in the Novel 43 (2): 152–178. (168, 161). Richards, Thomas. 1991. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. London: Verso. Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Salt, H.S. 1886. A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays. Manchester: The Vegetarian Society. Verne, Jules. 2011. From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. Woods, Rebecca J.H. 2017. The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900. Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press. Wynter, Andrew. 1874. Good Food for the Million. In Peeps into the Human Hive, vol. 2, 139–145. London: Chapman and Hall.

CHAPTER 3

Pain, Pleasure, and the World-Food-System: Plotting the Afterlife of the Plantation in the Poetry of Grace Nichols Esthie Hugo

Introduction This chapter considers how questions of food, race, and gender are brewed up and rendered palpable in the poetry of Guyanese author Grace Nichols. It focuses on Nichols’s first two poetry collections—I Is A Long Memoried Woman (1983) and The Fat Black Women’s Poems (1984)—in order to examine how her work offers an opportunity for understanding the plantation’s ongoing work of racialized and gendered domination and the forms of contestation that slavery’s “afterlife” (Hartman 2007) elicits in black Caribbean women’s writings on food. To this end, the chapter charts some of the ways in which Nichols’s poetry scripts women’s painful and

E. Hugo (*) Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_3

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pleasurable associations with food. While this scripting surfaces the horrors of the Caribbean region’s colonial plantation system, it also celebrates, I argue, food’s more palatable relations, leading Nichols to furnish a literary mode of dissent against the perpetuation of gendered and racial domination under the current world-food-system. Building on scholarship that has drawn attention to the long and intertwined histories of slavery and capitalism, this chapter argues that one key way in which Nichols encodes a practice of literary insurrection in her poetry is through an emphasis on food’s pleasures, in place of the capitalist logics that defined the plantation and its continuing history of “racial terror” (Hartman 2007: 10). Critics have long argued that food has held a powerful place in the history of women and their acts of slave resistance in the colonial Caribbean. Particularly salient to this anti-imperial, anti-­ capitalist history has been the informal labour of Afro-Caribbean “higgler” women, who from as early as 1672, have been documented as buying and selling edible staples from their provision grounds on Sunday markets in public spaces (Johnson 2009: 25). The food markets of these enslaved women formed a central part of what Sylvia Wynter would later term the “plot system”: the site of counter-hegemonic resistance to the plantation and its capitalist advancement of unsustainable, cash-crop monoculture (1971). In contrast to the “Euclidean grids of monoculture and commodity cultivation” that comprised the plantation nexus, the plot or provision ground provided an opportunity for the “voluntary growth of subsistence foods … that represent[ed] edible staples and the economically viable roots of the internal market” (DeLoughrey 2011: 58). It was by making visible this alternate local economy that higgler women performed their resistance to the complete hegemony of capitalist slavery and cash-­ cropping in the Caribbean region. “The very exercise of harvesting and selling their own crops”, writes Hume N. Johnson, “transformed the (still estate-owned and -controlled) provision grounds into an arena of independence and material betterment, as well as a source of personhood” (25). For these women, the growing and selling of food was thus never a matter of simple sustenance; it was, and in many ways still is, a matter of politics and a crucial site through which dissent could be realized. In contrast to the brutal and bloodthirsty plantation system, the plot offered an opportunity for crop cultivation to be refigured into a gratifying—and pleasurable—practice that enabled embondaged women to experience an intimate connection with the soil and natural landscape as well as cultivate a sense of freedom and personhood they were otherwise denied.

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These regional food histories can be seen as being powerfully at work in Nichols’s poetry. As scholars have noted, Nichols’s first collection, I Is A Long Memoried Woman, is comprised of a long poem that “takes as its project the reconstructing … of (black) Caribbean women’s histories [through its] poem-cycle structure and its merging of the particular with the universal, the concrete with the mythical” (Donnell and Welsh 1996: 295). Central to the collection’s project of “reconstructing” Caribbean women’s stories “in relation to male histories” (Donnell and Welsh, 295) is its interest in the gendering of the geography of Guyana, where monocultural sugar production has organized the region’s social, environmental, and economic relations since the seventeenth century. The Fat Black Women’s Poems extends this trope of re-inscription to revise racist patriarchal aesthetics of the fat black woman’s body in contemporary Britain, where Nichols has lived since 1977 (Scanlon 1998: 59). While Nichols’s first collection focuses on the figure of the slave woman located on a seventeenth-­century British Caribbean plantation, her second book of poetry is set in twentieth-century London. Her poetic project thus spans both time and space, connecting past and present, as well as core and periphery, through its poetic mapping of how the plantation past is carried into the contemporary city. Key, in this sense, to both collections is that they form part of a larger corpus of black women’s writing that aims to “recreate,” as M. NourbeSe Philips asserts, “[black women’s] histories and myths, as well as integrate that most painful of experiences—the loss of history and our world” (Philip 1989: 3). Published in 1983 and 1984, Nichols’s poetry collections also arise out of “a distinct historical turn” (Hall 2006: 3) that took place in black diasporic writing in Britain writing during the 1980s and 1990s. Stuart Hall describes this period as marking “a moment of explosive creativity in the black arts” (Hall 2006: 3), which “saw a proliferation of texts dealing with the history of slavery, a subject that was relatively neglected within Black British writing until that point” (Procter 2016: 129). Much of the literary (re)turn to plantation slavery1 has been read as a highly politicized reaction to “the shadow of race” (Hall, 3) that fell over Britain after the Second World War. In the wake of “the British Nationality Act of 1981, the militarization of black metropolitan neighbourhoods, and the race uprisings of the 1980s,” a new body of historical fictions emerged that was characterized by “a reinvestment in the past, and a renewed struggle over what that past means for the present and future” (Procter, 140). Nichols’s early poetry undoubtedly contributed to this

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historical turn in black British diasporic writing; her first two collections offer as much a reflection on the black woman’s experience of the colonial Caribbean as they do a consideration of the reality of black life in twentieth-­ century Britain. Remarking on the recent inclusion of her first book of poetry in the UK GCSE syllabus, Nichols has attested to her commitment to unveiling the history of the black diaspora in Britain in order for collective memory and healing to occur: I agree with David Olusoga that black history must be taught in schools. Many don’t realise why black and brown people are in England and how Britain has benefited economically from slavery and colonialism. People need to be educated about that for healing to take place. (Morris, “Poetic Justice”: 2020)

While Nichols’s poetry forms a crucial part of this literary commitment to foregrounding black British history, her work is also marked by a late twentieth-century turn in Caribbean women’s writing to the genre of the lyric poem. Her writing serves, in some senses, to extend the corpus of early twentieth-century Caribbean women’s lyrical poetry. Nichols’s poems are undoubtedly in dialogue with early feminist Caribbean and Creole authors such as Una Marson and Phyllis Shand Allfrey, both lyrical poets whose writings continually return, like Nichols’s, to the theme of women’s liberation amid the upheavals of the colonial period. Yet, her writing is perhaps best understood when placed alongside the work of her contemporaries, such as Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett, Valerie Bloom, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, and Olive Senior. Salient here is that her poems present a collective move away from narrative poetry, which traditionally chronicles events and is therefore more ‘typically’ suited to historical portrayal, in favour of the lyric poem as a strategy of historical representation. The lyric, most critics agree, follows no prescribed structure, and generally serves the purpose of conveying the emotions of individuals who speak in their own dictions and address their own communities (Ramey 2008: 17). Historically accompanied by music, the lyric retains a strong connection to orality and performance, relayed through its use of poetic techniques such as meter, rhyme, and refrain. Lauri Ramey has noted how the musicality of the lyric resonates with the genre of the slave song and that such resonances have been influential to the formation of African-American lyrical poetry, which pays tribute to slave songs by drawing on African and Creole

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orality, devices of call and response, as well as rhyme and rhythm to plot the history of slavery in lyrical form. Nichols’s use of the lyric follows many of these conventions, but what renders her poetry particularly evocative is her scripting of food as the site in which the afterlife of the plantation continues to surface. In this sense, Nichols’s poetic representation of black women’s relationships with food allows not only for the examination of the condition of slavery, but also for inquiry into how the plantation ‘lives on’ through the agro-industrial capitalist food system. It is now widely accepted that the profits generated by slave-produced commodity crops enabled the accumulation of capital needed to create the modern industrialized world (Mintz 1985). Equally, the modern world-food-system would not exist if it were not for the plantation complex. Michelle Stearn, referring to the “food apartheids” of the United States, argues that “slavery and exploitation formed the impetus for thriving food and agricultural systems [which], now morphed to adapt to a post-industrial era, continue to perpetuate inequality and oppression” (Stearn 2016). Sidney Mintz similarly claims that studying the plantation allows us to “uncover the agro-industrial structures whose origins were in the Old World, but which played a vital and painful part in integrating the New World with the Old” (Mintz 2011: 3). Like Stearn, Mintz locates the origins of the global food industry in the Atlantic world. “It was on the plantation”, he writes, that newly-conquered land, together with captive labor stolen from Africa during the course of four centuries, and the technical skills of Old World entrepreneurs, were joined together, thanks to global capitalism, to create the world’s first overseas centres of food export production. (2011: 7–8)

The organization of slave-labour, land and machinery transformed the plantation into a single unit of food production for the international market and, as such, inaugurated “the first stage in the globalisation of a world food system” (Mintz: 10). Mintz’s observation on the plantation’s centrality to the formation of the “corporate food regime” (Rollman 2018) is a crucial one, but it overlooks how vital black women’s labour has been to the forging of the Caribbean plantation in the contemporary global order. After all, as Saidiya Hartman reminds us, black women’s labour is foundational to “the gendered afterlife of slavery and global capitalism” (2016: 170). By focusing on the conscription of black women’s domestic work in America after

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abolition, Hartman argues that the plantation should not be thought of as “historically prior to the emergence of capitalism”; rather it forms “part of capitalism’s ongoing work of racialised and gendered extraction” (Weinbaum 2019: 2). Like Hartman, Silvia Federici traces the origins of capitalist expansion to Euro-American slavery and colonization, but places particular emphasis on how the development of capitalism impacted women’s agricultural relations. The privatization of land, along with the development of exchange-value, radically reorganized women’s relations with the earth through the creation of a division between food production for “direct consumption” and “food production for profit” (Federici 2009). Arguing that “[t]here is a direct relation between the destruction of the social and economic power of women … and the politics of food in capitalist society,” Federici shows how fundamental the control over women’s labour has been to the emergence of the global food market. Following Hartman and Federici, this chapter considers how Nichols’s encodes a politics of race, gender, and food into the lyric form, and in so doing, makes a claim not only for the significance of Nichols’s poetry to the study of the world-food-system but also to the growing field of food and literature.

“Making Something from This Ache-and-Pain-A-Me”: Sugar, Memory and the Waste of Women’s Labour in I Is A Long Memoried Woman One of the central ways in which Nichols’s first poetry collection explores the painful meanings that can be ascribed to black women’s work with food is through a focus on the female slave labouring in the plantation field. The poem “We the Women” (Nichols 1983: 12), which appears in Part One of the collection, grapples with the exploitation of gender and race via cash-cropping through an emphasis on the invisibilization of black women’s contributions to sugarcane production: We the women who toil unadorn heads tie with cheap cotton We the women who cut clear fetch dig sing

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Nichols here both exploits and tampers with the medium of lyrical poetry to rupture its conventional use of a fixed lyrical “I”. Placing emphasis on the collective of black embondaged women via her sustained use of the pronoun “we,” Nichols challenges not only the traditionally “masculine poetic persona” of the lyric but also the connection “between the lyric and selfhood” (Wills 2000: 19). By deflating the lyric’s conventional “representation of an [individual’s] inner life” (Wills: 19), Nichols asserts not only her feminist politics but also her distance from what Kwame Dawes describes as “the private, arched lyricism of modern British poetry” (2005: 282). Eschewing solitary reflection and sequestered meditation in favour of an emphasis on collective struggle, Nichols collapses the distinction between the singular and the plural, incorporating the voice of the solitary female lyrical speaker into those of the collective. One of the central ways in which Nichols does so is by inserting African and Caribbean narrative traditions and oral forms into the lyric genre, which, along with her commitment to Creole language, form a central part of her writing style and her poetry’s mediation of the Caribbean experience (Scanlon 1998: 63). By employing oral devices borrowed from non-European cultural traditions, Nichols dramatizes the lyric, stretching its limitations to infuse the form with the power of a collective voice speaking to a larger community about a broader communal experience. As such, Nichols invigorates the lyric genre through her use of Afro-­ Caribbean oral techniques, while the refrain “we the women” challenges the absence of black women’s voices in European accounts of Caribbean history. This “historical voicelessness” (Scanlon 1998: 63) spurs Nichols to create a lyrical speaker who mediates a female “I” and speaks for the collective by lamenting the plantation’s devaluation of black women’s labour. This the poem’s speaker achieves by explicitly positioning the slave women as unpaid workers, opening the poem with the line “we the women who toil” to position slavery, first and foremost, as a labour system that cheapens the lives of black women in order to extract their labour-power. Under plantation slavery, the work of black women has as much value as the “cheap / cotton” that they wear on their heads in a warped version of a kingly crown. Unlike kings, whose lives are immortalized in the pages of history, the “deaths” of these women are, in the final lines of the poem, swept “aside / as easy as dead leaves”; their lives are as valueless, the speaker suggests, as the debris from the harvested canes that they are forced to clear away. Drawing a comparison between refuse and the “cheapness” (Moore and Patel 2018) of black women’s labour, the speaker

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advances an image of the female slave who, like many of the enslaved humans who were literally worked to death on the plantation field, is reduced to disposable, forgettable waste. But even as the poem’s speaker draws on a discourse of disposal to envision the extractive operations of the slave system, she also refuses the very codes of expendability upon which the plantation economy depends by emphasizing the centrality of black women’s work to sugar production. As is well known, the plantation set in place processes of profit production that transformed black enslaved humans into expendable objects. “Slavery”, Katherine McKittrick writes, “position[ed] black subjects as ‘naturally’ condemned and disposable” (2014: 16), a logic of dispensability that was generated through slavery’s creation of “the category of surplus, waste and waste beings” (Baderoon 2018: 258). And yet, even as slaves were marked with the brand of disposability through their status as slaves, they remained integral to the plantation’s continuation of surplus production by providing the labour needed to generate profit in the form of surplus-value. Under these terms, we might reflect not only on the speaker’s insistence on the centrality of women to the plantation’s success but also note how the poem’s enjambed use of the word “aside” mirrors a simultaneous generation and dependence on the logic of surplus. While the poem’s literal sweeping of the word to the left side of the page is suggestive of a certain insignificance, its solitary position on the page also suggests its salience, emphasizing how its inclusion remains vital to the meaning of those which follow. Mimetically capturing the plantation’s code of dispensability and its simultaneous reliance on surplus labour, “We the Women,” like Nichols’s use of the lyric form itself, both exploits and resists the codes of labour extraction that construct black women as ‘superfluous’ under the cash-crop system. Nichols’s poetic project can thus be said to serve as a form of lyrical remembrance; an urgent paean to the women who were subordinated to the plantation’s logics of amnesia and erasure. In this sense, her poetry also surfaces the capitalist operations of the colonial sugar economy and its inauguration of modern capitalism’s continued racialization of the work women do with food. According to recent estimates provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, women of colour still produce more than half of all the food that is grown today for global consumption (“Women Feed the World” n.d.). This percentage increases further in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, where women of colour grow more than “80 percent of basic foodstuffs” (FAO, “Women Feed

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the World”, n.d.). But key here is that women’s work with food transcends their literal cultivation of crops; their food-labour also includes a series of tasks that play an essential role in ensuring food security for their families and communities. In addition to providing vital nutrients to their offspring through breastfeeding, women across the Global South undertake “virtually all of the tasks required for household food security”; from its production and processing through to its preparation and provisioning, the work of “food-getting” predominately remains the responsibility of women (Shiva 2009: 18). Yet, even as their work forms the backbone of the food system, women’s food-work continues to be undervalued because of capitalism’s gendered division of labour and its ‘naturalization’ of women’s work with food. Such social divisions, which discount “women’s food economy as ‘productive work’” (Shiva 2009: 17) have ensured that women’s agricultural contributions often go unpaid, such that most of the women who comprise the food industry’s labouring class continue to live in conditions of poverty. “Women form the bulk of the working poor,” writes Kathambi Kinoti, “they toil long hours without reaping enough to enable them to climb out of the dollar-a-day absolute poverty bracket” (2008). In addition to living below the breadline, many women remain cut off from ownership over the land because of colonial-era policies that “systematically favored men with regard to allocations of land, equipment, and training” (Federici 2009). In Guyana, “90 percent of female heads of farm households have no title to their land” (“FOA addresses gender inequalities” 2019). Not only do women own the least land, but they are also the most likely to be hungry and malnourished. While the chances of being food insecure are higher for women than men across the world, the largest gap exists in Latin America and the Caribbean (“FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean” n.d.). At the heart of this crisis lies “the global market economy; an economy that undervalues the labour of women—both productive and reproductive—and of the poor in general” (Kinoti 2008). It is these persistent material realities, shaped by the ‘invisible hands’ of slavery, that shape Nichols’s poetry in turn. In the poem “Without Song” (1983: 26), Nichols draws on the familiar theme of the plantation system’s codes of erasure to construct an intimate relation between black women, food, and memory. Remarking on the cruelties of the sugar economy, the poem’s speaker wonders if:

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maybe the thing is to forget to forget and be blind on this little sugar island to forget the Kingdom of Ancestors the washing of throats with palm wine to not see that woman, female flesh feast coated in molasses

In contrast to the speaker’s insistence on making visible black women’s labour in “We the Women,” the speaker of this poem laments the pain that accompanies the project of remembrance and witnessing. To do so, the speaker makes use of a series of food metaphors. The first of these concerns the speaker’s description of an unnamed Caribbean islet as a “little sugar island,” thus critiquing the construction of the Caribbean through a narrative of ‘peripheralization’ that ignores how large the region looms in the development of the industrialized core. “Although the Caribbean lies at the heart of the western hemisphere and was historically pivotal in the rise of Europe to world predominance”, writes Mimi Sheller, “it has nevertheless been spatially and temporally eviscerated from the imaginary geographies of ‘Western modernity’” (2003: 1). Further evoked in this description is the homogenization of the Caribbean under sugar cultivation, which carpeted the landscape with rolling green hills of sugarcane, turning the once colourful and diverse environment into a homochromous verdant world. Writing of the monoculturalization of Barbados, Andrea Stuart describes how “the rampant wilderness that had dominated the island had been completely tamed” by the end of the seventeenth century, making the island “look,” as gleefully reported by a British colonial official, “like a beautifully cultivated green garden” (2012: 143). Just as the Caribbean landscape is subjected to the colonial subordination of the sugar crop, so, too, is the body of the slave woman transformed into consumable object—her “female flesh” turned into a “feast coated in molasses.” This image works on both a literal and figurative level. On the one hand, the speaker is describing the act of witnessing a slave woman’s subjection to a common form of punishment that involved rubbing the body of a naked slave in molasses and exposing them to flies and mosquitoes, bringing literal meaning to Marx’s phrase that capital “comes into the world […] dripping, from head to toe, from every pore, with blood

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and dirt”… and molasses (1976 [1876]: 926). On the other hand, the poem’s speaker is lamenting the collective ‘ingesting’ of black women that was made possible by the consumptive appetites of the British slave trade; the global desire for the ‘sweetness’ of sugar enabling the large-scale “swallowing up,” as Mintz puts it (1985: 39), of black women as they were forcefully incorporated into the vortex of slavery’s “human-­ consuming economy” (Sheller 2003: 76). Such is the terror of this extractive economy that even the memory of “the Kingdom of the Ancestors” brings little comfort to the poem’s speaker. And yet, even as the speaker attempts to disremember her ancestry, she also lingers on her traditional ancestral practices, allowing the memory of “the washing of throats with palm wine” to momentarily disrupt the act of witnessing the plantation’s more savage violences. Palm wine has long played an integral role in West African life, often used to seal agreements between people, as well as to mark the opening of celebrations and ceremonies (Mbuagbaw and Noorduyn 2012). Traditionally consumed after consultations with ancestral spirits, the collective consumption of palm wine is believed to seal and strengthen the covenant between the human and spirit world, thus “ensuring the progression of life for the individual and the community” (Smith 2001: 214). Palm wine is a powerful material storehouse, in other words, of the pleasures that come with sociality and community; unlike sugar, its value is not determined by monetary exchange, but by its ability to create linkages across time and space, as well as between people and worlds, both material and spiritual. In her attempt to endure the terrors of slavery, the speaker reaches, then, for a food that is not associated with the British indulgence in “thoughtless consumption” (Sheller 2003: 14), allowing the memory of the pleasures of palm wine to act as a powerful archive that can be accessed to construct a pathway to survival. While the image of palm wine serves to bridge time and space and thus position the act of food-memory as a practice that can be harnessed to disrupt the plantation’s extractive codes, the poem itself serves as a means through which to memorialize black women’s lives through the act of writing itself. This poetic commitment to memorialization is one of “hopeful restoration and re/membering”; a celebration of “the potential of cultural regeneration to be found even in the midst of great hardship and pain” (Lopez 2003: 27). Thus, while Nichols’s first poetry collection emphasizes black women’s subjection under plantation slavery, it also stresses how women retained the potential to “mak[e] something” of their “ache-and-pain-a-me” (1983: 12). Resisting the

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sentimentality that is often associated with the lyric form, Nichols never allows her speaker/s to indulge in victimhood; refusing, as she puts it herself in “The Battle with Language,” to reduce “the black woman’s condition to that of ‘sufferer’” (Nichols 1990: 284). Like her eschewal of the lyric’s connotations of individual meditation and emotional romanticization, Nichols’s poetic portrayal of food emerges as a powerful site of memory that transcends both sentimentality and the post-Marxian turn towards “material things and symbolic meanings” (Sheller 2003: 76). Instead, Nichols’s lyrical scripting of food in I Is A Long Memoried Woman serves as the material basis from which to envision tactics of survival in a brutal and bitter world.

“Ain’t No Jemima”: Flesh, Food, and Domesticity in The Fat Black Women’s Poems Nichols’s second collection marks a move away from her previous focus on the labouring slave woman. In this poetry ensemble, Nichols turns her gaze towards twentieth-century London to interrogate developing discourses on race, identity, and nationalism emerging from the post-imperial era. Much like other post-1980 Black British writing, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems follows the familiar narrativization of a protagonist’s life before migration, their journey to Britain, and subsequent experience of arrival and settlement in a new city “marred by racism” and in which questions of home and belonging become particularly charged (Weedon 2016: 47). Reflective of such concerns, the collection is replete with images of food and its intimate connection with ‘home.’ Many of the poems feature traditional Caribbean foods such as mango, star-apple, guenips, plantains, saltfish, and sweet potatoes. The speaker of the collection frequently laments her inability to find these foods in Britain, making her longing for the Caribbean all the more powerful; “In London,” Nichols writes in “Like A Beacon,” “every now and then / I get this craving / for my mother’s food / I need this link / I need this touch / of home” (Nichols 1984: 27). In this sense, the collection can be understood as a response to the shift that took place in post-war definitions of citizenship arising from a new “rhetoric of British nationalism that sought to redefine British identity and state as ethnic rather than empire” (Kinnahan 2000: 208). Such conceptions of ‘Britishness’ set in place “new national boundaries” meant to

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“exclude previous subjects of empire, often on the basis of their ethnic difference and in response to new immigration patterns” opened by the 1948 British Nationality Act, originally envisioned as a solution to the post-war need for “low-end labour” (Kinnahan, 208). Subsequently, tensions around race and ‘ethnic difference’ rose across the country as numbers of immigrants increased; by 1976, The National Front was calling for the preservation of “our British native stock” by “terminating non-white immigration” (Holmes 1991: 57). These tensions culminated in the defeat of the Labour Party in 1979, enabling Thatcher’s Conservative Party to enforce the new British Nationality Act in 1981, which nullified the open-­ door policy of its 1948 predecessor by “redefining British nationality to exclude citizens of the New Commonwealth” (Tyler 2010: 61), creating ‘aliens’ within the borders of the nation state by effectively drawing “the lines of the nation […] around the boundaries of race” (Baucom 1999: 195). Signalling her rejection of the status of the unwanted black ‘alien’, Nichols opens The Fat Black Woman’s Poems with a poem entitled “Beauty” (1984: 7). Here, “beauty” is “a fat black woman / riding the waves / drifting in happy oblivion / while the sea turns back / to hug her shape.” Nichols thus charts the arrival of her protagonist in Britain through the evocative image of a fat black woman—the collection’s central speaker— floating contentedly in the Atlantic as she makes her way to British shores. The poem explicitly celebrates black womanhood, its imagining of black femininity and corporeality serving as a counter-narrative to the new forms of ‘state racism’ that were ushered in by the new Nationality Act. Peter Fryer laments the lingering power of empire in late twentieth-century Britain in Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1985). Referring to how little the pattern of racial disadvantage has changed since the colonial period, Fryer argues that while “the once ubiquitous ‘no coloured’ tag is no longer seen in landlords’ advertisements […] black people are still far more likely than white people to suffer overcrowding and the lack of various housing amenities” (Fryer 2018 [1984]: 388). It was not by accident, in other words, that some of the most sustained race uprisings of the early 1980s took place in the cities of London, Liverpool, and Bristol, all home to some of the central slaving ports of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and all enriched by the profits made from the colonial sugar economy. Nor is it coincidence that these uprisings were led by black youths who were the descendants of the British plantation system (Olusoga 2016).

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Key, then, to the poem’s reimagining of blackness in contemporary Britain is its exploitation of the familiar colonial tropes of the black female body as ‘New World.’ During the Euro-American colonial project of expansion in the Americas, a set of recurrent myths were used to characterize and thereby legitimize the embondaging of black African women. Chief among these myths were racist patriarchal beliefs that associated the black female body with notions of excessive wildness, fecundity, and beastliness (Morgan 2004). Such myths laid the discursive ground needed for colonizers to view black women’s bodies as in need of conquering and taming, much like the natural landscape itself. Exploiting these myths for her own purposes, Nichols reimagines her speaker as experiencing a unity with nature on her own terms, depicting the Fat Black Woman walking alone amongst “the fields,” smelling a “breezed hibiscus,” to construct her unifying experience with the landscape as free from the colonizing gaze of the white male explorer (1984: 7). Thus, in contrast to the brutalized and labouring body of the embondaged woman that we encounter in her first collection, Nichols depicts the body of the black woman as a site of pleasure, resisting the transmutation of black subjects into objects of consumption and extraction through a recuperation of the colonizing metaphor. Such resistances are brought to bear on Nichols’s portrayal of the Atlantic, too. As many scholars have shown, it was the Atlantic, as much as the plantation, which made human commodification possible. Stephanie E. Smallwood argues that it was while on the middle passage that slaves were transformed from “African bodies into Atlantic commodities and thereafter equated with the consumable goods that comprised the onboard shipment” (2007: 43). Such processes of transformation turned on the slave ship’s reduction of its human cargo “to the sum of their biological parts,” scaling life down to little more than “an arithmetical equation” (Smallwood 2007: 43). Hortense J. Spillers equally emphasizes the role of the ocean in her reading of the impact of slavery on black familial relations, arguing that the slave ship marked an alternative space of social belonging through its literal suspension in “the oceanic” (1987: 72). Even while moving across the Atlantic, Spillers shows how slaves were “nowhere at all,” in the sense that they were caught between “their indigenous land and culture” (Spillers, 72) and their eventual arrival in the Caribbean, where they would be ‘rebirthed’ as racialized commodities from the slave ship’s “tomb-like hatch” (Samuelson 2018: 37) into the plantation’s “death world” (Brown 2008).

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But Nichols’s rendering of her speaker’s oceanic suspension is equated with neither ambivalent Freudian subjectivity nor irrepressible loss; rather, the Fat Black Woman’s “drifting” is experienced as “a happy oblivion.” In place of having her humanity expelled by the Atlantic, Nichols’s speaker lies in its embrace, “riding the waves / while the sea turns back / to hug her shape.” The Fat Black Woman’s body is also explicitly removed from bearing the marks of slavery’s terrors: illness, emaciation, objectification. Rather, she drifts in the Atlantic content in her fatness and femininity, the undeniability of her beauty a constant refrain: “beauty / is a fat black woman.” Notable here, however, is that these celebratory constructions can only be made possible through a reversal of the slave journey itself; after all, the Fat Black Woman is travelling not from Africa to the Caribbean, but from the ‘New World’ to the Old. It is only through this reversal—this literal ‘taking back’—that her journey can be envisioned as returning that which slavery would have robbed from her, the suggestion being that her humanity will find its ultimate confirmation in her encounter with the splendours and pleasures promised by the (mother) city. And yet the ghosts of the slave system continue to haunt the Fat Black Woman even as she makes her home in the metropole. “Shopping in London” (1984: 11), Nichols writes in another poem, is a real drag for the fat black woman going from store to store in search of accommodating clothes Look at the frozen thin mannequins fixing her with grin and de pretty face salesgals exchanging slimming glances thinking she don’t notice

This poem explicitly critiques the continued expulsion of black bodies from the city by drawing attention to the global consumer market’s perpetuation of white beauty standards, which prize white aesthetics of thinness and lightness while constructing blackness as “outside of the realm of ‘the beautiful’” (Tate 2009: 17). The speaker’s comparison between the affirmed beauty of white women—“pretty face salesgals”—and their perceived ‘ugliness’ of the Fat Black Woman recalls Spillers’s comments on the connections made during slavery between “the flesh” and “the body.”

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Spillers conceptualizes the flesh not as biologically prior but as preceding the body, a distinction that resulted from the pain imposed by slavers upon the flesh of their slaves through whipping, chaining, burning, and “other modes of dehumanisation” (Tate 2018: 6). “I would make a distinction,” explains Spillers, “between ‘the body’ and ‘the flesh.’ […] [B]efore ‘the body’, there is the flesh, that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse” (67). Spillers’ point here is that white racialized violence racialized black subjects in turn through the brutal marking of their flesh. This is a process that continues to shape contemporary meanings of blackness and black female identity “within the continuing racial hierarchies based on physiognomy and physiology” (Tate 2018: 6). Under these terms, the poem can be said, then, to serve as an exploration of the realization, through the Fat Black Woman’s encounter with a global consumer market that does not cater for her, that the pain produced by slavery’s “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers: 67) does not end with emancipation. Questions of flesh and food are given further salience in the poem “The Fat Black Woman Remembers” (Nichols 1984: 9), where Nichols counters a further set of colonial-era myths, looking to dismantle slave-based associations of fatness with black domestic servitude. The “fat black woman” remembers “her Mama / and them days of playing / the jovial Jemima / tossing pancakes / to heaven.” Here, Nichols draws on the stereotype of the black “mammy,” the myth of the overweight black domestic servant who willingly acts as surrogate mother to the slaver by cooking, cleaning, and caring for his wife and children (McElya 2007). The fiction of the de-sexualized, smiling mammy first became popular during the American abolitionist movement of the 1830s, “when members of the planter class began using these stories [of the faithful slave] to animate their assertions of slavery as benevolent and slave owning as honourable” (McElya 2007: 4). While the mammy myth originated in America, it retains close ties with Britain due to the significant cultural transmission that took place between America and Britain throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Green 2018). Sunlight Soap, a British cleaning product manufactured in Port Sunlight in Liverpool, frequently made use of the mammy figure in its advertisements in the first two decades of the Victorian Era. Many of these adverts feature the caricatured image of a laughing fat black woman in a spotless white apron, hailing Sunlight Soap for its assistance in helping her complete “A Morning’s Work.”

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In the poem, the Fat Black Woman’s memories pivot on the image of her mother as a domestic worker forced to acquiesce with the mammy stereotype in order to meet the demands of her white employer. The image of her mother as “jovial Jemima” is a direct reference to the “Aunt Jemima,” a key figure in the history of food. Like Sunlight Soap’s appropriation of the mammy image, the international food conglomerate Quaker Oats Company chose to use the smiling face of an enslaved woman to represent their bestselling pancake mix named “Aunt Jemima.” The success of the pancake mix hinged not only on the new conveniences it offered in terms of food-preparation but also on its exploitation of white colonial nostalgia. Note, for example, how Nichols’s description of the Fat Black Woman’s mother turns on a series of images that evoke an idyllic home space; she is described as pressing “little white heads / against her big-aproned breasts / seeing down to the smallest fed” (1984: 9). The critique here, then, is of the white bourgeois household’s nostalgic belief that their home comforts—in particular their food—are made available through the ‘loving labours’ of a black female servant and not through capitalism’s continued exploitation of black women to fulfil the demands of the service economy. One of the central ways in which Nichols interrogates “the continuities between slavery and freedom” (Hartman 2016: 170) is thus through her interest in the “plantation handovers” (DuBois 1935) enabled by black women’s urbanized domestic labour. And yet, despite her performance as Jemima, the Fat Black Woman’s mother retains a rebellious spirit: her jobs, we are told, are done with “murderous blue laughter.” She ensures that such rebelliousness makes its way into the next generation, too, as she “feeds her own children on Satanic bread” (1984: 9). Here again Nichols complicates easy associations of food with pain alone: while the bread and its “Satanic” connotations can easily be read as referring to the curse of broken kinship that was set in place by slavery’s destruction of the black family unit (Hartman 2016: 170)—and, too, William Blake’s coinage of the phrase “these dark Satanic Mills” to describe the eighteenth-­century British textile industry (1993 [1808])—it can equally serve as a reference to Afro-Caribbean resistance to Euro-American religious formations and their “earthly manifestations of hierarchy and missionary colonization” (Scanlon 1998: 61). Indeed, Afro-Caribbean spiritualist practices such as Obeah were frequently misunderstood and recast as ‘Satan worship’ and ‘witchcraft’ by anxious white planters; as Juanita De Barros puts it, “in European eyes, obeah and allied practices were ‘ungodly’ and ‘evil’ and

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seemed to present a challenge to the white plantocratic power structure” (De Barros 2004: 28). Thus, while her white employer may associate her ‘daily bread’ with evil, with literal black magic, the Fat Black Woman’s mother views it as a spiritual bequest that will ensure that her daughter does not inherit the position of servitude that she had no choice but to fulfil. And indeed, as the poem’s speaker puts it herself in the final lines, with typical tongue-in-cheek: “this fat black woman ain’t no Jemima / Sure thing Honey / Yeah” (1984: 9).

Conclusion “How”, asks Gitanjali G. Shahani, “should we think of food in the literary text?” (2018: 3). I have suggested here that we might think of food less as a symbol and more as an “archive”, to borrow from Meg Samuelson, in which “the history of slavery continues to surface” (2008: 38). It is the continual surfacing of plantation histories, I would venture, that lends Nichols’s lyricism a particular materialist orientation, inviting a dialectical reading approach which “shuttles” not only between pain and pleasure, but also, as Michael Niblett, Chris Campbell, and Kerstin Oloff write in this collection’s introduction, “between the ways in which food is produced, shipped, sold, consumed and dominated by extra-alimentary global forces, and its meaning-making symbolic dimension” (2021: 10). Like the “dead leaves” which make their way into her poetry, Nichols’s poetic project frames food as the organic material of the human imagination and social analysis—as the historical matter that serves as the soil in which her lyricism is cultivated. In her writings, food’s ‘meaning’ is thus drawn as much from the symbolic world of affects—from the emotions of pain and pleasure—as it is informed by a series of world-historical preoccupations, thereby compelling attention to the continued salience of a materialist literary praxis grounded in critiques of the world-economy. And it is in this sense that Nichols’s poetry has much to contribute to the field of food and literature, as her lyricism calls for an understanding of food as intimately interwoven with global processes in which gendered and racialized domination continues to occupy a central and disturbing place.

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Note 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.

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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.

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———. 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.

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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.

CHAPTER 4

“The Landscape Heaved with Unspeakable Terror”: The Weird Presence of the World-­ Food-­System in the Cultural Imaginaries of England and the Caribbean Michael Niblett

“But from the start, Earth did not please you. You / set it alight, you disembowelled it, you forcefully / established marks of your presence all over it.” These lines, drawn from Olive Senior’s poem “Seeing the Light” (2005: 96), describe the violent transformation of lifeways and environments in the Caribbean following the colonial conquest and the rapid conversion of large swathes of land to cash-crop monoculture. This process, which turned the region into “the sugar bowl, tobacco pouch, coffee shop, and rum supplier of the world” (Mintz 1985: 130), was closely connected to a raft of changes then occurring in the English countryside.1

M. Niblett (*) Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_4

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Not the least of these was enclosure, which extinguished common rights to open fields and ‘waste’ lands.2 In so doing, it not only, in the words of John Clare, “trampled on the grave / Of labour’s rights, and left the poor a slave” (2004: 168), but also disrupted a complex ecology of customary foodways. Listing the foods typically gathered by commoners from woodlands, for example, Peter Linebaugh writes: hazelnuts and chestnuts could be sold at market; autumn mushrooms flavoured soups and stews. Wild chervil, fennel, mint, wild thyme, marjoram, borage, wild basil, tansy made herbs for cooking and healing. Wild sorrel, chicory, dandelion leaves, salad burnet, cats-ear, goats-beard, greater prickly lettuce, corn sow-thistle, fat-hen and chickweed, yarrow, charlock, and goose grass made salads. Elderberries, blackberries, bilberries, barberries, raspberries, wild strawberries, rosehips and haws, cranberries and sloes were good for jellies, jams, and wines. (2008: 43)

With enclosure and the increasing commodification of the land and its resources, access to this world of abundant use-values was restricted, while the cultural knowledge associated with the identification and preparation of these ‘wild’ foods was suppressed and eroded. Together, then, enclosure in England and the maturation of the plantation complex in the Caribbean represent pivotal moments in the development of the capitalist world-food-system—indeed, in the development of capitalism as such. As Linebaugh puts it, “the enclosure movement and the slave trade ushered industrial capitalism into the modern world”: The expelled commoners and the captured Africans provided the labour power available for exploitation in the factories of the field (tobacco and sugar) and the factories of the towns (woollens and cottons). Whether indentured servant, West African youngster, former milkmaid, or woodsman without his woods, the lords of humankind looked upon them indifferently as labouring bodies to produce surplus value, and so emerged the Atlantic working day, which entirely depended upon a prior discommoning. (2008: 94–95)

Clare’s insistence that enclosure turned the English poor into a “slave” must be understood as more than mere rhetoric, therefore; it speaks, rather, to the intertwining of the violent legacies of “discommoning” as these were experienced on both sides of the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this intertwined history, the present chapter examines fiction, theatre,

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film, and music from England and the Caribbean. It is concerned with how the impact of, and resistance to, enclosure and the plantation complex haunt the cultural registration of ongoing transformations in agrofood relations. I use the word “haunt” advisedly here, since I am particularly interested in works that mobilize elements of the Weird and the Eerie to convey both the sense of strangeness generated by capitalism’s periodic reorganization of landscapes and lifeworlds in the interests of endless accumulation, as well as the sheer difference of any alternative to the dominant socioeconomic logic. Commonly associated with the fiction of such early twentieth-century writers as H.  P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, and M. R. James, the Weird and the Eerie have been the subject of renewed critical attention in recent years (not least thanks to the work of China Miéville, Mark Fisher, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer). With regard specifically to the Weird, however, it is not simply that it has come to prominence, but also, as Stephen Shapiro observes, that its authors and audiences have undergone a radical transubstantiation. For work that was previously to be overwhelmingly created for and consumed by ‘white,’ heteronormative men, the Weird today has become one of a cluster of genres (e.g., science fiction) that have their most vibrant practitioners and readers within the overlapping categories of non-white, women’s, and less heteronormative subjects. (2019)

This rings true in the field of Caribbean literature. Here, in the context of a recent, general upsurge in sf writing from or associated with the region, authors such as Nalo Hopkinson and Rita Indiana have critically engaged with Weird literary modalities in their exploration of the “ongoing catastrophe” of slavery and imperialism (Brathwaite 2005). Thus, in Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015), allusions to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos are central to the novel’s critique of the racism, class inequality, sexual oppression, and ecocide that followed in the long wake of the colonial conquest. Roger McTair’s short story “Just a Lark,” meanwhile, which features in Hopkinson’s important edited collection of Caribbean “fabulist fiction,” Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root (2000), reworks the archetypal Lovecraftian tale in a Jamaican context. Set in the mid-twentieth century, the terrifying phenomenon that confronts McTair’s protagonist is not Cthulhu rising from the deep, but the spectre of plantation slavery, emerging out of the crypt of a sadistic nineteenth-century planter, Matthew Ashdown:

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As we made our way to the tomb, I heard the first faint but still terrible cries. Then they were loud; a grunting effort, a whistling crack, then whimpering punctuated by more grunts and cracks. And all the while the distinct noise of chains. A smell arose from the pit, like that of burning flesh. […] The entire landscape heaved with unspeakable terror. (77)

This manifestation of the island’s “repressed historical memory” (63) literalizes the story’s concern with the shadow cast by the death-world of the plantation over Jamaican social life.3 Indeed, the narrative itself could be said to be haunted: not only by the plantation complex, but also by the struggles of the poor and the powerless against this agro-food system, struggles that have found material expression in the alternative forms of life- and environment-making associated with the plot system. “The history of Caribbean society,” Sylvia Wynter has written, “is that of a dual relation between plantation and plot” (1971: 99). For Wynter, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey explains, the plantation represents “Euclidean grids of monoculture” and “the commodity cultivation of nonsustainable crops such as sugar and tobacco for external markets.” The plots or provision grounds, meanwhile, “with their diverse intercropping of indigenous and African cultivars,” support the “voluntary cultivation of subsistence foods such as yams, cassava, and sweet potatoes that represent edible staples and the economically viable roots of the internal markets” (2011: 58). They also support the folk traditions that have served as “a source of cultural guerrilla resistance to the plantation system” (Wynter 1971: 100). The conflict between the logics of plantation and plot has been ongoing, manifesting itself in recurrent battles over land use and ownership. With specific reference to Jamaica, Tony Weis observes that as a result of [the island’s] ingrained plantation matrix, land hunger has long been intense and defined by race. Shortly after Emancipation, numerous revolts centred around acquiring land, since land was seen as ‘the one true indicator that freedom had been properly achieved.’ The struggle for black access to land continues to this day, having been articulated throughout Jamaican history by leaders such as Sam Sharpe in the slave rebellion of 1831–32, Paul Bogle in the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, national hero Marcus Garvey in the 1920s and 1930s, and George Beckford and the New World intellectuals at the University of West Indies-Mona beginning in the late 1960s. (2001: 92)

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“Just a Lark” concatenates several such moments of struggle. Ashdown’s crypt is located near Morant Bay (the area is referred to in the story by its seventeenth-century Spanish name of Morante), and Ashdown himself was killed during the 1865 rebellion. The legacy of the plot system is also symbolized by a settlement of peasants the protagonist encounters (again, in the Morant Bay area). The peasants’ self-sufficiency and horticultural know-how is connected to the cultural history they preserve, something emphasized by their leader, Teacha Paul, who is an authority on African antiquity and religious practices. Tellingly, at the end of the story, the settlement is destroyed by the colonial authorities in yet another illustration of the continuing clash over land, labour, and food sovereignty in the Caribbean. With regard to enclosure in England, meanwhile: just as the impact of the plantation system in the Caribbean is not confined to the historical heyday of cash-crop monocultures, so enclosure was not limited to the great wave of Parliamentary enclosures that took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather, it occurred in “fits and starts,” beginning in the twelfth century, continuing into the twentieth (the final enclosure Bill was enacted by Parliament in 1914), and persisting into the present in the form of the ongoing privatization of public land (Christophers 2019: 81). The cultural memory of enclosure, moreover, has retained a resonance far beyond the immediate experience of the process itself. Ellen Rosenman suggests that “for the politicized working classes the Enclosure Acts represented a profound trauma, an extended moment in a narrative of dispossession that undergirded resistance to aristocratic power and urbanization” (2012). Similarly, J.  M. Neeson comments that “the sense of loss, the sense of robbery could last forever as the bitter inheritance of the rural poor.” Indeed, she notes, “of all the verses of village poetry (and all the comment on enclosure) to survive into the twentieth century the rhyme about the common stolen from the goose must rank among the best known” (1993: 291).4 But if the trauma of enclosure has reverberated across capitalism’s longue durée in England, so too has the idea of the commons as a site of resistance and as a repository of ideals of liberty and equality. “It will be noticed,” write Edgell Rickword and Jack Lindsay in A Handbook of Freedom: A Record of English Democracy Through Twelve Centuries (1939), “how the word ‘common’ and its derivatives […] appear and re-appear like a theme throughout the centuries”:

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It was for the once vast common lands that the peasants took up arms; it was as the ‘true commons’ that they spoke of themselves when they assembled, and it was the aspiration of men not corrupted by petty proprietorship ‘that all things should be in common.’ It is not necessary to postulate some folk-­ memory of an original state of freedom to account for this, though there may have been an approximation to such a state in the early agricultural settlements, and the notion recurs as a rationalization of a prevailing need at various times: so the Levellers appealed to a fundamental right which the Normans were said to have suppressed. (1978: 126)

It is the recurrence of this theme of the commons, alongside the reactivation of the historical memory of enclosure at analogous moments of struggle over land use and food sovereignty, that I highlight in the English cultural productions considered here. Although the cultural works I examine in this chapter emerge from irreducibly specific sociohistorical contexts on opposite sides of the Atlantic, it is important, I think, to emphasize the connections between the struggles they depict. As I have suggested, the histories of those struggles—between plantation and plot on the one hand, and enclosure and the commons on the other—are fundamentally intertwined, something that writers and thinkers in both the Caribbean and England have long highlighted. But such connections have also made themselves felt in more performative ways. Think, for example, of the Waltham Blacks—the English commoners who in Hampshire in the 1720s “blackened their faces as ‘sham Negroes’” as part of a series of actions aimed at protecting common rights in  local forests (Linebaugh 2008: 96). This “blackface performance,” writes Linebaugh, which was “not the licensed song and dance of nineteenth-century minstrelsy,” spoke in some measure to the commoners’ affinity with their “counterparts in the Americas and Africa” (2008: 104–105). Indeed, given the landowners’ view of the commoners as a “sordid race,” blacking “must be understood in an Atlantic racial context as well as the local microhistory of copse and coppice” (105). In addition to their blackened faces, the Waltham Blacks clothed themselves in animal skins and furs, their dress alluding to Anglo-Saxon pagan ritual and hence, perhaps, to a folk-memory of an alternative socioecological order—a folk-memory nourished by the myth of the Anglo-Saxon village as a space of equality and freedom that was suppressed by the Norman invasion and subsequent reorganization of landownership.5 This idea of the so-called Norman Yoke is one that has taken many forms, but as

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Christopher Hill argues, in “its main outlines it ran as follows: Before 1066 the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of this country lived as free and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions. The Norman Conquest deprived them of this liberty, and established the tyranny of an alien King and landlords” (1997: 52). As an historical account of the Norman Conquest and its impact, notes Hill, this “leaves something to be desired,” not least since “Anglo-Saxon society was already deeply divided into classes before William the Bastard set foot in England” (53). Nonetheless, “as a rudimentary class theory of politics, the myth had great historical significance” (53). Indeed, for all that it is a myth, there “is a reality underlying the idea of Saxon freedom, in the traditions of a more equal society, and the surviving communal and democratic institutions of rural England” (103). It is for this reason, perhaps, that the myth has remained an important one (if often only recalled in allusive fashion) to cultural narratives that invoke the idea of common rights and ownership in opposition to the commodification and privatization of the land. Thus, for example, nearly three hundred years after the Waltham Blacks stalked the forests of Hampshire, D.  C. Moore’s play Common (2017) reactivated the image of commoners in animal skins, performing quasi-­ Anglo-­Saxon rites and fighting enclosure. The drama centres on a group of nineteenth-century villagers in conflict with an aristocratic landowner. In its opening scene, the villagers gather “from shadow, lanterns lit, maskdressed as animal types or devilfolk or somepartboth [sic], on edge of their vast Common” (5). Moore’s resurrection of the violent history of enclosure—and “resurrection” is apt here given the weird events of the play—is clearly meant to resonate with contemporary struggles over land privatization. Indeed, the play premiered just a few years after the attempt by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government to sell-off England’s state-­ owned forests. Moreover, the original production’s casting of the black British actor Cush Jumbo as Laura, one of the leaders of the commoners’ revolt, suggests an implicit recognition of the history of racialized violence imbricated in the enclosure movement. This history has been explicitly addressed in another recent performance that mobilizes ritual pagan imagery. Here, however, it is combined with a Caribbean cultural imaginary such that the intertwined oppressions that the Waltham Blacks and Common gesture to indirectly are brought viscerally and critically to the fore. I am thinking of the track “Blasphemer” (2015) by the British vocalist, writer, and visual artist Gaika. Mixing Jamaican dancehall with London grime, Gaika (who was born to Grenadian

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and Jamaican parents and grew up in Brixton) underscores the continuities between Caribbean historical experience and the situation of Black British communities today. The song’s lyrics draw the connection between plantation slavery (“Who forgot the real things / Like steel rings round our necks”) and contemporary state violence, police brutality, and structural inequality (“Can we talk about needing jobs? / Can we talk about cleaning blocks? / […] Can we talk about young black boys? / Out in the street and just get shot / Are they gonna let them killer cops off?”). The haunting visuals of the track’s accompanying video, meanwhile, attest to what Gaika refers to as his “gothic aesthetic” (Jones 2015). Shot in black and white, it features ghostly, flickering images of the singer, bare-chested and wearing a horned mask and, later, a ragged hessian mask. The masks are redolent of pagan ritual dress, or at least popular depictions of such dress in folk horror films like The Wicker Man and Kill List. They allude in part, it seems, to a line in the song—“These people are pagans the shit they believe”—that suggests the kind of reactionary popular opinions fostered by Britain’s racist Tory government and mass media. The masks, however, also establish an unexpected connection to the shadowy history of animal-garbed commoners resisting enclosure. In so doing, they conjoin the struggle over the commons with the legacy of resistance to the Caribbean plantation system. For the horned mask Gaika wears is reminiscent, too, of versions of the Devil figure in Caribbean carnival, in particular Trinidad’s Jab Molassie and Grenada’s Jab Jab. Typically, the masqueraders playing these characters smear their body in oil, grease, or paint in an echo of the days when recently liberated slaves would daub themselves in molasses during Carnival celebrations. The molasses was intended to evoke the horrors of slave labour on the sugar plantation, revenge for which was acted out through the Devils’ threatening behaviour towards onlookers. Elements of this masquerade can be read into Gaika’s performance, from his writhing, angry movements to his paint-­ daubed body. The video, then, not only reinforces the song’s emphasis on the continuity between Caribbean slavery and contemporary racism in Britain, but also implicitly identifies the history of the sugar trade as an important connective optic. Discussing the imbrication of metropolitan and colonial identities, Stuart Hall once remarked: “People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. […] 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” (1997: 48). In summoning the

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spectre of the molasses-coated bodies of the Jab Jabs and Jab Molassies, in conjunction with Anglo-Saxon ritual tradition, Gaika’s performance offers a visceral embodiment of Hall’s metaphor. Making manifest the legacy of colonial violence that haunts English identity, as well as capitalism’s ongoing discommoning of working-class peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, Gaika dramatizes the intertwined histories of struggle that we will explore further below. *** In a wonderfully suggestive passage in his essay “Namsetoura and the Companion Stranger” (2003), Kamau Brathwaite details the manifold significance of the plots and provision grounds of the enslaved in the Caribbean. Up until the American War of Independence, he writes, the colonial authorities severely limited the amount of subsistence crops grown on the plantations to ensure that the utmost time and space could be dedicated to the production of cash-crops. Food was generally imported, primarily from the North American colonies. Such restrictions were not only a means to earn the maximum from plantation agriculture, but also a way of denying to the enslaved the “nourishing art(s) of cultivation and by xtension culture” (25). Above all, Brathwaite continues, the restrictions were a way to monitor and delimit the slaves’ strength/energy/protein intake/ DIET. So that on the slave plantations. one reason why there are relatively— but only relatively—few effective slave revolts in the period before 1776. for example. is because the slaves—w/out their own food plots. just didn’t have enough time/energy left over to PLOT the regime far less rebel it. That maronage was comparatively successful at this time is for the same reason— maroons at least had control over their own food space & supply and above all their DIET. (25)

Things changed with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, when naval blockades reduced North American food shipments into the British-controlled Caribbean. Combined with a persistent drought and a series of hurricanes, the blockades led to a widespread famine in which some 15,000 slaves died in Jamaica alone. Faced with the “collapse” of the plantation system, the authorities were forced “to permit/ allow/encourage—legalize in fact—the growing of slave food by slaves ­w/

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land (PLOTS!) and time (weekends) provisioned for this” (27). Granted more time on their plots, the enslaved also took the opportunity to cultivate alter/native cultural traditions and to engage in plotting of a more seditious sort. Hence, claims Brathwaite, the loosening of the regulations on what slaves could grow was a contributory factor in the proliferation of revolts and rebellions in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century. One contemporary observer who took great interest in this wave of rebellions was Robert Wedderburn. Born in Jamaica in 1762, Wedderburn was the son of an enslaved woman named Rosanna and a plantation owner named James Wedderburn. In 1778 he joined the Royal Navy and migrated to London, where he became involved in political radicalism. In addition to publishing various subversive periodicals and pamphlets (including the autobiography, The Horrors of Slavery [1824]), he “preached sedition at political meetings to the radical working class” and was associated with the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820 (Rice 2003: 10; McCalman 1986: 110). Insisting on the connection between plantation slavery in the colonies and wage slavery in the metropole, he sought a republican revolution grounded on a thoroughgoing redistribution of property both in Britain and the West Indies, and he did not hesitate to advocate violent methods to bring it about. He attacked slavery as part of a wider system of landed monopoly and corruption instituted by landlords, fundholders, kings and priests, and he offered his countrymen in the West Indies and England a detailed blueprint of liberation. (McCalman 1986: 108)

In his speeches at the debating chapel he founded in a large Soho hayloft in 1819, Wedderburn incited his audience by evoking the slave insurrections in the Caribbean and appealing “to Britons who boasted such superior feelings and principles whether they were ready to fight now but for a short time for their Liberties” (qtd. in Rice 2003: 11). Wedderburn’s radicalism was greatly influenced by the activities of Thomas Spence, whose “circle of veteran Jacobin revolutionaries and Utopian land reformers” he joined in 1813 (McCalman 1986: 105). Spence’s own political thinking had been decisively shaped by his early years in Newcastle, where he was witness to the efforts by “the Mayor and Corporation of Newcastle to enclose the Town Moor in 1771, ignoring the grazing and wooding rights which the city’s freemen enjoyed there” (Chase 2010: 27). In 1774 the dispute was settled in favour of the

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freemen. A year later, on “a wave of enthusiasm for the freemen’s victory,” Spence presented a lecture at the Newcastle Philosophical Society titled “Property in Land Every One’s Right” (Cazzola 2018: 3). Spence’s call for the radical redistribution of property and common ownership of the soil saw him expelled from the Society. Moving to London in the late 1780s, he began disseminating his ideas through pamphlets, songs, minted tokens, and wall chalkings. Against a backdrop of rising prices and widespread food riots, his “Plan” found an increasingly receptive audience amongst a restive working class (Chase 2010: 60). Indeed, by 1802 “the prime minister of England would be informed that there was scarcely a wall in London that did not have chalked upon it the slogan ‘Spence’s Plan and Full Bellies’” (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000: 294). Importantly, however, Spence’s plan was not meant only for England, but also had a transatlantic application. As Matilde Cazzola puts it, Spence “was aware that the enclosures on one side of the ocean, and the plantation system and the dispossession of the natives on the other side, were part of the same capitalist project of privatization of lands” (2018: 2). On several occasions, he used “American Indian and African communities as models and settings for his plan. More important, he was a fierce opponent of slavery who drew explicit parallels between the slave system abroad and the system of English landed monopoly which he believed to be the foundation of all inequality, hardship and oppression” (McCalman 1986: 107). Such ideas struck a chord with Wedderburn, who directly took up Spence’s demand for land to be held in common, urging that “all feudality of lordship in the soil be abolished, and the territory declared to be the people’s farm” (qtd. in Chase 2010: 2). But Wedderburn also brought to Spencean theory new ideas deriving from his experience of Jamaica and the world of the slave plantation. Thus, notes Iain McCalman, “his vision of land reform was sometimes more akin to the ‘proto-peasant’ aspirations of Jamaican slaves than to Spence’s rental-based plan” (1986: 108). In his correspondence with Elizabeth Campbell, his half-sister in Jamaica, Wedderburn emphasized the significance of Jamaica’s maroon communities, whose practices of subsistence agriculture and common land ownership he connected to the aims of the Spenceans. This connection was recognized, too, by Campbell, a landowner and slaveholder who in reply to Wedderburn wrote: “I, who am a weak woman, of the Maroon tribe, understood the Spencean doctrine directly: I heard of it, and obey, and the slaves felt the force directly” (qtd. in Linebaugh and Rediker 2000: 310). The force felt by the slaves was Campbell’s

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decision to manumit them and to redistribute her land along Spencean lines. Unsurprisingly, her actions did not sit well with the colonial authorities. In a further letter to Wedderburn, she explained that the governor had taken the news of her emancipation to the Jamaican Assembly, where one Macpherson had risen to speak against the doctrines of Thomas Spence […]. He moved that Campbell be treated as a lunatic and that the government confiscate her slaves and lands. […] The assembly then nullified Campbell’s manumission, since ‘slaves and lands set free by an Spencean enthusiast should not be entered on the records’—but neither should the record of the assembly itself be published, for fear that ‘it should fall into the hands of the slaves.’ (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000: 305–306)

The panic induced by Campbell’s actions and by the potential spread of Spencean ideas amongst the enslaved reflected the planter class’s gnawing anxiety about the future of West Indian sugar production. In the context of repeated slave insurrections and growing calls for emancipation, the planters faced the difficult question of how to retain a captive workforce. The maroons’ success in carving out autonomous communities away from the plantation yoke represented a dangerous historical precedent. Colonial accounts tended to portray the maroons as indolent and improvident; yet the reality of their hard-won self-sufficiency could not be ignored. So it was that in The History of the Maroons (1803), the planter-historian Robert C. Dallas felt obliged to correct previous representations of the maroons, at least as regards their agricultural labours: Their provision-grounds consisted of a considerable tract of unequal land, from which was produced a stock not only sufficient for their own use, but so superabundant as to enable them to supply the neighbouring settlements. Plantain, Indian corn or maize, yams, cocoas, toyaus, and in short all the nutritious roots that thrive in tropical soils, were cultivated in their grounds. In their gardens grew most of the culinary vegetables, and they were not without some fine fruits. […] Mammees, and other wild but delicious fruits, were at their hand, and pine-apples grew in their hedges. They bred cattle and hogs, and raised a great quantity of fowls. When we add to this domestic provision of good and wholesome food, we add the luxuries afforded by the woods […] we may doubt whether the Palate of Apicius would not have received higher gratification in Trelawney Town than at Rome. (1803: 106–107)

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The relative independence enabled by this “superabundant” production of food was precisely what the planters wished to thwart. Consequently, when emancipation came and workers began to leave the estates in search of “some degree of ownership and control over the means of production,” colonial regimes across the Caribbean strove to ensure that “land policy was carefully shaped toward keeping black people landless” (Rodney 1981: 60–61). Thus, for example, in Guyana in the 1840s “some planters deliberately destroyed fruit trees and provision grounds” in an effort to keep the emancipated population dependent on plantation labour (Adamson 1972: 35).6 The colonists’ fears over what would happen should this population break free entirely from the plantation economy is encapsulated in the writings of one contemporary observer: [The formerly enslaved] are beginning to take it for granted that the country is to be their own, in which notion they have been confirmed by emissaries from Demerara, urging them to hold out: and consequently, on the West coast they now give out that they will not work at all even if a guilder is offered them; that they will go to their own grounds. […] Even on estates where they have been working at the guilder rates they have struck … they seem resolved to have possession of the estates themselves … I can hardly suppose this fine country to be given over to the negroes. (qtd. in Adamson 1972: 37)

Anxieties such as these, culminating in the dreaded spectre of the colony “being given over to the negroes,” fuelled the colonial authorities’ belief that “almost any measure short of slavery” was excusable “if its result could be pictured as orienting the Negro within the magnetic field of the plantation” (Adamson 1972: 41). This was the logic, for instance, behind the efforts by Sir Henry Barkly, Guyana’s Governor in the early 1850s, to undermine subsistence agriculture by lowering duties on imported food. In 1851, he “managed to rush through a reduction of the duty on breadstuffs” in the hope that its “most beneficial result would be to divert labour from local plantain growing to the sugar estates” (Adamson 1972: 41). As Alan Adamson notes, “without realizing it, [Barkly] had put his finger on the most mordant feature of monoculture: its incapacity to coexist with a developing internal market, its convulsive need to destroy any other sector of the economy which might compete for ‘its’ labour” (1972: 42).

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The reverberations both of the plantation sector’s monstrous compulsion to asphyxiate locally oriented agriculture, as well as of the planter class’s dystopian fantasies regarding the collapse of the colony, find arresting expression in the work of Edgar Mittelholzer. The author of some twenty-two novels, as well as numerous short stories, poems, plays, and essays, Mittelholzer was a pioneer in Anglophone Caribbean literary circles as “the first of his generation to emigrate to the UK to make a serious career of writing novels” (Gilkes 1995: 127). He was also “a pioneer in the genre of speculative fiction in Caribbean writing” (Cox 2018: 10). Works such as Shadows Move Among Them (1951), The Adding Machine (1954), My Bones and My Flute (1955), A Tinkling in the Twilight (1959), and Eltonsbrody (1960) draw on gothic, fantasy, horror, and sf conventions, typically combining these with local settings and folkloric materials to produce Weird and Eerie narratives of a distinctly Caribbean sort.7 Take, for example, Shadows Move Among Them and My Bones and My Flute, both of which are set in the 1930s and feature protagonists who venture upriver into Guyana’s forested interior. Both novels, too, present this interior in ways that recall the eerie atmospherics and brooding, agential landscapes of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood: As the stream narrowed and the jungle reared silently higher and higher and denser on either bank the blacker and more evil a smile the water appeared to brew. The shadowed spaces made by the low-hanging foliage momently seemed to gather a deeper gloom and to glower with the sullen menace of many watching eyes: eyes concealed amid poison-berries and slow-drifting blossoms. (Shadows Move Among Them [2010: 38]) The river lurked like a sullen enemy which at any instant might send black, sluggish tentacles groping towards us through the dark. From upstream there came a low gruff barking, and I found myself stiffening, for I knew that no dog could utter such a sound. […] There was a real fascination in the night. A dense aliveness and intelligence—a watching calm. (My Bones and My Flute [2015: 92])

In his analysis of the Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher argues that what these aesthetic modes have in common is “a preoccupation with the strange” (2016: 8). Their allure, he writes, has to do with “a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience” (8). The weird is “that which does not belong”: it “brings to the familiar something that ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot

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be reconciled with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation)” (10–11). The eerie also disrupts our understanding of the familiar, only it “does not usually have the quality of shock that is typically a feature of the weird” (13). For Fisher, “the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?” (11). “A sense of the eerie,” he notes, “seldom clings to enclosed and domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved?” (11). This account of the Eerie perfectly captures the significance of Mittelholzer’s narrative tone. In emphasizing the strange, threatening quality of the jungle, with its eerie cries, silences, and moments of calm, both Shadows and My Bones not only convey the bewilderment of their characters when confronted by the immensity of the rainforest; they also register a lurking apprehension over the forest’s encroachment on an earlier, now derelict landscape. For it will turn out that the locations to which the protagonists travel in both novels are former sites of plantation agriculture; the ruins of sugar estates lie hidden beneath the hostile vegetation. The revelation of this buried history is closely connected to the supernatural phenomena Mittelholzer’s characters encounter. The jungle landscape is literally haunted by the violence of slavery and sugar monoculture. Thus, in Shadows, which centres on a utopian commune set up by the British missionary Reverend Harmston, the past clings to the present in the form of undead spectres that manifest amongst the commune’s inhabitants: All this jungle was cultivated land in the eighteenth century. Berbice was a flourishing colony. […] [But] there were bloody doings […] Two or three thousand slaves took charge of affairs practically overnight and the few hundred whites were slaughtered right and left. […] Later on, when the Government gained control again, the rebel leaders were burnt at the stake and broken on the wheel. Berkelhoost teems with passionate, cruel spirits. The whole neighbourhood bristles with the residual effluvia of past violence. (94)

The slave revolt Harmston refers to here is the Berbice rebellion of 1763. This event is also of central importance to My Bones, the plot of which turns on a cursed manuscript belonging to an eighteenth-century Dutch planter, Jan Peter Voorman, who died during the uprising. Voorman

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dabbled in magic and occultism and succeeded in using his flute to summon up a cluster of demons. After coming into contact with Voorman’s manuscript, the novel’s narrator, Milton Woodsley, and his friends, the Nevinson family, find themselves haunted by the planter, whose spirit remains tormented by the demons. These demons, described as the “Blacker Ones” (75) and “musky ectoplasms” (209), are explicitly associated with the rebel slaves, the “black wretches” (75) who attacked Voorman’s plantation. The Eerie qualities to be found in both novels, therefore, speak to the history of colonial anxieties around the potential collapse of plantation agriculture. That this history haunts these narratives suggests that it, too, continues to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. In Shadows, its significance is implicit: its allusive presence is a marker for the fact that, despite its utopian pretensions, the jungle commune replicates the logic of the plantation in certain key aspects, most notably as regards the particular forms of discipline it sanctions. In My Bones, the connection is more direct: the terrifying experiences of Milton and the Nevinsons can be read as a displaced expression of the anxiety they feel as middle-class Guyanese from “old coloured” families whose social position is tied to the continuation of existing class–colour hierarchies rooted in the plantation economy (52). Accompanying this anxiety is fear at the thought of what might replace the current order. Here, then, lies the significance of the Berbice rebellion, which, especially in My Bones, stands as a figure for a world in which the enslaved (or working classes) have seized power. The rebellion itself was a staggering achievement on the part of the insurgents, whose initial revolt in February 1763 rapidly spread to encompass some 4000 to 5000 slaves in what was then the Dutch colony of Berbice (Kars 2016: 39). For Sidney King (Eusi Kaywana), the rebellion should more properly be called a revolution, “perhaps the first proletarian revolution in the history of growing capitalism” and certainly one that “struck the first blow for Guyanese independence” (1966). The revolution “raged with literal fire and brimstone for some eleven months, dislodged the white ruling class, liberated vast territory, turned the whole colony upside down and finally collapsed after a glorious reign” (King 1966). During those eleven months, the colony exported no produce (Williams 1990: 140). The insurgents, meanwhile, mobilized food gardens upriver and sought to repurpose agricultural production for their own ends: as King puts it, “canes were being cut, provisions were being gathered and transportation of produce was being undertaken” (1966).

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The example offered by the Berbice revolution of a world turned upside down—of the collapse of cash-crop exports and of the masses asserting their independence—is perhaps the real terror lurking behind My Bones’ demonic creatures. Berbice and all that it implies is the “something beyond […], a dimension for which there is no word,” which Milton senses as being heralded by the “Blacker Ones” (222). And as is indicated by Milton’s Lovecraftian formulation here, it is with regard to this “beyond” that the Weird elements of Mittelholzer’s narrative assume most significance. China Miéville has suggested that one reason for the “revolutionary teratology” of Weird fiction is its concern to “impregnate the present with a bleak, unthinkable novum” (2009: 512–513). Certainly, the demons in My Bones represent just such a novum to the novel’s protagonists. Contemplating what it would mean to be overwhelmed by the demonic forces, Milton muses: “ours would be a transducting death; it would be a death fraught, paradoxically, with the definiteness of survival—a carrying over of ourselves into forms the very thought of which was so vile that we could not discuss it aloud but could only let it simmer within our shaken consciousness” (205). This fear of transduction into an alien form is implicitly, of course, a fear of becoming ‘like’ the black masses in one way or another. But it also registers, I want to suggest, a warped recognition of the possibility of a radically different social world, one linked to the values and history of the plot tradition. The novel’s description of the demons is crucial in this regard. “‘It was a horrible, slouching thing,’” explains Mrs Nevinson after encountering one such figure in her dreams: It had grey, wettish limbs—limbs like flippers—and there was a kind of fur on its body. And it had a squashed-in head with two spaces like eye-sockets. […] [T]his horrible creature squirmed and staggered about. […] It made queer scratching noises—or scraping noises—and it thumped about, and at one moment I saw something flicker like fire near it, and it seemed to break apart into slimy rags—but it came together again. (199–200)

This creature might easily have arisen from the pages of James or Lovecraft. Indeed, Milton explicitly references James’ Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary as an influence on the Nevinsons’ “mode of expression” when describing the demons (138). Given the specific context in which it appears, however, it is hard not to associate the creature with the horrors of the Caribbean plantation system. Its deformed physiology and weird amalgam

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of body parts (flippers, fur, limbs) allude to the violence done to the enslaved by their incorporation within the agro-industrial complex of the plantation (itself a grotesque amalgam of advanced technologies and backward labour practices). The demon’s “squashed-in” features and fragmented corporeality evoke the deformation of the slave’s labouring body, recalling, for example, the squashed or severed limbs typically suffered by those tasked with feeding cane into the sugar-mill’s rollers. By drawing the connection between the demons and the enslaved in this way, while at the same time directly referencing its Euro-American intertexts, Mittelholzer’s novel exposes the racist and classist ideologies embedded in the narratives of such ‘haute Weird’ authors as Lovecraft and James. Yet the demons in My Bones are more than just transplanted versions of their Weird Euro-American cousins. Mittelholzer’s descriptions also draw heavily on Guyanese folklore. The creatures are reminiscent of both the bakoo (a short, destructive, Poltergeist-like spirit) and the massacouraman (a river-dwelling spirit with Amerindian and African antecedents that has human, ape, and aquatic features). It is through this allusive connection to folklore that the plot tradition manifests itself in the narrative. Take the “slouching thing” encountered by Mrs. Nevinson: in its combination of the human, animal, and (via its association with the forest) vegetable, it disrupts the radical separation of the human and the nonhuman that is the corollary of capitalism’s reification of the natural conditions of production as alien property. This reifying logic is, of course, the logic of the plantation complex, which treats land as a mere commodity. What the demon’s uncategorizable admixture of human, animal, and vegetable recalls, by contrast, is the logic of the plot system, which draws on the noncapitalist sensibilities of African and Amerindian communities for whom, as Wynter puts it, “the land remained the Earth” and the human and nonhuman were experienced as a dialectical unity (1971: 99). The demon’s corporeality, moreover, suggests a link to the staple crops typically grown on the plots and provision grounds: yams, cassava, and sweet potatoes. These tuberous roots can reproduce vegetatively, a quality that has contributed to their becoming important figurative models for Caribbean history. Thus Nalo Hopkinson, who reads this history in relation to the regenerative properties of yams: “One thread of Caribbean history is of peoples who were forced to chop away their native languages, customs, and beliefs in an attempt to make them into ciphers without memory. But language, custom and belief are growing things. Chop them up and, like yams, they just sprout whole new plants” (2000: 1). Although rendered obscure and

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degraded by its mediation through the elite consciousness of Mittelholzer’s protagonists, what we might call an aesthetics of the yam can be detected in the account of the demons’ bodies—in the way that they “break apart” and “come together again” or dissolve into the surrounding “vegetable miasma” before recombining in new forms (92). The demons, then, can be understood as an expression—however distorted and allusive—of the “cultural guerrilla resistance to the plantation system” that was nourished by the alter/native socioecology of the plot system. The haunting possibility that My Bones stages but cannot confront directly, in other words, is that agro-food relations in the Caribbean might yet be transformed in line with the needs of the poor and the powerless. *** The spectre of radical change that My Bones raises indirectly through its Weird spectres is re-contained at the conclusion of the narrative, when the demons are exorcised by Milton and the Nevinsons in alliance with Voorman. This life- and soul-saving compact between the bourgeois protagonists and the ghostly planter suggests the economic continuities that exist between the era of plantation slavery and the novel’s present. From this perspective, the way that My Bones both sets in motion and seeks to contain anxieties around radical change speaks to the upheavals of the period in which it was written (although published in 1955, the novel was conceived and first drafted by Mittelholzer in the mid-1940s [Westmaas 2013: 36]). The middle decades of the twentieth century saw significant changes in Guyana’s agricultural sector as part of a wider process of economic modernization then underway across the Caribbean. The sugar industry was restructured: transnational corporations intensified the process of land and capital consolidation, while factories, transport links, and storage facilities were modernized. Time-and-motion studies were used to map and quantify labourers’ behaviour in order to rationalize work routines (Thomas 1984: 145). This increase in the exploitation of human and extra-human natures led to a rise in sugar yields. It was also met with resistance. Signal in this regard was the 1948 sugar workers’ strike, the proximate cause of which was the enforced change from the “cut-and-­ drop” method of harvesting sugarcane to the more demanding “cut-and-­ load” method (Spinner 1984: 26–27). In the ensuing dispute, police officers opened fire on striking workers at Plantation Enmore, killing five of them. In this context, My Bones’ allusive revisiting of earlier moments of

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worker resistance, in conjunction with the protagonists’ coded fears over threats to Guyana’s established class–colour hierarchy, can be read as an imaginative restaging of, and attempt to neutralize, contemporary conflicts between the plantation sector and the labouring classes. The mid-twentieth-century transformation of agricultural production in Guyana (and throughout the Caribbean) was part of a wider reorganization of the world-system that laid the foundations for the post-1945 global economic boom. In England, farming was undergoing a similar process of modernization. The 1947 Agriculture Act marked a “watershed in the history of British agriculture”: in its wake came an increasing movement towards cereal monocultures, widespread mechanization, and the growing use of processed animal feedstuffs, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers (Bowers and Cheshire 1983: 65, 2; Shoard 1980: 18–20). These trends accelerated in the late 1960s and 1970s, not least as a result of Britain’s entry into the EEC and adoption of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP encouraged the production of large grain-­livestock surpluses by offering “guaranteed prices and protectionism against imports […] for EEC-produced commodities” (Weis 2007: 66). Such policies need to be seen in the light of the crisis into which the world-economy had stumbled by the early 1970s, when increasing worker militancy and sharp increases in “world prices of food and other raw materials, led by oil” reduced global profit rates (Bowers and Cheshire 1983: 78). Capital’s response to this crisis included a renewed drive to secure expanded streams of relatively cheap food, energy, raw materials, and labour-power in an effort to drive down production costs. In England, the financial inducements to intensify agricultural production led to new rounds of enclosure. Wetlands were drained and swathes of moorland and downland were fenced off and converted to arable land, particularly rye grass monocultures (Shoard 1980). The impact had on the English countryside by these changes made itself felt in popular consciousness, where it resonated with a growing environmental awareness and what George McKay terms the “horti-­ counterculture of the 1960s” (2011: 106). As David Matless observes in his account of the shifting relationship between landscape and Englishness: During the late 1960s and 1970s a radical environmentalism evolves in part through the self-made landscape of free festivals, Albion Fairs and rediscovered ley lines […]. An emerging Green Englishness connected to a revitalization of movements for organic farming. From the 1963 publication of

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Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, documenting the effects of pesticides and herbicides on wildlife, agriculture is restyled as an enemy of landscape and nature. (2016: 378)

Such developments vitally informed a whole range of contemporary cultural movements. They provided the crucial context, for example, for the era’s folk revival (a “brief Indian summer and fruitful autumn,” as Rob Young puts it, “that lasted from around 1969 to 1972” [Young 2011: 6]). Albums such as Shirley and Dolly Collins’ Anthems in Eden (1969) and the Albion Country Band’s Battle of the Field (recorded in 1973) responded directly to the historical transformation of rural England, seeking to revive an earlier structure of feeling connected to a pre-industrial agricultural calendar. Commenting on the relationship between the fluctuating fortunes of folk music and struggles over the land, Shirley Collins has observed: “It’s all bound up with history as well, after the Enclosures Act, when people lost all their grazing rights, their common land, their gardens; and with the move from the land, after the wars, when industrialism came in and machines came into the farm” (qtd. in Young 2011: 211). This history can be detected, too, albeit in a more tangential way, in Fairport Convention’s seminal Liege and Lief (1969). The “weirdness” of this album, in the words of bandmember Ashley Hutchings, comes from its efforts to summon up a mythical English landscape, one connected to an equally mythologized folk-memory of Anglo-Saxon ritual tradition. The LP’s gatefold sleeve features photos and engravings of folk customs such as the Padstow Obby Oss and pace-egging, while the opening track’s injunction to “all ye rolling minstrels” to “rouse the spirit of the earth” is answered by the album’s pulsing, dynamic reworkings of traditional ballads like “Tam Lin.” Seen in relation to the ongoing transformation of rural England, the band’s combination of folk materials with contemporary, electrified rock arrangements registers the confrontation between the forces of capitalist modernization and an alternative vision of the countryside rooted in a pre-capitalist relationship to the land and drawing on the myth of Anglo-Saxon freedom and equality. A related, if differently inflected, staging of the confrontation between the modern and the archaic is to be found in David Rudkin’s remarkable first play Afore Night Come (1962). Anticipating many of the concerns around food production that would become central to the horti-­ counterculture, Rudkin’s work is set in a Black Country pear orchard and focuses on the murderous antipathy shown by a group of labourers

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towards two newcomers: Roche, an itinerant Irishman, and Larry, a university student. The play climaxes with the ritual mutilation and decapitation of Roche in what is, it seems, only the most recent in a sequence of quasi-sacrificial killings carried out by the labourers. As this gruesome rite is enacted, the crop-spraying helicopter from Pest Control—a menacing background presence throughout the play—douses the stage with pesticide. The dangers associated with the helicopter’s activities are mentioned several times in the drama. “Didn’t ought to spray when the blokes’m a-picking,” says the foreman, Spens, at one point. “Make them go all bald. Make all their hair come out. Make them so’s they won’t get no babbies” (44). The theme of pesticide-induced infertility is reinforced by the labourer Ginger, whose inability to have children is mocked by Spens, and who after the murder of Roche “appears to drink the blood from the severed head as a potential cure for his sterility” (Rabey 1998: 19). The play’s intertwining of the toxic consequences of the post-1947 intensification of farming with the labourers’ archaic rites suggests the uneven and combined quality of the renewed modernization of the countryside, as well as the violence done to human and nonhuman natures by the contemporary revolution in agro-food relations. But we might also read the climactic ritual execution as the folkloric idiom through which the labourers attempt to make sense of and exert some form of control over the impact of this revolution on their work routines. Moreover, in the element of the Weird it introduces into the play’s social realism, the labourers’ archaic rite can be grasped, paradoxically, as a presentiment of the future—of the dystopian novum that is late-capitalist agriculture, the baleful consequences of which are evident everywhere today, from global soil degradation to species extinction (both of which are inseparable from the industrial use of pesticide). The seam of Weird folk horror that surfaces in Afore Night Comes makes it something of a forerunner to the groundswell of British folk horror films and TV shows that appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s.8 Indeed, several of Rudkin’s later works for TV are often categorized under the folk horror rubric. His 1987 TV play White Lady, for example, revisits the idea of strange, seemingly archaic forces erupting into the contemporary landscape. Here, however, these forces are more obviously supernatural than in Afore Night Come, yet also more directly associated with the violence of modern agriculture. The drama focuses on a farmer, Gil, who is estranged from his wife and struggling to bring up his two daughters, Amy and Tess. They live on a ramshackle farm, where Gil pursues a small-scale,

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self-­ sufficient mode of agriculture at odds with the prevailing trend towards intensification and mechanization (he still cuts his grass by hand, for example). From the start, the play intercuts shots of the farmhouse and of Gil at work with slides of medical photographs, graphs, and data documenting the effect of pesticides on various animals, fruit, and vegetables. These references to the devastating repercussions of the post-war revolution in farming are amplified by the presentation of the land encircling Gil’s property. His farmhouse stands amidst a sea of cereal monoculture and fruit plantations. These belong to some unseen owner, whose presence is signalled only by Gil’s repeated rebuke to his daughters not to stray on to “people’s land.” The implication is that the surrounding crops have been treated with pesticides (in one scene, endless lines of fruit trees are shown from the perspective of a helicopter flying overhead, recalling the crop-spraying activities of Pest Control in Afore Night Come). It is in this context that the titular figure of the White Lady appears. An ethereal, scythe-carrying apparition, she at first appears to represent a kind of folkloric embodiment of earthly fertility and agricultural abundance, before being revealed as the personification of the deathly grip of modern industrial farming techniques. Tempting Amy and Tess with lavish piles of fruit and vegetables, set atop cloth-covered barrels, she tells the girls that she will take them to her “planet of light” and leave changelings in their place. The camera then pans to the piles of food and we see that the barrels they sit on contain hazardous chemicals. “Each time you have eaten,” intones the White Lady, “I have kissed you. Each time you have breathed. All children are mine now. Say goodbye to the earth.” More than just a reference to the children’s impending departure from this reality, the White Lady’s words are an obvious allusion to the long-term toxification of bodies and landscapes caused by pesticide use. Far more explicitly than in the ritualistic killings of Afore Night Come, therefore, White Lady casts the violence associated with the contemporary revolution in agro-food relations in a folkloric idiom. In so doing, it not only underscores the uneven and jarring experience of this revolution, but also suggests its continuity within a longer historical process, that of the ongoing if spasmodic capitalization of the countryside. Indeed, the White Lady calls direct attention to the legacy of enclosure and the loss of the commons. When asked by Amy and Tess whether their father can accompany them to the planet of light, the White Lady dismisses Gil as a “sheep of a man.” “Once, long ago, he lost the land he lived from,” she declares. “Next he lost his country. Now, he is losing the earth.” These lines seem

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to offer a compressed history not so much of Gil’s individual experience, but of the experience of rural populations over the longue durée: from the disappearance of common land to the increasing de-nationalization of farming with the rise of global agribusiness to the destruction of the earth itself as a result of overexploitation. White Lady appeared at a time when the impact of the new enclosures associated with the post-war transformation of British agriculture had become the subject of popular analysis (Marion Shoard’s The Theft of the Countryside and Richard Mabey’s The Common Ground were both published in 1980, for example). By summoning the spectre of the historic enclosure of the English countryside, White Lady underscores the periodicity of discommoning and its centrality to capitalism’s repeated efforts to overcome the barriers to profit it creates for itself. Yet if the history of enclosure continues to haunt the present, so too does the legacy of the commons. Gil might be marginal, failing, and deprived of his future (his children) by capitalist agribusiness (the White Lady). Nevertheless, his farm stands as a figure for a relationship to the land different to that which would, in the words of another Rudkin character (Arne, from the magisterial Penda’s Fen), “pillage our earth, ransack it, drain it dry for quick gain to hand on nothing but dust to the children of tomorrow.” A similar re-­ emphasis on the legacies of plot and plantation is evident in the Caribbean following the neoliberal restructuring of agriculture. Although there is not space to pursue the comparison further here, I want to conclude by returning to Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics and, specifically, to her poem “The Knot Garden.” For the latter underlines the new rounds of enclosure and rationalized landscapes that come with the transformation of agro-food relations under the aegis of the money-lending institutions of late capitalism: “Only last week as our leader left / for another IMF meeting, he ordered / the hacking out of paths and / ditches, the cutting of swaths / to separate out flowers / from weeds, woods from trees.” But somebody, continues Senior, “didn’t get it right” since “what goes on in mixed / farming is actually quite hard / to envision since so many things / propagate underground, by / division” (2005: 88). Here, the plot-­ based horticulture of “mixed farming” and the botanic qualities of staple crops such as yams are set in opposition to the plantation logic that underpins the IMF’s policy prescriptions for country’s like Senior’s Jamaica (namely, market liberalization and increased export orientation). Indeed, in an echo of the connections we have seen throughout this chapter between aesthetic, horticultural, and political plots, the intercropped

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vegetation Senior describes in entangled, enjambed lines emerges as the literal ground of refusal to the “leader” who acts as the handmaiden of capitalist imperialism: “the fertilized soil / […] burst into new and twisted growth / of such profusion by the time / he returns, it proves / too impenetrable for landing” (89).

Notes 1. Those changes (enclosure, the capitalization of agriculture, and so forth) were occurring across the British Isles (think, for instance, of the Highland Clearances in Scotland). But since my focus in this chapter is on English cultural texts (alongside Caribbean material), I will refer specifically to England when discussing historical processes and events. 2. The term ‘waste’ (as a type of common land) is potentially misleading: as Brett Christophers explains, such land “was not necessarily waste or wasted in the sense with which we are familiar, as in valueless and unused, respectively; it was used in many socially and economically productive ways, such as for gathering firewood or grazing animals, and it was integral as common-­ fields to the self-provisioning, common-right peasant economy of the British countryside” (2019: 80). In this connection, it is worth emphasizing that the term ‘commons’ is also potentially misleading. Although “sometimes used to denote communal forms of landownership (land held in common),” the commons in England were “typically not communally owned. They were always mostly privately owned. What were ‘common’ were instead the rights to land, specifically to access and to take or use part of a piece of land or of its produce. And those who enjoyed or exercised these rights were ‘commoners’” (Christophers 2019: 80). 3. On the plantation as a death-world—as a world in which “death served as the principal arena of social life and gave rise to its customs”—see Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden (2008: 59). 4. The rhyme to which Neeson refers here is the following (or some variant thereof): “The law locks up the man or woman / Who steals the goose from off the common / But leaves the greater villain loose / Who steals the common from the goose.” 5. On the use of animal costumes in Anglo-Saxon ritual, see Hutton (1991: 329). 6. In his discussion of the planters’ actions, Walter Rodney draws the connection with the processes of discommoning underway on the other side of the Atlantic: “The measures of victimization had something in common with those fashioned at an earlier epoch by landed proprietors in Europe, who

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were making the transition from feudalism to capitalism by depriving the farmer serfs of their customary rights to the land” (1981: 60). 7. All of the works mentioned here are set in the Caribbean, with the exception of A Tinkling in the Twilight, which is set in England. 8. This wave of folk horror productions is best emblematized by the appearance of the “unholy trinity” of films Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973) (Scovell 2017: 13).

Works Cited Adamson, Alan H. 1972. Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904. New Haven: Yale UP. Bowers, J.K., and Paul Cheshire. 1983. Agriculture, the Countryside, and Land Use. London: Methuen. Brathwaite, Kamau. 2003. Namsetoura and the Companion Stranger. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 1 (1): 1–83. ———. 2005. In Joyelle McSweeney, “Poetics, Revelations, and Catastrophes: An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite”, Rain Taxi Online Edition, Autumn. Brown, Vincent. 2008. The Reaper’s Garden. Harvard UP. Cazzola, Matilde. 2018. ‘All shall be happy by land and by sea’: Thomas Spence as an Atlantic Thinker. Atlantic Studies 15 (4): 431–450. Chase, Malcolm. 2010. The People’s Farm. London: Breviary Stuff Publications. Christophers, Brett. 2019. The New Enclosures. London: Verso. Clare, John. 2004. Major Works. Oxford UP. Cox, Juanita. 2018. Introduction. In Creole Chips and Other Writings, ed. Juanita Cox, 7–15. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Dallas, Robert C. 1803. The History of the Maroons. Longman and Rees. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2011. Yams, Roots, and Rot: Allegories of the Provision Grounds. Small Axe 34: 58–75. Fairport Convention. 1969. Liege and Lief. Island. Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books. Gilkes, Michael. 1995. Edgar Mittelholzer. In West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King, 2nd ed., 127–138. London: Macmillan Education. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities. In Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King, 41–68. University of Minneapolis Press. Hill, Christopher. 1997. Puritanism and Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hopkinson, Nalo. 2000. membah. In Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root, ed. Nalo Hopkinson, 1. Vermont: Invisible Cities Press. Hutton, Ronald. 1991. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Jones, Daisy. 2015. Meet Gaika, Electronic Music’s Answer to Basquiat. https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/28417/1/meet-­g aika­electronic-­music-­s-­answer-­to-­basquiat. Kars, Marjoleine. 2016. Dodging Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763. The American Historical Review 121 (1): 39–69. King, Sidney. 1966. A Birth of Freedom. New World Quarterly, Guyana Independence Issue: 22–27. Linebaugh, Peter. 2008. The Magna Carta Manifesto. University of California Press. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra. Boston: Beacon Press. Matless, David. 2016. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books. McCalman, Iain. 1986. Anti-Slavery and Ultra-Radicalism in Early Nineteenth-­ Century England: The Case of Robert Wedderburn. Slavery and Abolition 7 (2): 99–117. McKay, George. 2011. Radical Gardening. London: Frances Lincoln Ltd. McTair, Roger. 2000. Just a Lark (or The Crypt of Matthew Ashdown). In Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root, ed. Nalo Hopkinson. Vermont: Invisible Cities Press. Miéville, China. 2009. Weird Fiction. In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould et al., 510–515. London: Routledge. Mintz, Sidney. 1985. From Plantations for Peasantries in the Caribbean. In Caribbean Contours, ed S.  Mintz and S.  Price. 127–53. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Mittelholzer, Edgar. 2010. Shadows Move Among Them. Leeds: Peepal Tree. ———. 2015. My Bones and My Flute. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Moore, D.C. 2017. Common. London: Bloomsbury. Neeson, J.M. 1993. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820. Cambridge UP. Rabey, Davis I. 1998. David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience: An Expository Study of His Drama 1959–1994. London: Routleddge. Rice, Alan. 2003. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum. Rickword, Edgell, and Jack Lindsay. 1978 [1939]. “On English Freedom.” Literature in Society: Essays and Opinions (II): 1931–1978. By Edgell Rickword. Manchester: Carcanet. 123–132. Rodney, Walter. 1981. A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1891–1905. London: Heinemann. Rosenman, Ellen. 2012. On Enclosure Acts and the Commons. http://www. branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=ellen-­r osenman-­o n-­e nclosure-­a cts-­a nd-­ the-­commons. Rudkin, David. 1974. Penda’s Fen. BBC, March 21. ———. 1987. White Lady. BBC, August 26. ———. 2001. Afore Night Come. London: Oberon Books.

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Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Senior, Olive. 2005. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: Insomniac Press. Shapiro, Stephen. 2019. Woke Weird and Decolonial Television. Unpublished Essay. Shoard, Marion. 1980. The Theft of the Countryside. London: Temple Smith. Spinner, Thomas. 1984. A Political and Social History of Guyana, 1945–1983. Boulder: Westview Press. Thomas, Clive Y. 1984. Plantations, Peasants, and State. University of California Press. Weis, Tony. 2001. Contradictions and Change in Jamaica. Capitalism Nature Socialism 12 (2): 85–131. ———. 2007. The Global Food Economy. London: Zed Books. Westmaas, Juanita Anne. 2013. Edgar Mittelholzer (1909–1965) and the Shaping of His Novels. Dissertation, University of Birmingham. Williams, Brackette F. 1990. Dutchman Ghosts and the History Mystery: Ritual, Colonizer, and Colonized Interpretations of the 1763 Berbice Slave Rebellion. Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (2): 133–165. Wynter, Sylvia. 1971. Novel and History, Plot and Plantation. Savacou 5: 95–102. Young, Rob. 2011. Electric Eden. London: Faber and Faber.

PART II

Cash-Crops and Agricultural Monarchs

CHAPTER 5

Laurie Lee in Cyprus: Scripting Propaganda, Productivity, and Peasant Labour Chris Campbell

English writer Laurie Lee opens his short account of filming in Cyprus by contrasting an exhausted, autumnal London with the promise of Mediterranean sun: One rather dark and grimy day, when the war had been on six years and the faces of everyone had a jaundiced look, dry and yellow, like bits of old leaves, I walked into a pub and saw Ralph Keene. He was simmering with some secret he longed to reveal, and at last it came out. “I’m going to Cyprus to make a film,” he said. “Aren’t I lucky?” (Lee 1947: 1)

By dint of his previous visit to the island, and through a good deal of cajoling, Lee managed to get himself hired as script writer working alongside Keene. As he explains, the original idea had come from the then Governor of Cyprus, Charles Campbell Woolley, via the Colonial Office and Ministry

C. Campbell (*) Department of English & Film, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_5

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of Information. Lee’s and Keene’s endeavours were, then, to result in a striking example of that well-known genre: the colonial propaganda documentary: It was a journey to find a film about a people as yet un-filmed. A people of whom there was a great deal to say, but of whom a great deal must be left unsaid. […] We had to make a film about an island which was a Crown Colony, and we had to show some of the benefits which Colonial Government bestows. A natural aim for an official film: but it meant that much that was in itself fascinating and significant had to be ignored. (1–2)

Cyprus is an Island premiered at the Curzon Cinema in London, in 1946. It had been shot on location in 1945, was directed by Keene, narrated by Valentine Dyall, and produced by Keene’s Greenpark Productions. Lee and Keene then co-authored the account of the film’s creation, We Made a Film in Cyprus, which was published in 1947. Lee’s introduction to the project is revealing in a number of ways. It demonstrates that the administration saw its agricultural policy in Cyprus as the exemplification of its colonial mission. Keene’s and Lee’s film, speaking to the intensification of productivity through the re-orienting of grazing, farming, irrigation, and crop production, is testament to the imperial-capitalist drive to development. That this process entailed the mass re-ordering of lives, livelihoods, and landscapes during the Second World War reveals that agro-food cultivation on the island was thoroughly enmeshed in relations of class, colonial, gendered, and racialized power. The representations of the Cypriot subject can be seen here as a site of ideological struggle: the power relations of agricultural production and the world-food-system are manifested in a particularly striking way in the film’s figuration of what it presents as the various ‘native’ characteristics of the peasantry—virtuous rusticism, inscrutability, irascibility—all of which are in need of various forms of capitalist instruction. This is, of course, standard grist to the mill of the imperial imaginary, and as such, the film provides a useful case-study through which to better understand the discursive strategies of imperialism in the context of the violent rationalization of Cyprus’s agricultural system. Indeed, with its focus on the lives of peasant families and transformations in agricultural practices, it is possible to view the colonially mandated documentary as operating across the scales of capitalist-imperialist notions of development. Cyprus is an Island suggests the moral improvement of the native colonial subject as a

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co-constitutive element of the programme of political development projects, which sought to expand and legitimize new markets in order to ensure maximum yield from colonial possessions. The history of Cyprus is instructive to scholars interested in cultural registrations of the world-food-system for two reasons. First, because as a case-study Cyprus remains somewhat peripheral to mainstream studies of empire, at least within established circuits of inquiry for postcolonial literary studies.1 As such, it offers an acute angle on established readings of the cross-cultures of empire, providing a localized Mediterranean modality through which to consider the full range “of colonial and postcolonial problematics: race, religion, ethnicity, nationhood, sub-nationhood, socialist politics, finance capital, imperialism, militarization, and regional overdetermination” (Connery and Seth 2006). To this list, taken from the foreword to the Cyprus special issue of Postcolonial Studies, we might usefully add the issue of land laws, agro-food production, and the disaggregation of peasant foodways. These particular additional factors can be brought into clearer focus through a world-cultural approach to food regime analysis. As Philip McMichael has outlined, critical food regime perspectives have historicized the global food system, “problematising linear representations of agricultural modernisation, […] conceptualising key historical contradictions in particular food regimes that produce crisis, transformation and transition” (2009: 14). For materialist cultural critics such systemic readings of the world-food-system deepen understandings of the role of both food and agriculture in processes of global capital accumulation, and open up new ways to consider how cultural texts might stabilize and underpin, or contest and even resist the reconfigurations in agricultural and food production and circulation. The film Cyprus Is an Island offers us the chance to consider the cultural registration of these reconfigurations in a colonial territory undergoing seismic regional transformation at what can be understood as the interstices of two distinct, if overlapping, food regimes. Cyprus in the 1940s straddles critical designations of the first and second global food regimes. The first food regime, often dated from 1870 to 1914, coincided with the high-tide of the European colonial projects and Britain’s hegemony over the world-economy (McMichael 2013). The second, the “surplus food regime” dated by Harriet Friedmann from 1945 to 1973, emerged during the period of US hegemony over the world-­ economy and was tied to the rollout of various developmentalist policies

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(Friedmann 1993). It is certainly easy to see how the enforcement of agricultural policy during the war years on Cyprus fits the paradigm of the first “colonial project” food regime upon which British claims to be the ‘workshop of the world’ rested (McMichael 2009, 141). As Henry Bernstein outlines, this regime typically concentrated on: first, imports of “cheap food” (wheat and meat) from colonial settler states to underwrite industrial growth in the European core; and second, colonial exports of tropical or localized specialist goods (Bernstein 2015: 5). The semi-peripheral status of Cyprus meant that it could fulfil both of these demands. But the transformations in agro-food production that Cyprus is an Island depicts and actively promotes also gesture towards the drive to increase yields typical of the second, “surplus food regime.” The latter’s focus on overproduction led to the re-routing of food flows—via aid schemes and surplus ‘dumping’—from the capitalist core to the periphery. Exemplifying a localized, East Mediterranean modality of imperial subjugation, the case of Cyprus during the war serves therefore as something of a hangover from the first global regime and a prefiguration of, or point of transition into, the second. Furthermore, food regime analysis of the drive to increase agricultural production can throw new light on longstanding scholarly debates over the ‘value’ of Cyprus as a colonial possession. Historians have debated all aspects of the perceived value of the island to the British. The strategic value of its geopolitical position may well have been as overplayed as its supposed commercial value.2 Whatever strategic value there had been in 1878 was quickly eroded once the British occupied Egypt in 1882, and the attempts to gain ‘added value’ from the island were largely limited to trying to expand market opportunities via agriculture and the small industrial mining sector. There was also the cultural appeal of Hellenic classical legacy to consider. This had whetted the appetites of British politicians and may have acted as an amplifier to calls to restore the Island’s past riches. As Andrekos Varnava explains, the British may well have come to see Cyprus as a Tory folly or an “inconsequential possession,” but nevertheless the estimation of Cyprus’s future value was “based on a mythologised distant past” (2009: 20). Cyprus is an Island certainly indulges in this act of imperial mythologizing. Its opening sequence draws an explicit line of connection between the mythic past of Cyprus and the contemporary quest for renewed productivity; imagining a return to former glories which was to be delivered by the forces of benign British progressivism.

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Cyprus is an Island and its representation of issues of agriculture and the peasantry sought to justify colonial-capitalist development in the waning years of the British-centred world-economy. The putative aim of the film, to talk up the value of Cypriot development and production of key commodities, coincides with a prominent plot strand aimed at the moral re-education of a recalcitrant and rebellious sector of the native population. Lee’s journal of the film-making process, read alongside the documentary itself, is worth closer examination, not least because it is here that he provides a sense of his deep ambivalence at the remit of his employment. The published account, “Scripting the Film,” which sits alongside Keene’s “Filming the Script” in the volume We made a Film in Cyprus, acts as something of a counterweight to the plot trajectory of the film itself by documenting things that fall outside the camera’s field of vision and providing a purview which frequently runs counter to or complicates an understanding of the principle aims of the colonial administration. Taken together as a composite ‘world-cultural text,’ the film and the book (and Lee’s research notebooks for both) provide a paradigm for how cultural forms can promote both a stabilization of, or overt justification for, the periodic reconfiguration of agricultural production and circulation of food and commodities, while at the same time revealing strains of resistance and contestation to the upheavals it entailed. *** The mechanism by which the British hoped to free up the ‘added value’ of Cyprus came via sizeable grants under the auspices of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, May 1940 (and a later act of 1945). From 1941 until March 1946, the island received money amounting to over £720,000, which was to be spent, it was stipulated, mainly on agricultural and irrigation schemes, afforestation and medicine (Hill 1952: 484; Panteli 1990: 134). In Lee’s small, black leather-bound notebook, the research notes he took while in Cyprus detail the ways in which such grants, while providing the impetus for water supply schemes, also extracted a significant contribution from affected villages themselves: water    small dams built to irrigate 1 to 5 miles work financed originally under Colonial Development and Welfare Act Now villagers contribute either in cash or work. (BL Add. MS. 88936/2/162)

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In this way we can see Lee’s work as mediating the progressive developmentalist narrative of the colonial administration and offering a glimpse of the strings that were attached—the reorganized labour practices service colonial policy, and a financial burden is passed on to those Cypriots who might least be able to afford it. In this mode, Lee’s notes speak to an understanding of the long history of economic underdevelopment of Cyprus under Ottoman and then British rule. As Yiannos Katsourides has shown, while certain infrastructural improvements were undertaken, British colonialism was responsible for arresting the development of a Cypriot working class and for the hindrance of smooth economic development (2014a: 20). After the financial crisis of 1929–1933, British attempts to “improve the peasantry’s living and working conditions” were subordinated to the primary concern of implementing colonial policy so as to increase the island’s productive capacities, as well as achieving a “secondary target” of weakening the peasantry’s “political and economic dependency on the nationalist elites and the clergy” (2014a: 28). Cyprus is an Island dramatizes the enforcement of new colonial laws and the disciplining of instances of localized peasant action that opposed the afforestation and agricultural rationalization of the British and seeks to overwrite the reality of the political tensions that were fomenting in the 1940s. The film’s attempt to manage and contain, in filmic narrative form, the forces of social and political discontent is indicative of official anxieties at the time: the war-years were experienced as a crucial period of transition between the labour rebellions of the 1930s and the nascent anti-colonial ethno-nationalism that would erupt in the 1950s. As script writer, Lee’s task was to navigate the politics of narrating the official line, which promised to ameliorate the lives and livelihoods of Cypriots and to deliver people from destitution. It is clear that this story often conflicted with the more overt framework within which the filmmakers had to operate. As well as the practical complications of undertaking a script and shooting in constrained time, the director Ralph Keene describes the significant misgivings about the narrative framing of his film. Both he and Lee objected in particular to the imposition of the concluding sequence, which to their minds compromised the more compelling aspects of their narrative: It now only remained to fill in the framework of the central story—an introductory sequence, which traced the history of Cyprus in terms of its ancient monuments, and a montage of the island’s products and industries to round

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off the film. This latter both Laurie and I regretted; we felt it had no place in an otherwise simple agricultural story. But the colonial authorities insisted. (Keene 1947: 72)

The final minutes of the film turn from a consideration of the dynamics of village life to the “substance” of the island. These closing shots embed the production of cash-crop agriculture (including food and non-food products) within specific areas of the island: timber from the Troödos and Psokas; lemons and oranges from Famagusta, Lefka and Lapithos; wine and spirits from the vineyards of Stroumbi and Limassol; tobacco, cigarettes from the factories of Nicosia and Larnaca; and “silk cocoons to be spun into fine thread on the filatures of Paphos” (28:00–29:25). The sequence is an encomium to the wealth-generating energy of capitalist enterprise and the products of empire. It plays all too obviously on the idea of a fruitful island, with images of industrious Cypriot labourers in the field and the factory turning the natural wealth of the island into viable commodities under the guiding hand of British stewardship. Most obviously, the focus of these closing minutes exemplifies the economic necessity, felt by the British, to boost export trade, which had been severely disrupted by the war. Lee’s own written observations of the unharvested citrus groves highlights as much: “neglected lemon trees stood loaded with dragging fruit […]. The fallen fruit lay in golden drifts across the gardens and upon the roads. Nobody wanted it, for this was the surplus, grown for export, and war had ruined the trade” (1947: 9). Valentine Dyall’s voiceover foregrounds in the final minutes that “Cyprus is an Island that feeds on itself,” but this catalogue works to showcase commodity production as much as a self-sustaining island food system. Cyprus in the final apprehension of the film, then, is an island geared up to be an export economy, experiencing the disproportionate transfer of not only surplus-value but also ecological resources, including biophysical matter, soil nutrients, and human energy leached out from the island through its specialized export crops. At this point I want to track back from the film’s conclusion to its opening, which projects an orientalist sense of mythic time, rather than the sense of capitalist modernity through dynamic productivity and economic renewal that the conclusion signals. Ever-present but overlooked, it is the life and labour of the Cypriot peasant that is the first significant close focus of the film. A close-up shot rests on a pair of well-worn, empty shoes on the ground, while the narration speaks to the convoluted imperial history

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of the island: “Cyprus is like a ring that has passed from hand to hand of changing Empires. Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Venetian and Ottoman” (4:53). With the announcement of the arrival of the British, black-stockinged feet are shown slipping into the shoes and the Cypriot rustic is, finally, brought out of timelessness and into modernity, achieving mobility and, we are led to believe, recognition and representation: “Cyprus is now an island of the British Commonwealth, and these are her people” (5:10). The notion of an agrarian underclass cast aside by a long history of invasion and subjection finally being restored to representation is, of course, political mis-recognition by cinematic sleight of hand. Despite the epic sweep of history that the narrator intones, what emerges in a viewing of the film is the resolutely and deliberately de-historicized, depoliticized figuration of the peasantry. Cyprus is an Island is, as Cihat Arınç has contended, “a 1946 documentary film that appears as a colonial film travelogue, a stereotypical example of the British colonial film culture in which the lived experiences of the colonised is rendered inaudible, invisible, or purely absent” (2015: 237). While the Greek Cypriots are fixed in particular subject positions, the Turkish Cypriots are virtually written out of the film altogether, despite Lee’s journal showing that he and Keene engaged with members of all communities during the writing and filming process. This act of silencing (neither Turkish nor Greek Cypriots are ever interviewed and even the dramatization sequences are short on spoken dialogue) accentuates the ‘history from the top-down’ focalization of the film. In this sequence the sweeping long, pan and mix shots of the camera combine with the bombastic voice-over narration detailing previous invading kings, colonializing forces, and mythological fable.3 The film, then, participates in a much longer tradition of over-excited cultural Hellenism from British visitors. Travelers to the island, along with many officials and administrators, have frequently preferred to see Cyprus as a playground for Aphrodite, making explicitly gendered and racialized cases for colonial control of a sensuous and unruly and bewitching possession (Arınç: 241 and Varnava: 57–58). Grafted on to the grand narrative of myth and history, the notion of the marginalized, inscrutable Cypriot as a victim of a history of neglect is a useful one, for the film purports to rescue the peasantry from the very position it is helping to perpetuate. Even if economically dispossessed, the labouring classes and the peasantry of Cyprus had been far from inscrutable and had refused to be silenced. The film was made against the backdrop of a significant history of working people’s resistance to the

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depredations of colonial rule, and with full awareness of the recent reality of industrial and agricultural labourers’ increasingly effective political organization. Just over a decade earlier, the burning of Government House in Nicosia on 21 October 1931 had started an anti-colonial rebellion (Octovriana) that had swept across the island. This uprising resulted in what Robert Holland has described as “the most humiliating blow sustained by the British in any of their Crown Colonies in the years between the two world wars” (1998: 4–5). It was a blow to prestige from which the administration would never fully recover. And, while the original energies of the protest had been directed in the cause of enosis, they soon spilled over into wider acts of uprising against British rule.4 Indeed, the red-sky nights of the Octovriana were fueled in part by anger at the collapse in prices of agricultural products as a result of the depression: the fallout from this collapse had further immiserated a class of peasants, three-­ quarters of whom were already heavily indebted (Panayiotopoulos 1999: 36). By the time Lee is cracking walnuts with Governor Woolley in the replacement Government house in 1945, the draconian anti-union laws which had been the predictable colonial response following the uprising, had recently been repealed. In addition, the communist party AKEL (Progressive Party of the Working People), newly formed in 1941 and strongly supportive of worker and peasant rights, had started to make effective inroads into the countryside, forming a network of peasant unions, which would result in the Union of Cypriot Agriculturalists (Peristianis 2006: 250). A standout example of the insurgent anti-colonial peasantry can be found in the figure of HajiMatheos HajiNikolas, an autodidact farmer, trade unionist, and political spokesperson from the Morphou area who, after the Octovriana disturbances, had been returned to Argaki and confined for a period by the authorities. In his pioneering study, Peter Loizos discusses how, by 1945, HajiMatheos had published a pamphlet, The Agrarian Class in Cyprus, in which he argues for political solidarity between Christian and Muslim peasants in the face of a parasitic professional class and its colonial overseers. The text articulates the dangers of a blinkered pursuit of enosis, which was led by profiteers and diverts energy and funds away from the “bread-and-olives” issues of livelihood and wages. HajiMatheos also puts the case for a unified front of agrarian workers who might create a “closed economy” which supported local production in order to forestall “the total deprivation” of Cypriot society (Loizos 2006: 634). As a political figure, HajiMatheos achieved only some

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small success and recognition; he was part of the newly emerging communist agrarian movement and held office for a time after AKEL’s electoral successes in 1943 and 1946. However, as Loizos puts it, he was a transitional figure and “his was an unusual voice,” while his pamphlet— “one man’s pro-poor, pro-ruralist manifesto”—captured a time of flux (2006: 634). (31). Taking on board the singularity of the case of HajiMatheos, his individualized “transitional” position can nevertheless be understood as enmeshed within larger social transformations of the time, transformations which saw the gradual decline of elements of the agrarian class and the widening of political consciousness. During the period of HajiMatheos’s emergence, between the two world wars, Katsourides explains how “a new wave of landless peasants emerged that, together with the poor labourers in the towns, comprised a considerable and vital mass of people that could be referred to as working class” (2014a: 31). In contradistinction to acknowledging the increasing politicization of the peasantry and the wider class dynamics of the agrarian change being brought about, Cyprus is an Island portrays a vision of rural labour and primitive social systems which seemed innately predisposed to be mobilized in the service of the imperial project of progress. This was to be progress engendered by careful colonial stewardship of nature and thorough, efficient re-organization of labour power. In this sense, Keene’s documentary finds itself in step with other visual and literary cultural forms circulating around the island at the time. Rita Severis has demonstrated the ways in which the colonial administration brought pressure to bear on artists and writers in Cyprus during the 1940s and 1950s, sometimes overtly promoting, at other times tacitly supporting, aesthetic practices which might sculpt a notion of Cypriot identity for its own ends (2006: 396). In so doing, and in providing a paradoxical ideological countercurrent to the philhellenism that had served to justify the acquisition of the “inconsequential possession,” the colonial authorities hoped to counter the drive for enosis from Greek Cypriots and diffuse political tensions. The notion of finding the ‘eternal Cypriot’ through culture was an extension of a long-held colonial desire to draw out into the public eye an invisible body of Cypriots who might be pro-British, but would also be anti-enosis. As historians have noted, this was a thorny and hubristic endeavour for a whole host of reasons, not least that this was an imagined demographic that may never have really existed at all (Kelling 1990: 55; Assos 2018: 37; Michael 2009: 18).

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Cyprus is an Island exemplifies aspects of the creation of the ‘eternal Cypriot’ most obviously through the image of the long-unshod peasant now ready for work. But as the thread of this imagined subject continues and serves as a fertile ground for Lee’s plot, the story moves on to a depiction of the mountain villages of the island. These are viewed as post-­ lapsarian communities, fallen (economically, morally) into unproductive ruin and the colonial cultural imperative to find or create the ‘eternal Cypriot’ by re-organizing patterns of life and labour is explicit: Walking back from the school, among litter of rocks and thorns, I looked in at several cottages. They were museums of poverty; single rooms crowded with old beds, floors of earth crawling with ants, and all food hung from the ceiling against the rats […] For the lives of these shepherds were changing the clearing of their flocks from the forest had left their village with a sinister rootless air. Some of the men had settled down to new work as forester or charcoal burners. But the only hope for the majority lay in farming, and there was no farmland in the hill. The village was in fact dead, and its last days had come. The Government was planning to move all the families to a lowland site on the western coast, where they would be given fields and taught to farm. Such a thing had not happened in Cyprus before and it would be a tricky venture. (Lee 1947: 36–37)

While the final film focusses on moral deficiency, here, by contrast, Lee’s prose offers a glimpse of the desperate poverty occasioned by economic deprivation and official neglect. Lee signals, in his equivocation at the end of the paragraph, that the mandated process of forcible relocation would have human costs, which the script itself would never be able to acknowledge. For the film’s backers, such depictions of rural poverty served to further the claims that development and relocation would restore pride and productivity to the lives of Cypriots, ‘eternal’ or otherwise. Lee’s writing offers a counterpoint to these claims, demonstrating awareness of the large-scale rural exodus and ongoing expropriation that was instigated. To follow Henry Bernstein’s formulation, the clearances of mountain villages saw “peasants become petty commodity producers, who have to produce their subsistence through integration into wider social divisions of labour and markets” (2010: 4). This document of the clearances of the Cypriot highlands exemplifies, poignantly, the ways in which local socioecologies can be forcibly integrated into a wider world economy. From a narrative standpoint, these compulsory clearances and conversions provide for Lee the structural base for his script. The narrative of the attempt by the British

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regime (acting as the self-styled scourge of Eastern ‘inefficiency’) to free up precious timber and crop resources by resolving Cyprus’s ‘goat problem’ was to be set within the imperial paradigm of the oppositions between one “productive” village and one “fallen” village; a tale of conflict between the virtuous peasant, Nikos, and the indolent Vassos. The administration’s battle against the goat, of which the film is an integral part, was indivisible from the plan for eviction and resettlement of mountain communities. In the 1940s, the population derived much of its milk, cheese, and meat—along with four-fifths of its leather—from goats. While we might want to caution against seeing the cause of island deforestation as singular (human mismanagement and previous grazing regimes are as much to blame as the goat itself), the long-term effects of goat browsing on Cyprus seemed to have been little short of disastrous (Gade 2008: 536). The Cypriot goat, it appears, was the scourge of the agriculture and forestry development policies to the extent that it has been claimed that “during the 1930s the Cyprus goat had almost worldwide fame. It certainly became the most publicized forest animal in the world” (Thirgood 1987: 170). This is the reputation of the goat we witness on film, carrying “plague in its mouth” and it plays its part as villain of the piece very well. A herd of goats is shown devastating arable and tree crops alongside the portentous tones of the narration: “‘And always, wherever there was a green thing growing, it was everywhere menaced by the sharp, poisonous and insatiable tooth of the goat’ [MIX to big C.U. of goat eating olive branch]” (Keene and Lee 1947: 84). By playing up the villainy of the goats and anti-colonial incendiarism, and by playing down the role of British policy decisions over land rights, ownership, and usage, Cyprus is an Island undoubtedly provides a distorted representation of the threats to the forest. In many ways, the goat has been positioned as fall-guy for the deforestation that the British themselves had precipitated through timber felling in significant swathes to further the war efforts (Harris 2012: 3671). Lee’s journal describes “Forest Areas, protected by law from goats and wood-stealers” in order to maximize the colonial harvest (25). The criminalization of wood-collecting practices and grazing rights that were generations old is evidence of the renewed drive to appropriate all land formerly deemed to be common property and either privatize it or deliver it into state hands. The implementation of these new laws and the propaganda effort to promote them deepened and, in some cases, created divisions between elements of the agrarian classes. As Sarah E. Harris explains, the patterns of traditional

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Cypriot agriculture were considered inefficient and were to be substituted for a system that involved no goats and limited fallow: As the years passed, the British propaganda regarding goats and the ‘correct’ mode of agriculture became more and more of a reality in some of the farmer’s eyes until a much stronger tension arose between shepherds and farmers than had existed in the past […]. In many ways, the British views concerning goats and farmers turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (2012: 3673)

Rather than simply representing or dramatizing the tensions between shepherd and farmer, films like Keene and Lee’s actually contributed to the deepening of social tensions and rifts. The film must certainly be understood as part of a flawed publicity machine “that assumed that shepherds and agriculturalists could not mix well and [was] determined to teach this belief to the Cypriot” (Harris 2012: 3673). Harris’s scholarship allows us to reframe the film’s operative axis and to see it for what it is: a blunt device for sorting colonial goats from sheep. The moral distance that the film attempts to establish between the itinerant, obstinate shepherd Vassos and the settled, family-oriented, industrious farmer Nikos is underscored in significant ways. Most noticeably, perhaps, by the soundtrack. The melodramatic and menacing part of the score described in the script as “goat music—harsh, discordant and agitated” carries over into scenes with Vassos himself, whereas Nikos’s family scenes are marked up musically as “peasant music, a shepherd’s pipe theme with orchestra accompaniment from the Petrides suite” (Keene and Lee 1947: 83–84). The contrast between the figure of Vassos, often shown as isolated, and the communal shots of Nikos’s family is also stark. Presumably meant to be representatives of ‘eternal’ Cypriot ideals, the family’s labouring practices—all generations participating in field work—not only demonstrate the British drive to create an aesthetic of industrious productivity, but also illustrate what was “the central innovation of the colonial-­diasporic food regime, […]  the fully commercial farm based on family labour” (Friedmann 2005: 235). The dispute between the two men over the damage to crops is settled and Vassos (and the goats) are cast out of the village, whence he flees to the forest and turns arsonist. From this point in the film we witness a high-­ tempo chase sequence and then the punishment and redemption of the combustible Vassos, who is re-settled as a farmer. By framing the outcome

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of the case as a village-led judgement, the film proposes that the transformations of the commons and the disciplining of agricultural labour are produced, as Jonathan Stubbs argues, by a “rational and democratic process” led by the villagers themselves, rather than through British coercion (2015: 244). The depiction of the shepherd as criminalized vandal also demonstrates misapprehension, willful or otherwise, on the part of the British. It is the case that there had been a discernible spike in forest crime rates from around 1944 to 1946, with felonies including unlawful grazing, unlawful felling, and land encroachment (Thirgood 1987: 200–201). However, this uptick in cases can be explained by the eager prosecution of new laws rather than any necessary change to peasant practices. As Katsourides argues, we can understand peasant demonstrations as one effective way through which those with little or no political agency might respond to any new forms of uneven economic relations that overturn their traditional operations, and now seek to determine the direction of their livelihoods (2014a: 71). Moreover, acts of incendiarism were not necessarily undertaken in fits of pique or, as the plot of the film suggests, in revenge. Rather, after the erosion of the commons, fires as well as other forest practices now regarded as criminal became even more important as a means for survival. Burnings, for example, had always been a part of forest ecology—important to small-scale processes of clearance and renewal. Now, for locals who had limited rights to the land they might also serve to offer opportunities via short-term employment in, say, salvage or replanting schemes (Harris 2012: 3674). In the final instance, Cyprus is an Island paints a disingenuous portrait of the shepherd-turned-fugitive, making him seem a timeless, ever-present figure in Cypriot life—one whose anti-­ social deficiencies had been cured rather than created by the structural inequalities of colonial-capitalist agro-development. *** I want to return, in the concluding part of this chapter, to Lee’s opening observations made in “Scripting the Film”: the reasons for wanting to record the process of filmmaking and the ambivalent position in which the script-writer found himself. The objective, to show the benefits of colonial governance, was a “natural aim for an official film: but it meant that much that was in itself fascinating and significant had to be ignored” (Lee 1947: 2). He closes his piece in similar mode: “I thought of the film we had prepared, which was now ready to be made; but I thought more of that

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film we could never make, of the things that could not be said” (1947: 57). Much of what fascinates in Lee’s journal are the very aspects of his view of Cyprus that diametrically oppose the images created by his film. Foremost among these is the imagined figure of the eternal, and eternally grateful, labouring Cypriot. Lee’s contribution to We Made a Film in Cyprus is notable because it offers a nuanced corrective to this colonially constructed image of the peasant. This is a corrective that takes two principle forms: a fuller acknowledgement of the politics of anti-colonialism and a deeper engagement with the working lives of women on the island. Lee’s account of the whole project concludes with the description of the cast and crew enjoying the Easter festivities in Lythrodontas. After filming had finished, Keene organized a communal viewing of two films in the village square: his own, Cornish Valley, and another, set in India. Both films articulated the experiences of British and Indian peasant life and were to be followed by a lecture from a British official. Lee suggests here that the attempts to instruct the whole village in this way failed; while the audience could easily see the connection between their lands and the “lush caricature” embodied in the Cornish equivalent, the response was mirthful and dismissive. This may not have been the formative educational experience that Information Officer Bell wanted to bring about. At this very moment, the village receives the news that the war has ended, and Lee finishes with a meditation on his entire experience of Cyprus: All over the world, now, people were celebrating or mourning the end of the war. And we sat in this small, smoky, goat-smelling room while the girls, moving like slaves, brought us pots full of macaroni and chunks of stewed meat. We drank and stuffed ourselves […] Suddenly, like a visitation, came the wife of Nikos and stood behind his chair. Patient, exhausted, her grey face drawn, she hovered in his shadow. […] He kept her there and described her with bitter arrogance; her looks, her obedience, her complaints, her yearly labours. And she waited. (1947: 54–56)

The most salient feature, signalled here, and one that runs through all of Lee’s observations in the memoir but that barely gets a mention in the film (women workers are ever-present, never named or remarked upon), is the issue of the gendered division of labour. Lee’s notebooks detail his impressions of the working lives of Cypriot women and document seeing road-builders with children strapped to their backs, as well as detailing examples of the sexual brutality of British soldiers toward Cypriot women.

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This memoir, broader in its range and deeper in its scope than the film, at least attempts to acknowledge the lived experience of Cypriot women. Redressing, to a small degree, the film’s insistent focus on masculine labour and patriarchal sociality, Lee offers perceptive readings of the forms of oppression that many women found themselves subjected to, and his account reveals several examples of the intersecting and amplifying layers of patriarchal, colonial, and class exploitation. The focus on the women of Lythrodontas here is prefigured in Lee’s narrative by his visit to Lefkara. Between the years 1900 and 1930, the commodification of Lefkara’s lace (lefkaritika) brought more wealth to the village than to the rest of the island as a whole, changing the local economy and social structures (Koko and Kaipainen 2015: 11). And yet, this was wealth made by the hands of women, individual producer-­ artisans, who likely never saw any direct economic benefit. During his visit, Lee encounters the cottage industry of lacemaking, recognizing both the demanding nature and painstaking artistry of production: “[a]ll the girls in the village worked the lace, stooping their dark heads low over the sheeted linen, flashing their needles […] labouring as much as twelve hours a day, and every day […] It was fine work they were doing. A table cloth would take a girl a month of full days in the making. Then it would sell for £2 or £3” (1947: 19). The true exploitation of the workers here is laid bare when Lee is told of how the scurrilous dealer “takes everything from the girls for a few shillings and sells it at fabulous prices […] ‘With his house and garden and his fountain and his great fat belly. It is all built on the eyes and youth of the girls of the village!’” (1947: 19). This dynamic of patriarchal exploitation follows a similar trajectory to that observed by Maria Mies in her ground-breaking work with lace-making women in Narsapur. It was equally the case that the women of Lefkara had to participate in this ‘wage labour’ while also fulfilling all the other obligations of familial and domestic duty—undertaking unacknowledged reproductive labour as well as poorly remunerated ‘productive’ work (Mies 2014: xvii).5 That this harsh example of the extraction of surplus value from peasant labour never features in the film is not surprising, but its inclusion in Lee’s memoir serves to highlight the way in which the film downplays or effaces the role of women in agricultural as well as artisanal labour. This effacement shows up the limited focus of the film’s attempts to create a praise-­ song to the dyad of peasant industry and British organization.

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The dictates of capital not only required that women’s labour go un-­ narrated, but also that anti-colonial dissent be silenced in Cyprus is and Island. This aspect of Cypriot political life, too, however, was to some degree given voice in Lee’s prose. The film obviously works hard to displace or disarm any discordant voices, for instance by seeking to contain the longer history of anti-colonial incendiarism within the caricature of one truculent shepherd. Lee’s travels across the island, however, revealed the realities of a more widespread disquiet with the British. For example, he relates the episode in which a hidden cache of arms and ammunition is uncovered and is also witness to outbursts of nationalist fury. Retiring at the end of the village festivities in Lythrodontas, Lee asks about the island’s post-war political future. The response he receives exemplifies the specific form of Greek Cypriot anti-colonial nationalism that would dominate the next decade—the EOKA-led calls for enosis: And Jacobus, who had some English, grew fanciful and outspoken, shouting us all down. We were his friends, yes. He would tell us something, yes. Cyprus did not belong to Britain, no; it was an old ship boarded by pirates, plundered, and anchored in poverty. One day, he said, we will throw these pirates into the sea, we will cut the cables of our island and sail it home to Greece. (Lee 1947: 55)

Jacobus’s disquisition on British imperial piracy sits, I think, rather nicely alongside the class-conscious broadsides HajiMatheos’s levelled at colonial governance in the same year and in which he identified as protecting British manufacturing interests at the expense of rural producers and consumers in Cyprus during the depression and again during the war: A poor man finds himself in insurmountable economic distress. He seeks relief from a relative, takes what he needs, basing his requests on kinship rights. After some time he is in better shape, even in a position to return what he borrowed, or at least part of it. But at this point he completely ignores his benefactor’s complaints, he replies with contemptuous laughter that he does not care […] The government is like that poor relative who forgot his benefactor and came again, even requisitioning by decree what the producer has, without so much as asking his opinion. (HajiNikola 2006 [1945]: 643)

Such articulations of dissent further highlight the film’s egregious assumption of Cypriot acquiescence. They certainly undercut the claim made in

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the first reel, that Cyprus was now willingly participating as a productive part of a British-led commonwealth of mutual interest. Indeed, Jonathan Stubbs’s comprehensive analysis of the history of the film’s production, circulation, and reception reveals that there was a similar discontent towards the film’s portrayal of life under British rule, in Cyprus itself at least. Stubbs reveals that Cyprus is an Island had a lengthy afterlife in Britain, circulating around British official and educational institutions in various forms for a number of years following its release. It had also received largely favourable reviews in the press (245). The response in Cyprus after the film was released there in February 1947 was, in contrast, swift, sharp, and unambiguous. The film “was quickly withdrawn in the wake of public protests, a situation which echoed the civil unrest generated by British films in India during the late 1930s” (Stubbs 2015: 245). This might well reinforce the contention that the film had always been as much (if not more) about proselytizing to a British audience about the well-received fruits of imperial endeavour, as it had been about trying to win over Cypriots themselves. This chapter has attempted to consider in detail some of the discursive strategies of imperialism in the context of the transformation of Cyprus’s agricultural system in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Cyprus is an Island appeared in 1946 at a moment of world-economic transition. This era saw the fall of the first world food regime and the rise of the second, and also bore witness to the indisputable waning of British imperial influence in the world-economy. Emerging at this conjuncture, the film’s attempts to increase resource yields and to shore-up commodity production was predicated not only on the rationalization of farms, forest landscapes, and labour practices. It was also dependent on a propaganda drive which combined a new rhetoric of ‘commonwealth’ interest with a re-­ inscription of old colonial stereotypes concerning an imagined Cypriot peasantry. One obverse side of the story, a noticeable absence in the film, was the actual rise of an increasingly radicalized anti-colonial working class. As the case of Cyprus is an Island reveals, struggles in the world-­ food-­system are inextricably intertwined with the cultures, politics, and processes of decolonization. The story of this film and of Lee’s accompanying prose is also part of the wider story of anti-colonial struggle, a struggle which would erupt fully on the island in the years following the film’s release.

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Notes 1. Among the most notable exceptions have been the long-standing engagement with “postcolonial Cyprus” by Yiannis Papadakis et  al. (2006), Rebecca Bryant (2004), and recent interventions from Bahriye Kemal (2019). 2. See for instance, John M.  MacKenzie’s “Editor’s Foreword” (Varnava 2009: x). 3. The film also ignores the matter of ethnic and religious conflict in Cyprus—a willful disavowal which might be considered brazen given a catalogue of deliberate British attempts to exacerbate tensions in the service of maintaining their power and authority. For an excellent examination of British imperial ‘divide and rule’ see Ilia Xypolia (2016, 2017). 4. Enosis, the long-standing demand for political union with Greece, was the fundamental premise of Greek-Cypriot ethno-nationalism in the twentieth century. Driven primarily by the bourgeoisie and the Church of Cyprus, claims for enosis dominated discussion and debate in most areas of Greek-­ Cypriot political life. (See, Katsourides 2014b: 476–477.) 5. Indeed, Sasha Josephides has shown how the specific, disciplining codes of masculinist Cypriot propriety (“family honour” and “shame”) created the pre-conditions for such exploitations of gendered forms of labour not just in the villages of Cyprus, but on into the diasporic experiences of many Cypriot women who would later take up textile work in cities like London (Josephides 1988: 33). See also, Mohanty 2002.

Works Cited Assos, Demetris. 2018. Makarios: The Revolutionary Priest of Cyprus. London: I.B. Tauris. Bernstein, Henry. 2010. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. Lynne Rienner. ———. 2015. Food Regimes and Food Regime Analysis: A Selective Survey. BRICS Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS). British Library. Laurie Lee Papers. Small Notebook on Cyprus. Add. MS. 88936/2/162. Bryant, Rebecca. 2004. Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus. London: I.B. Tauris. Cihat, Arinc. 2015. Postcolonial Ghosts in New Turkish Cinema: A Deconstructive Politics of Memory in Dervis Zaim’s ‘The Cyprus Trilogy’. Doctoral Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London. Connery, Christopher, and Vanita Seth. 2006. Forward: Thinking with Cyprus. Postcolonial Studies 9 (3): 227–229. Friedmann, Harriet. 1993. The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis. New Left Review 197: 29–57.

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Friedmann, Harriet. 2005. From Colonialism to Green Capitalism: Social Movements and Emergence of Food Regimes. In New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development, ed. F.H.  Buttel and P.McMichael, 227–264. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Gade, Daniel W. 2008. Goats. In The Cambridge World History of Food, vol. 1, 531–536. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HajiNikola, HajiMatheos. 2006 [1945]. The Agrarian Class in Cyprus. In Britain in Cyprus: Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, 1878–2006, ed. Hubert Faustmann and Nicos Peristianis, 637–652. Mannheim and Mohnesee: Bibliopolis. Harris, Sarah E. 2012. Cyprus as a Degraded Landscape or Resilient Environment in the Wake of Colonial Intrusion. PNAS 109 (10): 3670–3675. Hill, George. 1952. A History of Cyprus. Volume 4: The Ottoman Province. The British Colony. 1571–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland, Robert. 1998. Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Josephius, Sasha. 1988. Honour, Family, and Work: Greek Cypriot Women Before and After Migration. In Enterprising Women: Ethnicity, Economy, and Gender Relations, ed. Parminde Bhachu and Sallie Westwood, 28–46. London: Routledge. Katsourides, Yiannos. 2014a. The History of the Communist Party in Cyprus: Colonialism, Class and the Cypriot Left. London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2014b. The National Question in Cyprus and the Cypriot Communist Left in the Era of British Colonialism (1922–59). Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 16 (4): 474–501. Keene, Ralph. 1947. Filming the Script. In We Made a Film in Cyprus, 58–78. Longmans: Green and Co. Keene, Ralph, and Laurie Lee. 1947. We Made a Film in Cyprus. Longmans: Green and Co. Kelling, George. 1990. Countdown to Rebellion: British Policy in Cyprus, 1939–1955. Greenwood Press. Kemal, Bahriye. 2019. Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space. London and New York: Routledge. Koko, Sirpa, and Minna Kaipainen. 2015. The Changing Role of Cultural Heritage in Traditional Textile Crafts from Cyprus. Craft Research 6 (1): 9–30. Lee, Laurie. 1947. Scripting the Film. In We Made a Film in Cyprus, 1–57. Longmans: Green and Co. Loizos, Peter. 2006. HajiMatheos HajiNikolas – A Home-Grown Radical Thinker. In Britain in Cyprus: Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, 1878–2006, ed. Hubert Faustmann and Nicos Peristianis, 631–636. Mannheim and Mohnesee: Bibliopolis.

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McMichael, Philip. 2009. A Food Regime Genealogy. The Journal of Peasant Studies 36 (1): 139–169. ———. 2013. Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions. Halifax, NS: Fernwood. Michael, Michalis. 2009. Resolving the Cyprus Conflict: Negotiating History. New York: Palgrave. Mies, Maria. 2014 [1986]. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2002. Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity. In The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics, ed. Nancy Holmstrom. New York: Monthly Review Press. Panayiotopoulos, Prodromos. 1999. The Emergent Post-Colonial State in Cyprus. Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 37 (1): 31–55. Panteli, Stavros. 1990. The Making of Modern Cyprus. Interworld. Papadakis, Yiannos, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Welz. 2006. Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict. Bloomington: Indiana Press. Peristianis, Nicos. 2006. The Rise of Left and of Intra-Ethnic Cleavage. In Britain in Cyprus: Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, 1878–2006, ed. Hubert Faustmann and Nicos Peristianis, 233–268. Mannheim and Mohnesee: Bibliopolis. Severis, Rita C. 2006. Travelling Artists in Cyprus: Art, Identity and Politics. In Britain in Cyprus: Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, 1878–2006, ed. Hubert Faustmann and Nicos Peristianis, 381–412. Mannheim and Mohnesee: Bibliopolis. Stubbs, Jonathan. 2015. ‘Did You Ever Notice This Dot in the Mediterranean?’ Colonial Cyprus in the Postwar British Documentary. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35 (2): 240–256. Thirgood, J.V. 1987. Cyprus: A Chronicle of Its Forests, Land and People. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Varnava, Andrekos. 2009. British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Xypolia, Ilia. 2016. Divide et Impera: Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of British Imperialism. Critique 44 (3): 221–231. ———. 2017. British Imperialism and Turkish Nationalism in Cyprus, 1923–1939: Divide, Define and Rule. Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Plants in the Free World Garden: Revolution and Rice in Thai Literature Treasa De Loughry

Introduction A US diplomatic cable from Thailand in 1960 concludes that “Thailand represents an especially healthy and vigorous plant in the free world garden” (Johnson 1960: 1173), summarising the beneficent care the South East Asian nation ostensibly required from its US benefactor in negotiating the free ‘trade’ garden. Seeking to buttress its military and geopolitical might, the US, from the 1950s to the 1970s, engaged on a vast programme of military spending, infrastructural development, and ecological programming in Thailand. The goal of the latter was the US’s well-worn foreign policy manoeuvre of import substitution and dependency, or quelling communist discontent by eradicating hunger through ‘food aid’ before expanding Green Revolution technologies across the region and

T. De Loughry (*) School of English Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_6

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plugging subsistence communities into global agri-systems.1 The consequences of these combined pressures—ideological, technological, and infrastructural—on the region’s actual plants, especially the main export crop rice, dramatically widened regional inequality, particularly in the poorer Northern regions. This chapter examines Thai literary responses to transformations in rice as subsistence to rice as commodity, from the 1950s period of US-funded counter-insurgencies and local socioecological change, until shortly after the 1973 farmer–student revolution for social justice and land reform. It first discusses saktina, a feudal mode of class relations retooled for the development era, through the work of novelist and diplomat Seni Saowaphong, whose 1957 novel Ghosts narrates the clash of class systems when Sai Seema, a lawyer and the son of a rice farmer, meets aristocrat Ratchanee. Together they seek to overcome the saktina system, which would both keep them apart and prevent them from helping farmers escape penurious sharecropping practices. Saowaphong’s novel presents an almost utopian vision of newly empowered professional middle classes as a panacea to urban aristocrats who benefit from the labour and debt of rural farmers, in a prescient account of the future cross-class alliances that would fuel the 1973 revolution. Saowaphong was a literary contemporary of activist and writer Khamsing Srinawk, whose social realist short story collection The Politician and Other Stories (2001) I also examine below. This collection is focused more precisely on Northern regions, the tensions between modernisation and Buddhist belief systems, and the co-­ optation of saktina into local relations. In particular, Srinawk’s short stories offer multiple ways into examining the boom–bust dynamics of food abundance and scarcity that structured Thailand during the 1950s, with “The Gold-Legged Frog” (1958) narrating a relentlessly tragic tale of drought and despair, and “Breeding Stock” (1958) concerned with the introduction of monstrously huge American breeding animals that signal broader transformations in global food regimes. The final Srinawk tale under discussion, “Dark Glasses” (1969), signals how modernisation renders women especially susceptible to seasonal migration and sex work, within a relatively unforgiving merit-based belief system. The final section of this chapter explores how Chart Korbjitti’s A Baker’s Dozen (2010) traverses the alienations of Thai society after the failures of the 1970s student–farmer revolution. Korbjitti’s tales are more straightforwardly magical than Saowaphong’s novel or Srinawk’s short stories, imagining characters travelling to spirit worlds and using supernatural powers to gain

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political advantage. This use of critical irrealism rather than social realism, I argue, signifies Korbjitti’s disenchantment with the failures of the 1970s revolution. By examining these three texts, this chapter maps a cumulative trajectory from 1950s discontent to 1970s revolution and 1980s disenchantment, and argues for a world-ecological analysis of their registration not just of regional or national political upheaval, but also of broader tendencies in the world-system—of US-led developmental programming, eco-­ modernisation, and anti-communism. The contexts of feudal agrarian practices and US imperialism are crucial to the plotting of works that narrate the post-1950s transition from subsistence to ‘capitalised’ rice, even as these complex histories and practices are rendered alternately invisible in these narratives. While there is already a growing body of work on the registration of US-led environmental transformations in post–World War II literatures elsewhere, such as in Latin America, South East Asia, particularly Thailand, tends to be under-regarded in world literary analyses, in large part because of the scarcity of translated materials. This is due to a combination of factors, not least Thailand’s brief history of novel writing: the first Thai novel was a translation of Marie Corelli’s gothic horror Vendetta (1886), published in 1902 (Chaloemtiarana 2018: 12), and the concurrent development of a highly localised and vernacular literary scene did not lend itself to translation. Secondly, the contemporary book market has largely focused on romance or picaresque crime novels (Barang 2004: loc. 316), while also being culturally usurped by the popularity of television and film. In terms of writing concerned with rural development, Northern penury, and farmer activism, the short story, rather than the novel has predominated. Thai short stories were popularised in periodical forms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but these were often only read by the middle classes. The post-1950s emergence of Northern activist-farmer writers was not strictly because of this periodical culture, but due to the short story’s concision and efficacy in conveying politically urgent topics. Many farmer-writers were incidental authors, who fled to the jungle to avoid political persecution, using social realist forms to thinly fictionalise already existing conditions. Martin Platt’s exhaustive account of these Northern short story writers is the result of proficiency in Thai, careful archival research and interviews with surviving authors—and offers a model of Thai literary analysis unavailable to most world literary researchers. This situation, of an extremely limited translated corpus is almost unique in Southeast Asia and bespeaks, as

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Chaloemtiarna argues, of how the Thai novel and literary forms more generally are “written in the vernacular and consumed locally” (2018: 74). However, the conditions by which Thailand was modernised in the mid-twentieth century are grounded in global and US-led models of agricultural reform and anti-communist sentiment that were trialled in other nations, including India, Mexico, and the Philippines, and then redeployed elsewhere. Despite the local circulation of Thai literary production, this should not hinder attempts to employ materialist world-literary analyses to this region and consider how communities see themselves as part of broader rural–urban and rural–global ecological transformations. This analysis thus builds on well-articulated discussions about the limits of postcolonial literary theory by attending to the interaction between global modes of power, local foodways, and cultural forms. I draw on a tripartite schema that includes the work of environmental historian Jason W. Moore and his concept of a ‘world-ecology’ or the dialectical coproduction of the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the organisation of nature; the Warwick Research Collective (WReC 2015), which argues that world literature is the literature of the capitalist world-system; and Michael Niblett’s related argument for a world-literary study that would register “transformations in world ecology that have been both cause and consequence of the transition to, and subsequent reorganizations of, the capitalist world-economy” (2012: 16). On this basis, my chapter examines how resistance to the metabolism of ‘cheap nature’ and ‘cheap labour’ has been mobilised and represented in Thai literature. The focus on literatures from and about Thailand’s rice-growing regions means examining discontinuities of form and content in works that register tensions between pre-­ capitalist social formations and subsistence (agri)cultures, and their reinscription in national and global circuits of distribution and consumption.

Saktina and Seni Saowaphong’s Ghosts Thailand’s post–World War II history is illustrative of mid-twentieth-­ century global reconfigurations in food regimes.2 Never intensively colonised, due in part to trade agreements like Britain’s 1855 Bowring Treaty, Thailand has always had a strategic and realpolitik approach to Western powers, seeking to avoid loss of sovereignty through economic compromises (Chaloemtiarana 2018: 13). In this spirit Thailand strategically aligned itself with the US after the World War II defeat of its ally Japan,

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and in return for hosting American airbases from the 1950s onwards, Thailand received substantial economic and military assistance to buttress its military police state and fuel the frontier grab of the communist-­ infiltrated North.3 But communist insurgencies, and a desire for land and class reform, posed major challenges to the post–World War II American order in Asia. Monitoring and sustaining the Thai ‘free trade plant’ meant intruding on local socioecological relations through, for example, the ‘re-­ routing’ of US food surpluses through Eisenhower’s “Food for Peace” programme (McMichael 2009: 141), developmental initiatives focusing on roads and rice, and the expansion of the Green Revolution, particularly ‘miracle rice’ varieties (Cullather 2010: loc. 2244). Rural Thai peasants were only “marginally wired to the circuits of the market mechanism” (Yotopoulos and Adulavidhaya 1975: 28), but these conditions did not dissuade developmental efforts to sustain it. The Green Revolution survived through repression, by empowering privileged and wealthy landowners to expand through land-grabbing, employing reserve armies of the ‘under-employed’, and flooding markets with cheap crops; and it encouraged corruption through ownership of profitable concessions and development grants (Ganjanapan and Hirsch 2010: 30; Cullather 2010: loc. 3289). Thailand, the rice basket of South East Asia, was particularly affected by American rice dumping, with US diplomatic cables revealing the Thai government’s discontent, and worries that “US actions have had depressive effect on market and fears for future” (Johnson 1960: 1170).4 Rice has long been one of Thailand’s staple crops—a common Thai greeting— “Gin kôw re ̌u yang?” can be interpreted as “have you eaten rice yet?” (Williams et al. 2012: 738), and in the North East, animist beliefs in rice ‘souls’ and spirits are co-articulated with seasonal cycles, providing the temporal framework for village life (Keyes 1967: 14–5). However, anarchist historian James Scott argues that prior to mass rice cultivation South East Asia was the largest maroon zone in the world, populated by upland nomadic groups who relied on an “escape agriculture” (2009: 187) of low-maintenance crops like cassava, potatoes, and taro. Rice is not simply a key commodity in this region, but one that lent itself to state-building practices: the South East Asian “padi state” was an effective way to gather together stateless peoples (5), with rice a time-consuming and uniform crop that shackled padi-farmers to seasonal patterns, predictable crop yields and tax revenues, and a uniformity of social patterns. Confirming this link between rice and exploitation, the Thai word for feudal is “saktina”

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(Haberkorn 2011: 57), meaning “‘power over the rice fields’”. Saktina coheres class relations through paternalistic forms of village-headman patronage, finding contemporary material expression in the infrastructures and bureaucracies of development (see Chiengkul 2015: 129–131). In the twentieth century, Thailand’s feudal saktina relations, as a somewhat enduring set of attitudes, class relations, and modes of local governance, were retooled to stabilise cash-crop societies, ensuring the ‘cheap fix’ of labour and food, the suppression of Northern irredentism, and renewed loyalty amongst local power-brokers. These tendencies are visible in one of the earlier examples of literature in translation that narrates the difficulties of Thailand’s entrenched saktina system. Seni Saowaphong’s 1957 novel Ghosts depicts the social clash when Bangkok-based Sai Seema, a lawyer and the son of a rice farmer, falls in love with aristocrat Ratchanee. Author Seni Saowaphong, real name Sakchai Bamrungphong, worked as a journalist, translator, diplomat, and writer. In Ghosts, he thinly fictionalises the rent and sharecropping problems of his home region—Bang Bor south of Bangkok—in ways that later resonated with the emerging concerns of radicalised students. Ghosts blends factual information on class and World War II Thailand through a multi-scalar narrative that forces a contiguity between saktina and its effects on personal relationships, like Ratchanee’s parents’ opposition to her potential marriage to Sai. This complexity is enabled by a cast of numerous and fleetingly sighted characters who populate the novel’s account of a tripartite class system of corrupt aristocratic elites, a burgeoning professional middle class, and a third tier of impoverished rice farmers: they include Phoon, the chauffeur struggling to buy medicine with his low wages; Fatso, the rice farmer killed trying to destroy Japanese ammunitions; and Darunee, Ratchanee’s older sister, who must ‘save face’ in a loveless marriage. The subjects of the novel’s title are Thailand’s ‘spectral’ modernising (and largely middle-class) forces who threaten to dismantle the nation’s strict social hierarchies, and resist saktina to support rural workers. Saowaphong’s novel presciently imagines class solidarities that would not come to fruition until a later alliance emerged between educated metropolitan students and farmers concerned with social justice, the ‘ghosts’ of Thailand’s future. It is for this reason that his work was rediscovered during the 1970s by student activists. Ghosts was initially serialised in Sayarmsamai magazine between 1953 and 1954 (see Hideki 2007; Barang 1999: loc. 3235). But after the 1957 coup d’état, and the

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censorship of Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat’s military government, writers like Seni Saowaphong and Khamsing Srinawk halted publication or moderated their critique. The literary techniques and politics of Srinawk, and to some degree Saowaphong, were influenced by the work of thinkers like murdered Marxist Jit Phumisak. Phumisak’s “Art for Life, Art for the People” manifesto (originally published in 1957), which was republished by student activists in 1972, led to the emergence of the 1970s “Literature for Life”5 and popular “Songs for Life” movement, with writers and lyricists seeking to highlight local injustices, rural–urban inequality and the negative impact of development programmes, especially in the North East, which experienced a golden cultural age of protest art (Platt 2013: 69). The “Literature for Life” movement encouraged a critical social realism that would draw on the lives of “‘farmers, workers, hopeless people, women and youth’” (Phumisak qtd. in Platt 2013: 65), while being accessible to all. Older members of the 1950s era of discontent became actively involved in the 1970s, like Srinawk, and previously censored literary outputs were rediscovered like Ghosts (Platt 2013: 64). A significant periodicity thus links the 1950s and 1970s in the reactivation of cultures of protest during moments of governmental “laxness” (64) towards censorship and scrutiny. These often social realist works were produced during the 1950s and 1970s intensification of sharecropping, amidst US intervention, which together rapidly transformed the region and necessitated critical narrative modes. In a review of Ghosts, Hiramatsu Hideki historicises Saowaphong’s contribution to the ‘art for life’ movement with Saowaphong, in lectures at Thammasat University in 1952, emphasising the “obligation of writers towards society” while “openly point[ing] out the value of literary realism” (Hideki 2007). This realism finds expression in Ghosts in often didactic accounts of how banks find profit by using land as guarantee and credit in a nation heavily dependent on agriculture; in sharp critiques of privation by rural figures; and in the social awakening of young middle-class characters like lawyer Sai, banker Ratchanee, teacher Kingthian, and Nikhom, a district official posted ‘upcountry’ to the Northeast. Notably only this middle class can ‘see’ the whole range of forces deepening deprivation in the countryside, and have the political awareness and educational attainment to act on their impulses in a more sustainable and strategic fashion than the text’s retrospective portrayal of a failed attack by peasants on Japanese occupiers during World War II.

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Fredric Jameson, in an attempt to reconceive Lukács’ theory of class consciousness in spatial and world-systemic terms, stated that a new critical realism could estrange reality by challenging class oppression and dominant political positions to “project structural relations between classes as well as class struggles in other countries” (2010: 236). But in Ghosts political awakenings occur in the city: arguably, the novel’s production by and for an urban literary audience, and the premature nature of Saowaphong’s progressive viewpoint, explains Ghosts’ location of solidarity in the core (Bangkok), rather than from without (padi fields). The novel’s political revelations largely emerge from the middle classes, as depicted in Ratchanee’s incremental epiphanies, and the multivocal nature of the narrative, which offers a didactic account of the combined nature of class, poverty, and uneven development. Lawyer Sai, in a crucial scene, notes that “‘Poverty doesn’t allow us to be free’” (Saowaphong  1999:  loc. 2012), with small shop owners accruing debt because they are beholden to poor customers, volatile markets, and brokers. But Ratchanee is initially unable to link power and indebtedness. While working in a bank she sees how “money generates money, both tangible and invisible, how profit accrues in the form of interest, commissions, insurance premiums and the like, […] more clearly than she had ever visualised the interests and rents which her father received from lending money and renting movable and immovable property” (1999: loc. 1760). Ratchanee needs encouragement from Sai to break from this definition of monetary ‘wealth’ to realise the intellectual richness of her friend Kingthian who has a “thousand pupils” (1999: loc. 1772). For Sai, these realisations enable him to see that in the countryside, threats to existence lie in “bribes, wages and other evils”, rather than “wild animals” (1999: loc. 2846). Saowaphong locates most of the political promise of his narrative amongst metropolitan figures like Sai because he is a product of an emerging upwardly mobile class, amidst changing educational and social conditions. The novel’s radical innovation is in empathising with rural farmers, but also in Sai’s decision to renege on his commitments to a monk who arranges for his studies and who later asks Sai to sue local farmers who have failed to pay their rents to his partner, a wealthy landed widow. This portrayal breaks with conventional social hierarchies and the repayment of debt. But it also speaks to changing conditions in Thailand due to educational expansion and American-funded exchange programmes, which had the effect during the civil rights movement of encouraging the political radicalism of Thai students, who drew parallels between the Vietnamese

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war and their own country, calling the US the “white peril” (Prokati 2009: 99). Saowaphong, while unable to take advantage of his own student exchange in the 1930s due to the outbreak of World War II, worked as a Thai ambassador in countries such as the Soviet Union, India, Vienna, and Burma, and his first ‘Art for Life’ novel, Wanlaya’s Love (1952), is set in post–World War II Paris (Barang 2004: loc. 1063). If Saowaphong’s literary intervention seems at times subtle, and heavily rooted in Sai’s enlightened if didactic narrative, it’s worth restating that Ghosts is an early attempt to overcome central Thailand’s metropolitan amnesia towards its uplands, and that it takes a radical and modern position in challenging social norms. As Sai reminds Ratchanee, “[t]here are two schools of thought: one believes in predestination, that is, that merit and demerit determine our fate before we’re even born and thus nothing can be changed, but another, more recent, school of thought holds that these differences are created by man himself, and therefore can be changed” (1999: loc. 887). This reframing of society in critical constructivist terms became central to the development of left-wing Thai protest literature in the 1970s, and it is to the literary exemplar of this moment, Khamsing Srinawk, that we now turn.

‘Drought, Want, Disaster, and Death’: Khamsing Srinawk’s The Politician and Other Stories Crucially, several of the tales in Khamsing Srinawk’s The Politician and Other Stories (2001) are located in Thailand’s Northern peripheries, rather than focusing, as Saowaphong does, on the role of the bourgeois city dweller in potentially emancipating rice farmers. Srinawk, pen name Lao Khamhawm, is one of Thailand’s best-known writers for his humorous and satirical short stories which deal with rural issues, from deforestation to corruption, prostitution to sharecropping. Srinawk worked as a journalist and forest ranger, effectively combining agricultural work with writing before being forced into exile in Sweden after the 1976 Thammasat massacre and coup (Anderson and Mendiones 1985: 291; Platt 2013: 48–9). His great innovation was in humanising the complexity and emotional richness of peasants, previously regarded as undifferentiated types in Thai literature (Phillips 1987: 129), and adding richness to a region generally stereotyped as a problematic periphery.6 Praised for their authenticity and commitment to narrating the complexities of peasant life, Srinawk’s tales exhibit the “generic

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discontinuities” (Parry 2009: 32) of peripheral works by narrating the impact of modernisation on Northern subsistence farming, the tensions in Buddhist belief systems, the ‘demeriting’ effects of prostitution, and the co-optation of saktina relations into newly financialised agricultural systems. “The Gold-Legged Frog” (1958) begins retrospectively with Isaan farmer Nak Na-Ngam despairing at a whirlwind that portends future calamities—“drought, want, disaster, and death” (28)—and points to a disaster already past. Nak is mourning the death of his son by a cobra bite, and the added injustice of being forced to attend a regional office for a handout for large families during the boy’s protracted death. Rudely treated by officials, he observes that “‘[a]ll you do is suffer if you’re born a rice famer and a subject. […] You’re poor and helpless, your mouth gets stained from eating roots when the rice has run out, you’re at the end of your tether and you turn to the authorities only to be put down’” (31). The pathetic fallacy of ominous whirlwinds and burning sunshine articulates Nak’s fraught relation with those who seek to observe and administer his reproductive life, just as officials, merchants, and scientists would soon seek to rearrange agricultural production in similarly catastrophic terms. This theme, of antagonistic relations between officials and farmers, and the ineffectiveness of populist solutions against the profound suffering and existential dread of subsistence farmers, recurs in stories like “The Politician” (1958), which deals with the gilded promises of politicians canvassing for votes, or “Paradise Preserved” (1973), which concerns the transformative power of politics in elevating cronies beyond local suffering. Srinawk’s tales dramatise suffering, pathos, and class relations by vividly portraying the inequities and micro-conflicts stalking subsistence farmers and hungry Northerners, who like the children in “Dunghill” (1960) are reduced to fighting over edible dung beetles and are without the capacity to energetically mobilise in popular protest. In an interview, Srinawk admits that the misery of these tales is meant to elicit the sympathy of urban dwellers (qtd. in Platt 2013: 57), or the “rich people of the country” (qtd. in Ozea 2008: 89)—revealingly, they often contain concise explanatory accounts of rural rituals and beliefs. However, Srinawk’s method extends beyond ‘misery’ drought narratives, using humour and satire, alongside tragedy and realism, to narrate the ingenious strategies by which rural folk attempt to survive difficult climactic conditions, penurious sharecropping, and ruthless thieves. In “The Buffalo with the Red Horns” (1981) farmer Thit Si Thanonchai, named after the cunning protagonist of a popular legend (fn. 2, 121),

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refuses to sell his buffalo or resort to the precarious “buying and selling, renting and hiring” (122) practices commonplace in regions where drought necessitates that farmers sell-off assets to Chinese merchants who own the entire agricultural production chain, from animals to the rice mill (122). But unlike local farmers, now thrust into new seasonal patterns of rice growing and urban migration to pay off debts accrued from rental agreements, Thit Si’s life is more stable. Afraid of local thieves, he paints his buffalo’s horns red to make it look like a hired beast and thus assures him of the protection extended to the merchant’s property. However, Thit Si’s wily efforts fail, and he suffers the vigilante justice of the village magnate. This tale, written in 1981 after the end of land reform protests, shows farmers like Thit Si resisting the growing precarity of agricultural workers. But given Srinawk’s commitment to social realism, Thit Si fails to escape retributive action from a ‘saktina’ patronage system involving politically connected and cash-wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs and local politicians, and is forced into an uneasy compromise with nascent modes of agri-business. The stories in The Politician are arranged in chronological order and, although they wear their allegorical references and contextual information lightly, can be read for their critique of the agricultural upheaval, gendered precarity, and indebtedness visited on Northerners. In “Breeding Stock” (1958), a local industrious farmer is tasked with taking on American-bred chickens, pigs, and cows. The breeding chicken is, the farmer reassures his wife, proof of modernity, and the need to “become up to date” (18). The farmer’s wife, initially worried at tales of exaggeratedly huge chickens as big as vultures, and pigs as large as water buffaloes, eventually enjoys hearing stories that convey the “oddities of progress” (18). These defamiliarised creatures are preliminary signs of local ruptures in socioecological conditions as the family is forced to integrate into an expanding American “animal protein complex” (Friedmann qtd. in McMichael 2009: 146). At the cusp of this change, the farmer’s wife can intimate neither the entire international chain of chemical fertilisers, insecticides, seeds, technologies, and dietary adjustments to which the family will adjust, nor the failures of future infertile cows, pejoratively nicknamed in actuality “plastic cows” (Baker and Phongpaichit 2009: 213). Nick Cullather describes the goals of the Green Revolution as being to restore the “lost ‘balance’ between food supply and population”, and instil ‘democratic’ (read, non-communist) values by modifying “the psychology of the peasant” (2010: loc. 130–6). The great irony of the tale is that

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“Breeding Stock” begins with the elderly woman reflecting on the fertility of her land and the great quickness with which gourds, mangoes, and legumes grow. Importantly, in the context of initial Green Revolution manifestoes promising to alleviate hunger, it is due to, rather than in spite of, her husband’s agricultural efficiency that they are chosen for this US-funded breeding programme, and the ideological mission of these endeavours—to interpellate farmers into ‘free trade markets’, and to ameliorate local ethnic difference—furthers the woman’s good-humoured bewilderment. Jason Moore argues that the post–World War II period was one of high “ecological surplus” (2015: 96), as accumulation regimes of “plunder and productivity” were expanded into new frontiers. But in Thailand, early Green Revolution technologies were not successful in revitalising food yields. New frontiers of ‘plunder and productivity’ were activated through the underdevelopment of subsistence agriculture through ‘innovations’ in US development programming, food dumping, and an expanding Northern land frontier supplemented by an underemployed peasantry. The Green Revolution’s ripple effects brutally altered “peasant ecologies” (Moore 2015: 254) throughout South East Asia, creating a mass of reserve labour. Thailand’s post-1970s booming semi-peripheral economy was made possible by this reserve army of “cheap labor moving into the Bangkok metropolitan area from the outlying provinces” (Mills 1995: 258) to work in “export-oriented manufacturing” roles in textile industries, but especially service labour in sex work and tourism. In “Breeding Stock”, the elderly woman imagines in her naivety that even American men, including a straw colour–haired “scarecrow” (Srinawk 1958: 20), were sent to breed with Thai women, and her confusion about whether animals or people are being used as ‘upgraded’ breeding devices speaks to the rapid and disorienting modifications made by subsistence farmers in ways that take on irreal and humorous qualities.7 Explanatory footnotes in “Breeding Stock” reveal how the story plays on the mistranslation of “yes” by Thai translators as “yet”, which sounds to Thai ears like the word for “fuck” (fn. 1, 20). The crudeness of the pun gestures to escalations in prostitution due to Vietnam War–era American R&R trips, which disproportionately impacted Isaan women. In Thailand, rice trading was traditionally women’s labour, but their role was undermined by falling food prices amidst rice dumping. This, alongside a patriarchal Buddhist culture, fuelled the influx of Isaan women into prostitution, and with their dark skin, and pejorative representation in popular media as

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backward country bumpkins, Isaaners were recruited for foreign rather than domestic prostitution markets (Lyttleton 1994: 260).8 However, Isaan women were not simply hapless victims of such rackets, but were responding directly to the diminishment of rural ecological and economic conditions (Phongpaichit qtd. in Lyttleton 1994: 264). Srinawk’s 1969 story “Dark Glasses” literalises these tendencies by depicting the disappearance of a young girl, Khaemkham, a “‘real beauty’” (89), from Isaan village Dong Khaem, after it is connected up to the regional road system. This facilitates the travel of unscrupulous Thai-­ speaking engineers wearing ‘dark glasses’, the latter an ambivalent symbol of American modernity. Her mother recalls the family’s unease when the village is suddenly accessible by car, with an annual Buddhist merit-­making festival altered from a homely event to one transformed by generator lights, loudspeakers, and gauzy decorations (92). Developmental strategies lead to unintended consequences, with Khaemkham lured to Bangkok, presumably to work as a prostitute, until she returns for the Vessantara festival, a ritual migration undertaken by “the children of the Northeast” (fn. 1, 95), who return to give money and gifts to their families. The story stages a clash between ritualised Buddhism and modernity through the festival and the experiences of Khaemkham. The festival celebrates the legend of Prince Vessantara, a forerunner of the Buddha, who gained merit by giving away his belongings and family, while Khaemkham’s ‘choice’ to escape hard economic conditions rather than being ‘given away’ is at odds with this form of merit-making. Ritualised Buddhist forms of accruing good deeds are incommensurable with the ‘demeriting’ effects of capitalist precarity on Isaaners, particularly women. During Khaemkham’s absence the family keep a small bird, which her father releases in a gesture of goodwill and merit-making. But his son kills it, thinking it a “‘fat and stupid’” (95) creature, in a metonym for the harm caused to naïve female Isaaners lured to their ‘cages’ and outside the recuperative possibilities of Buddhist belief systems, further underlining Khaemkham’s irredeemable situation. This story’s inclusion of the Vessantara festival and commentary on women’s lack of merit works hard to suggest the social disruptions caused to villagers by seasonal rural–metropolitan work amidst the undercutting of rice prices. Ancient festivals decorated with garish ornaments telegraph the intense commodification not just of things, but of beliefs and bodies in newly predacious ways, with residual moral systems struggling to keep pace with the disorientating impact of capitalist relations on village life.

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Rather than dampen insurrectionary potential, the conditions to which Srinawk’s stories respond inflamed revolt. The events of 1973 were an expression of a dormant history of protest against tightening surveillance, and revolt against the socioecological conditions fostered by saktina and the advent of US imperialism. Violent counter-attacks to 1970s’ democracy movements were a state response to threats over embedded forms of power, because “the struggle for the land was also a struggle over meaning and meaning making” (Haberkorn 2011: 59)—or in world-ecological terms, because revolution and protest literature threatened capitalist forms of environment-making based on the ongoing suppression of Northern peoples. More conceptually, scholars of Isaan note that “‘migration and mobility have be[come] defining features of life and living in Northeast Thailand’” (Rigg and Salamanca qtd. in Keyes 2014: loc. 263–4), with Mary Beth Mills describing how this has led Isaaners to have a “local awareness of connections to wider society” (1999: 29). The short story functions in this critical context as a formal correlative to the fragmentation and alienation of Northern migrant life; and when Srinawk’s collection is considered as a whole, it can be seen to map the cascading effects of food crises, from subsistence to scarcity and urban migration.

Phi Ka, Communist Spectres and Critical Irrealism This chapter has thus far examined the appearance in several short stories and a novel, dating from the 1950s to the 1970s, of saktina as a retooled expression of residual class politics and emergent developmental programming, in often social realist works that occasionally express the surreal perception of US agricultural modernisation. I want to conclude with a brief analysis of the appearance of phi ka spirits and spectral other worlds as an archaic expression of fear surrounding land, and latterly as a means of critiquing government policy without attracting the wrath of censors after the failures of the 1970s revolution. First, however, a brief note on these revolutionary events. In October 1973, student and farmer democracy movements intersected in the successful democratic overthrow of the nation’s military dictatorship. The protesters demanded controls over sharecropping and rice prices, in the context of land shortages and high rents (Haberkorn 2011: 5). But the Thai government was nervous that the protest movements were the “precursor to a communist future in Thailand” (Haberkorn 2008: 19) and that the country might follow in the footsteps of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The US, seeking to forestall

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this eventuality, had given funding and support to Thai military and right-­ wing militia groups who overstated fears of a communist takeover by external nations to incite violence against activists.9 The 1976 massacre at Thammasat University in which over forty students were killed, and many more assaulted, effectively ended the democracy movement. Chart Korbjitti’s A Baker’s Dozen (2010) is composed of thirteen short stories, and traverses the alienations of Thai society after the failures of the people’s revolution. Korbjitti is a Bangkok born and raised author, and has published over fifteen collections of short stories, screenplays, and novels, many of which have not been translated into English. He studied in Bangkok during the period of 1970s political revolt, and his formative years, living in shared houses with fellow writers, artists, and musicians (Ozea 2008: 59), proved to be greatly influential on his writing. But his disenchantment with the protests and their failure has led him to focus on individual rather than societal issues, with Korbjitti locating his literary experimentations in the works of Hemingway and Sartre (199). Several of the tales in A Baker’s Dozen are more straightforwardly magical than Srinawk’s short stories, imagining characters travelling to spirit worlds and using supernatural powers to gain political advantage. This critical irrealism, or the irruption of the “logic of the imagination, of the marvellous, of the mystery or the dream” (Löwy 2007: 196), makes a conscious but subtle protest against the disappointments of the post-revolutionary era. Thai narratives frequently depict supernatural events to obliquely critique contemporaneous politics. In Korbjitti’s “Shamgri-La” (1985), grandfather Khlai accidentally travels to a ghost world where dead politicians participate in the same events as their real-life political peers, electing “‘ghost representatives to the Ghost Assembly’” (loc. 1061) and appearing on ghost televisions. But “‘blabbermouth’” ghost representatives with “‘twenty mouths’” (loc. 1079) defer action by speaking endlessly, in a pointed critique of the ineffectiveness of political talk to resolve food crises. The most influential politicians metamorphise into grotesque parasitic caricatures, with over-large mouths, huge heads, and round bodies, a result of their corrupt engorging on the resources, aspirations, and wealth of their electorates. Meanwhile Khlai’s grandchildren canvas the government for a guaranteed price for rice given low commodity prices and high fertiliser costs. But despite the obvious allegorical critique of Shamgri-La, Khlai’s audience remark that “the spirit world is ‘quite unlike here. Here the high-ups solve problems in earnest’” (loc. 1088)—presumably these

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final comments are meant to deflect actual political ire and censorship, despite the loaded satirical critique of the tale’s title. In these stories, Northern border regions are sites of displaced mysticism and latent critique. In “Facial Footwork” (2005) a disgraced politician receives a face massage by Khmer wizard Tow Teenborarn in Isaan, availing of ancient Cambodian magic to make his face “‘thick skinned … insensitive and brazen. From now on you’ll be shameless; your face will be like the soles of my feet, a real shitty face’” (2005: loc. 1232). After the treatment the Deputy Minister shrugs off accusations of corruption in a waste water treatment case. Isaan is represented as an enigmatic site of cross-border magic, in which the shameful suppression of the region’s revolutionary history, as signified by the taboo use of feet in the head massage,10 becomes a site of career-making reinvention for unscrupulous politicians. Realism takes on the estranging and surreal qualities of irrealism to critique the repressive and incommensurable socioecological, cultural, and political conditions of post-revolutionary Thai society, in an imaginative account of the ‘stamping down’ or diminishment of traumatic memories of protest in the service of politically expedient narratives. The final story in Korbjitti’s collection, “The Personal Knife” (1983), again focuses on over-consumptive, metropolitan elites by reimagining them as literal cannibals, in a surreal and estranging account of capitalism’s monstrous but quotidian qualities. Bangkok’s wealthiest families are bestowed with “personal knives” that give them exclusive dining rights to eat “inferior” victims at ritual eating events that culminate in an orgy of dismemberment. Written in a flat first-person voice, a father introduces his son to the rite as a sign of his elevation in Thai society. Eating his first morsel of human flesh, the son’s expression changes rapidly from repulsion to ravenous desire: Reluctantly he raised his fork where the skin of the big toe was stuck and brought it to his mouth. As soon as his tongue registered its taste, I saw the expression on his face change as if he had just witnessed a miracle he was no longer expecting. His eyes lit up with a ferocious light. He cast a famished glance at the big toe on his plate. […] He now knew the taste of human flesh. Nothing in his expression revealed any longer any compassion for inferior folk. (loc. 1429–35)

The allegorical intent of the story is clear—“inferior folk,” or those without access to wealth, are cannibalised figuratively and in actuality by the

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insatiable hunger of an economy dependant on a corrupt network of wealthy generals, courtiers, and politicians. This network literally exhausts and dehumanises those who labour in the very professions, of menial service and agricultural work, that energise and nourish the nation—or in the case of “Facial Footwork”, the way that rural karmic cleansing is exploited by politicians. Women are the worst victims of this triangulation of labour, class, and food, being forced to sacrifice even their unborn children to the rich—a fellow diner remarks with gruesome zeal: “‘Oh, she’s got a little one in her tummy!’” (loc. 1408). The next generation are pointedly ‘up for sale’, their potential already foreclosed, in the thorough saturation of lifeworlds and agriculture with the consumptive logic of exchange value. Cannibalistic spirits or phi ka are popular in Northern folklore. Historically, they are used to demonise those who exceed traditional gender norms or socio-economic positions—we could read them in Michael Taussig’s terms as pre-capitalist contestations of capitalist frontier-making amidst emergent socioecological rifts. For instance, Ganjanapan describes how Northern Thai aristocrats who lost land and profit due to foreign monopolies, bribed local exorcists to decry successful peasants as phi ka (1984: 326). Significantly in 1970s anti-communist propaganda, calling someone ‘communist’ was a stigmatising gesture akin to phi ka or witchcraft accusations (Cohen et al. 2010: 41).11 In “The Personal Knife” the threat used against marginal communist sympathisers is inverted—phi ka exist as an intention, or capitalism as an enlivened greedy cannibalistic spirit that depends upon metropolitan and multinational webs of power and privilege, suggesting that anti-communist phi ka accusations are targeted at the ‘wrong enemy’. Put differently, phi ka is here not a ghastly spectral figuration, or insult, but a way of discussing urban class politics as a rapacious, depleting force. Although this final tale is seemingly distant from our initial starting point in rice, the connecting thread is how the unscrupulous underdevelopment and exploitation of food frontiers and agricultural workers through national and US-led policies has, since the 1950s, further catalysed the deepening of rural and urban inequalities. Rice plays a distinctive role in these works insofar as they register the estranging and alienating effects of changes to socioecological conditions, from rice as subsistence to rice as a commodity. As mentioned, rice had a pivotal role as an instrument of US’s foreign policy intervention in Asia during the Cold War. Rice food aid came with developmental funding, and the Thai government strategically used US assistance to fund counter-insurgencies, prop

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up entrenched saktina and sharecropping systems, underdevelop Northern subsistence agriculture, and deepen into transformations in seasonal and migratory working patterns. Such widespread and rapid socioecological changes find corollaries in disjunctive aesthetic modes like the coexistence of social realism and humorous asides in Srinawk’s tales, and the satirical ghost worlds and irreal imaginaries of Korbjitti.12 This is in the context of the unrelenting production of Thailand as a minor Asian Tiger since the 1970s, which continues to capitalise on surplus reserves of labour and resources. In contrast to the high-tech innovation of hypermodern economies like Singapore or South Korea, Thailand inhabits a semi-peripheral role in the world-economy, shifting towards highly feminised metropolitan-based assembly-line work, piecing together computer parts and cars to become, rather worryingly, the “‘Detroit of Asia’” (Done et al. qtd. in Doner 2009: 32), while finding new ways to exploit land frontiers and fisheries. This shift renders Thailand a ‘miracle’ of neoclassical economic growth, but a decidedly unequal one with deepening urban–rural divides. Economic growth and technological upgrading have largely not been extended to agriculture, which is “left to fend for itself” (Abonyi 2005: 9), and seasonal agricultural work remains vital to surplus workers for whom assembly-line labour provides additional income. But such precarious industrial work threatens to diminish as wages rise and low-paid work shifts elsewhere. The goal of literary groups like “Literature” or “Songs for Life” to critically reflect on multi-scalar forms of oppression and economic exploitation seems more politically urgent now than ever. If the fictional works produced by these groups are dominated by a realist aesthetics that imagines the cascading effects of destabilisations in global rice prices and local conditions, while dialectically critiquing regional class systems, gender relations, and US imperialism, they are also grappling with the difficulties of calling alternative forms of resistance and inter-class solidarity into being. The problem contemporary writers have to solve is how to build upon the lessons of “Literature for Life” and its commitment to critical realism in order to engender a more liberatory aesthetic imaginary in the face of ongoing censorship and political instability.13

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Notes 1. See Cullather for a rigorous account of how American foreign policy viewed peasants as a threat and “transitional figure, caught halfway between feudal serfdom and capitalist proprietorship” (Cullather 2010: loc. 75). Susceptible to communism, the peasant was “demanding, volatile, and suggestible” (loc. 1010), and had a “mystical attachment to the land”. Thailand’s large population of peasant farmers were the target of American funded development initiatives and domestic social science programmes, and this, alongside their central role in democracy movements, led to increased cultural attention on the rice farmer. 2. ‘Food regimes’ are concerned with how transformations in the global food system are linked to questions of hegemony, ideology, financialisation, and local structures of power. As Friedmann notes, “[t]he food regime, therefore, was partly about international relations of food, and partly about the world food economy. Regulation of the food regime both underpinned and reflected changing balances of power among states, organized national lobbies, classes—farmers, workers, peasants—and capital” (1993: 31). 3. By 1969 the US had spent “$2.2 billion in economic and military assistance into Thailand” (McMahon 1999: 172), constituting infrastructural projects, arms and military-grade training for Thai police, and galvanising anti-­ communist crackdowns and power grabs (see Fineman 1997: 122–3, 152–4). 4. Several peripheral nations became more, not less, dependent on food imports after World War II, having previously experienced food self-­ sufficiency (Friedmann 1993: 38). 5. Several critics query how influential this movement was (Phillips 1987: fn. 30, 75; Platt 2013: 62–9), with writers like Korbjitti and Srinawk sympathetic to, but withholding full aesthetic identification with, the tenets of ‘Literature for Life’. 6. Thailand’s Northeast region is known colloquially as “panha Isan” or the “Northeastern problem” (Keyes 2014: 28), because of its difficult environmental conditions, political rebellions, underdevelopment, and migration (Keyes 2014: loc. 28; Uhlig 1995: 130). 7. This tale presages the popularity of the 1965 song “Phuujaj Lii” or “Headman Lii” about a headman directing his villagers to follow new governmental policies in raising ducks and pigs—an instruction that leads to humorous mistranslations of pigs as “‘ordinary little dogs’” (Phillips 1987: 234–5). 8. This legacy continues with non-profits reporting that 70–90% of sex workers in popular tourist areas of Bangkok and Pattaya are from Isaan (Wittman 2011: 22).

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9. Fliers denouncing student and farmer protestors as communists appeared in villages (Haberkorn 2008: 20–21); and radio and television broadcasts promoted the slogan of “‘Right Kill Left’”, portraying protestors as “‘burdens on the land’” (Anderson  and Mendiones 1985: 39). “Nak Phaeaendin” or the “Scum of the Earth” was a right-wing song played constantly on Thai radio during this period (Phillips 1987: 328–332). Increasingly, farmer activists were assassinated or disappeared. The threat posed by groups like the Communist Party of Thailand was overstated— located in Isaan’s mountains, their numbers were in the low thousands, and they were mostly a Beijing propaganda tool and response to American interference (Kislenko 2004), but they attracted a strong following amongst Northeasterners who suffered at the hands of military forces and corrupt bureaucracies (Keyes 2010: 23). 10. In Thai Buddhist bodily beliefs the head is sacred, but the feet are regarded as lowly. 11. Additionally, North and Northeastern regions are uxorilocal—in marriage men live with their wife’s family—and land shortages meant that families often sought to restrict marriages by daughters through phi ka accusations (Ganjanapan 1984: 327). More recently, phi ka have found national popularity in soap operas and in fears surrounding challenges to traditional gender roles by migrant female labourers (Mills 1995: 263). 12. See also Minfong Ho’s 1986 children’s historical novel which is about Northern farmer-activists, Rice Without Rain (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books); and Pira Sudham’s 2014 short story collection It Is the People: of Thailand and other countries (ShireAsia: Bangkok), with its indictment of poor rental laws, World Bank–funded dam projects, and volatile rice prices. 13. For further reading on a new generation of Thai authors who are reconfiguring the social realism of ‘Literature for Life’, see Word Without Borders, Thailand special issue, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/issue/ november-­2016-­thailand; and the work of Sheffield-based publisher Titled Axis Press, which specialises in translating Asian fiction, and has published work by Thai authors like Prabda Yoon and Duanwad Pimwana.

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Keyes, Charles F. 1967. Bān Nông Tün: A Central Isan Village. Unpublished Paper. https://www.academia.edu/9192950/B%C4%81n_N%C3%B4ng_ T%C3%BCn_A_Central_Isan_Village. ———. 2010. Opening Reflections: Northeastern Thai Ethnoregionalism Updated. In Tracks and Traces: Thailand and the Work of Andrew Turton, ed. Philip Hirsch and Nicholas Tapp, 17–28. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2014. Finding Their Voice: Northeastern Villagers and the Thai State. Bangkok: Silkworm Press. Kislenko, Arne. 2004. A Not So Silent Partner: Thailand’s Role in Covert Operations, Counter-Insurgency and the Wars in Indochina. Journal of Conflict Studies 24 (1): 1–19. Korbjitti, Chart. 2010. A Baker’s Dozen: 13 Thai Short Stories. Trans. Marcel Barang. Bangkok: Éditions Immatérielles & ThaiFiction Publishing. Löwy, Michael. 2007. The Current of Critical Irrealism: “A moonlit enchanted night”. In Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont, 211–224. Malden: Blackwell. Lyttleton, Chris. 1994. The Good People of Isan: Commercial Sex in Northeast Thailand. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 5 (1–2): 257–279. McMahon, Robert J. 1999. The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War I. New York: Columbia University Press. McMichael, Philip. 2009. A Food Regime Genealogy. The Journal of Peasant Studies 36 (1): 139–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150902820354. Mills, Mary Beth. 1995. Attack of the Widow Ghosts: Gender, Death, and Modernity in Northeast Thailand. In Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, ed. Aihwa Ong and Michael G.  Peletz, 244–273. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ———. 1999. Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Niblett, Michael. 2012. World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 16 (Summer): 15–30. Ozea, Matthew J. 2008. Thai Literature at the Crossroads of Modernity: Advancing a Critique of Neo-Liberal Development Though the Writings of Khamsing Srinawk and Chart Korbjitti. Masters of Arts, Ohio University, Ohio. Parry, Benita. 2009. Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms. Ariel 40: 27–55. Phillips, Herbert P, in association with Vinita Atmiyanandana Lawler, Amnuaycaj Patipat, Likhit Dhiravegin. 1987. Modern Thai Literature: With an Ethnographic Interpretation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Platt, Martin B. 2013. Isan Writers, Thai Literature: Writing and Regionalism in Modern Thailand. Singapore: NUS Press.

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Prokati, Kittisak. 2009. Thailand: The “October Movement” and the Transformation to Democracy. In 1968: Memories and Legacies of a Global Revolt, ed. Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke, 99–102. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute. Saowaphong, Seni. 1999. Ghosts: A Thai Novel. Trans. Marcel Barang. 1957. Peesart. Bangkok: Thaifiction Publishing. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Stanford: Yale University Press. Srinawk, Khamsing. 2001. The Politician and Other Stories. Trans. Domnern Garden and Herbert P. Phillips. 3rd ed. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Uhlig, Harald. 1995. The “Problem-Region” Northeastern Thailand. In Regions and National Integration in Thailand, 1892–1992, ed. Volker Grabowsky, 130–144. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Warwick Research Collective. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Williams, China, Mark Beales, Tim Bewer, and Celeste Brash. 2012. Thailand. 14th ed. London: Lonely Planet Publications. Wittman, Cori. 2011. From Rice Fields to Red Light Districts: An Economic Examination of Factors Motivating Employment in Thailand’s Sex Industry. Master of Agribusiness, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. Yotopoulos, Pan A., and Kamphol Adulavidhaya. 1975. The Green Revolution in Thailand: With a Bang Or With a Whimper? Stanford: Food Research Institute, Stanford University.

CHAPTER 7

Fleeing Ilex Paraguariensis: Yerba Mate Plantations in Horacio Quiroga and Augusto Roa Bastos Axel Pérez Trujillo

Jesuit historian José Guevara tells of the outburst in 1592 of the newly appointed Governor of Paraguay, Hernando Arias de Saavedra, during which he burned a bag of the “yerba from Paraguay” in a public plaza in Buenos Aires after seeing the Guaraní transporting the crop downriver to be delivered to the capital of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata (Guevara 1836). Disgusted with the miseries of the indigenous population as labourers, the governor warned that “this yerba would be the ruin of your nation.”1 Ambiguous yet powerful, his fateful words have echoed throughout the history of a region shaped by the exploitation and harvesting of a plant known to the Guaraní as ka’a—although it is now most commonly referred to as yerba mate in South America.2 Interestingly, Saavedra already

A. Pérez Trujillo (*) School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Durham, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_7

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acknowledged the Guaraní term for the plant during his years as Governor of Paraguay, years in which he made efforts to control the cultivation of this native plant, which can only be found in the temperate latitudes shared between Paraguay, the northern province of Misiones in Argentina, and the states of Paraná and Mato Grosso in Brazil. In this chapter, I will explore the history of the extraction and harvesting of yerba mate as an export commodity in the densely wooded areas between Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. I will do so through the literary imaginaries of two important writers: the Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937) and the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos (1917–2005). Both authors penned texts depicting the impact of settler plantations on Guaraní populations well into the twentieth century, especially in regard to the conditions of semi-slavery experienced by indigenous labourers, who were commonly known as “mensú,” the Spanish apocope for “mensual” or “worker on a monthly stipend.” The mensú were primarily hired for the seasonal extraction and harvesting of mate in plantations or yerbales. Quiroga writes from first-hand experience, having himself been a plantation owner at the beginning of the twentieth century in the city of San Ignacio, located in the modern-day province of Misiones in Argentina. Leonor Fleming suggests that it is in the ranch of Misiones that Quiroga came into contact with the “exploited peons of labor and yerbales that he transforms into the protagonists of ‘Los Mensú’ or ‘La bofetada’” (Fleming  2012: 80; see also Reck 1966: 5). Roa Bastos also had direct experience of mate plantations, most likely when working as a young columnist for El País in Asunción, Paraguay, between 1936 and 1945 (Weldt-­ Basson 2010: 2). A fictionalized account of his experiences appears in one of his unpublished short stories that was later included in the posthumous collection Cuentos completos (2008) under the title “Chico-Coá,” a semi-­ autobiographical story in which the narrator tells of his encounter with a young plantation boy: “My articles for the newspaper in Asunción on yerbales and labour in the southeast were never published, and I was already fully yielding to the irresistible fascination of the jungle” (Roa Bastos 2008: 533). Yet it is in Hijo de Hombre (1960) that Roa Bastos, inspired by the earlier work of Rafael Barrett in Lo que son los yerbales (1910), offers a scathing portrayal of mate plantations. The transformation of mate into an international cash-crop and the exploitation of labourers carrying hundreds of kilograms of its leaves for landowners to sell at a profit is an important theme in the early writings of Quiroga and Roa Bastos, one that has not garnered much attention from scholars.

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The history of yerba mate—especially as it appears in the fictions of Quiroga and Roa Bastos—reflects what Jason Moore terms capitalism’s “commodity frontier strategy” (Moore 2011: 19). Mensú labourers were precariously employed to quickly harvest mate to be sent downriver to Buenos Aires in a rapidly shifting export market driven by the large potential gains of plantation owners. In Paraguay, for example, national production of mate went from 980,000 kg in 1854 to 18,000,000 kg in 1929 (La yerba mate 1933: 13; Linhares 1969: 49). Bearing out Moore’s description of capitalism as an ecological regime, the rapid expansion and subsequent exhaustion of mate production in the period 1870–1930 coincided with the greater penetration of metropolitan imperialist interests into Latin American nations. Under this new economic imperialism, the mate plant became an international commodity and the mensú an exploited labour force, “reordering the totality of the nature-society dialectic” (Moore 2011: 18). Central to the reorganization of mate agriculture was what Moore calls the dialectical relationship between “Cheap Nature” and “Cheap Labour” (Moore 2016: 99). As we will see, this dialectic is clearly present in the writings of Quiroga and Roa Bastos which portray the duality of mate harvesting as a process that transforms nature into a commodity and labourers into semi-slaves caught within the capitalist ecology of the extraction zone.3 In what follows, I focus specifically on the portrayal of yerbales and mensú labourers in Roa Bastos’ “Exodo” (from Hijo de Hombre [1960]) and in two of Quiroga’s journalistic articles about Misiones, “El oro vegetal” (1912) and “El cultivo de la yerba mate” (1920), as well as his short story “Los Mensú” (1914). Each of the texts offers an invaluable entry into the necrophiliac capitalist-ecology of mate harvesting and extraction under the pressure to export the plant as an international commodity, a pressure that transforms mensú labourers into diseased creatures willing to risk everything—even their lives—to escape the yerbales.

Yerba Mate as an Export Commodity In Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby reminds us that the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers set out to construct “new versions of Europe out of suitable real estate” in the Americas, a process involving a “biological expansion” related to the influx of flora carried on the colonizers’ ships (Crosby 1986: 102). The encounter with yerba mate, however, represents a clear example of the attempt by colonizers at exploiting and

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domesticating an indigenous plant with the sole purpose of turning it into a commodity to be sold in international markets. The first exploitation of the mate trees by Spaniards—before the arrival of Jesuit and Franciscan orders—involved labourers cutting up the entire tree to sell its leaves downstream in Bueno Aires, an invasive method of resource extraction that ignored the practices of the Guaraní (Corrêa Filho 1957: 3). It was with the arrival of the Jesuits that an attempt was made to cultivate the mate trees within the missions alongside the Guaraní, a shift that launched the spread of mate harvesting throughout Paraguay. So popular was cultivated mate that it became a sought-after commodity not only by Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, but also Guaraní communities in the Chaco region. As Moore explains, such initial appropriations of “cheap natures” in capitalist ecologies involved “quite conscious colonial strategies to reorganize indigenous populations into strategic hamlets that functioned as labour reserves” (2015: 70). The Jesuits were responsible for organizing the Guaraní into a labour force dedicated to the harvest of yerbales, a labour force that would later be known to plantation owners as mensú workers. As Macarena Gómez-­ Barris argues, these are some of the first “extractive zones” in South America: “during the Jesuit restructuring of land in Paraguay throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Guaraní dwellings were organized to keep maximum control over the forcibly settled population, as well as expand monocultural production” (Gómez-Barris 2017: 7). The Jesuits established a monopoly on the mate industry that lasted for more than a century, before they were expelled from the Americas in 1767 and the viceroyal government under Dr. Francisco Bucareli took control of the plantations (Corrêa Filho 1957: 7). The period from the 1780s to 1816 was a “Golden Age” for mate production in the Upper Plata region, with “the port of Asunción, for example, register[ing] an export of nearly two million arrobas of yerba mate” in a single year (Whigham 2018: 20). European settlers rushed to make a profit out of yerba mate, employing new techniques to mass-produce the crop as an export commodity from the 1820s onwards (Linhares 1969: 171; Corrêa Filho 1957: 18). This period saw the establishment of large plantations by La Industrial Paraguaya (Paraguay) and Mate Laranjeira (Brazil). According to Linhares, the incorporation of steam engines and new industrial techniques to dry the mate leaves in large quantities began a new “golden phase” of production in the region in around 1875 (Linhares 1969: 172).4 It is this transformation of the exploitation of mate that runs through many of the short

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stories by Quiroga, who, after installing himself in San Ignacio in 1906, established the association La Yabebirí dedicated to the commercial planting of mate (Ruffinelli 1971: 13). Quiroga offers an invaluable description of these new modes of harvesting mate early in the twentieth century in his article “El oro vegetal” (1912): Las operaciones para la utilización del producto continúan siendo las mismas de los tiempos primitivos. La más curiosa y la primera de todas, es la “safecación”, que consiste en exponer la rama cortada a la llama durante algunos segundos. Sin este requisito, las hojas ennegrecerían al ser secadas, con la consiguiente descomposición de la yerba. Mientras se estudia el por qué del fenómeno, se ha dado un paso adelante, sustituyendo a la vieja maniobra de safecar rama a rama, la operación en bloque, efectuada en grandes cilindros de alambre tejido, girando, exactamente como una tostadora de café, sobre un fuego vivo. (Quiroga 1971a: 32) [The procedures for the consumption of the product continue being the same as in primitive times. The most curious and first of all is the “drying,” which consists in exposing the cut branch to a flame for a few seconds. Without this requisite, the leaves will blacken while dehydrating, eventually leading to the decomposition of the yerba. While the reasons behind the phenomenon are studied, a step forward has been taken, substituting the old procedure of drying branch by branch with a large-scale operation that takes place in large cylinders of woven wires as they rotate, exactly as the roasting of coffee, over a fire.]

Quiroga’s entrepreneurial enthusiasm for the streamlining of the production of mate echoes the emergence of the yerba fever in the region as pioneers rushed to set up their plantations (Quiroga 1968: 133; 1971a, 33). His interest in new modes of mate production is intimately linked to what Beatriz Sarlo calls his “technical imagination”: “Occupational know-­ how probably figured in almost all of Quiroga’s escapades, from his first cotton business in Chaco Austral to the more or less exotic botanical gardens that he managed to plant, graft, and hybridise toward the end of his stay in San Ignacio, Misiones” (Sarlo 2008:15). Quiroga’s letters from 1911 until 1931 bear witness to his interest in making his yerba plantations profitable under the pressure of rapidly changing market conditions. Moreover, they document the difficulties small plantation owners faced as a result of competition from large corporations. If when he wrote “El oro vegetal” he was still eager to enter into the business of growing and selling mate, by 1930 Quiroga was disappointed with the predominance of large

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plantations and capitalists. In a letter to his neighbour in San Ignacio, Isidoro Escalera, dated March 26, 1930, Quiroga writes the following: “Here we also do not know what will be of the yerba market. What is certain is that the big fish will always win, and the smaller will lose” (Quiroga 2010: 395).

Dialectics of Yerbales and Mensú in the work of Horacio Quiroga Quiroga experienced first-hand life in the Argentine provinces of Chaco and Misiones, having lived both in the outskirts of the city Resistencia, located near the Paraná river as it descends into Argentina from Paraguay, and in San Ignacio, a former Jesuit mission located further upriver on the opposite shore of the Paraná river. He first travelled to the San Ignacio mission in 1903 with Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugonés. The pair were involved in a research initiative concerning Jesuit ruins, which was promoted by the Ministry of Public Instruction in Argentina (Jitrik 1967: 21). Accompanying Lugonés, Quiroga would photograph the ruins and landscape of the region, whilst also visiting other cities such as Posadas during the trip. He was so impressed by what he had experienced that a year later, investing all of his inheritance, he decided to buy a piece of land near the city of Resistencia and dedicated himself to the harvesting of cotton, a crop whose production in the northern provinces of Argentina began to be encouraged by British capitalists and the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture in the early twentieth century (McCutcheon McBride 1920: 48). The cotton-planting endeavour by Quiroga failed, and he was forced to return to Buenos Aires in July of 1905. Undaunted, he eventually installed himself with his family in the mission of San Ignacio in 1910. Embracing all the hardships of living far from the urban centres in which he had spent his early life, he dedicated himself to planting yerba mate on his estate. His work reflects his ambivalent position as both a participant in the capitalist ecology of the plantation complex and a critic of the cruelty involved in the intensive harvest of cotton, wood, and especially yerba mate. As a small landowner, he simultaneously participated in the mate economy and suffered as a result of the competitive capitalist logic of larger international corporations. His outlook on the commodification of mate in the region changed from an initial enthusiastic approach to its

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harvest (as seen in “El oro vegetal”) to a later disillusioned scepticism of the entire mate industry (evident in his article “El cultivo de la yerba mate,” from 1920). A similar transition takes place in his short-story depictions of the mensú labourers. The portrayal of these workers primarily focused on mate harvesting and wood logging is negative in “Los Mensú” (1914) and gradually shifts to a more compassionate understanding of them in “Un peón” (1918) and “Los desterrados” (1925). This shift can also be appreciated in his letters, many of which contain glimpses into his administration of the mate plantation he owned. The countless letters he sent to his neighbour Isidoro Escalera, who would administer the San Ignacio ranch while Quiroga was away, manifest his growing critique of the whole industry. On April 25, 1930, for example, Quiroga expresses his discontent to Escalera, writing that “this issue of the yerba does not look to improve, as you may have seen in newspapers. I understand that the product will not be protected, since it is about opening new markets” (Quiroga 2010: 397). Unable to keep up with the market prices set by the big mate corporations, Quiroga gradually perceived the darker side of the commodification of the plant and its impact on those labouring in the fields. One important aspect to keep in mind concerning Quiroga’s depiction of the “cheap labour” at work in the mate fields is that the mensú— although primarily linked to yerbales—would also be employed in logging enterprises. This dual employment of the mensú is due to the seasonal aspect of mate harvesting and the mensú’s skill with the machete and axe, two tools that are essential to yerba mate and tree-logging industries. The harvesting cycle of mate takes place late in the summer, when the leaves of the tree have fully matured and can be extracted using the machete (Corrêa Filho 1957: 18). When the mensú are not employed in harvesting or clearing the mate plantations, they would most likely work for logging companies. Quiroga himself identifies the use of the machete and axe as a skill that is pivotal in yerbales: “The machete was not sufficient sometimes, depending on how thick and admirable the plant; and they would then use the axe, leaving a tree filled with riches that had required dozens of years to reach its full development […] annihilated forever” (“Quiroga 1971a: 29). In fact, harvesting mate is initially not so different from logging, insofar as both activities require the physical cutting of trees. In all of Quiroga’s short stories, this duality is present in the depiction of the labourers. From “Los Mensú” to “Los pescadores de vigas,”5 “Un peón,” and “Los desterrados,” labourers are always doubling between harvesting

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mate and logging without a clear-cut distinction being made in the narratives. Jennifer L. French argues that “the classic Misiones stories [Quiroga] writes from 1910 on will consistently contrast the exploitative practices of the region’s large-scale logging and Yerba mate industries with the more modest challenges of isolated pioneers” (French 2005: 42). In an article published in La Nación in 1920, titled “Tres impresiones sobre el cultivo de la yerba mate,” Quiroga provides the following description of a mate plantation: El que estas líneas escribe conserva vivísima la impresión sufrida al ver por primera vez una joven plantación de yerba. En pleno bosque subtropical, y en el vasto espacio de dos hectáreas, el monte había sido totalmente echado abajo. No había regido la más remota previsión en el desmonte: los árboles yacían tumbados, aplastados a ras de tierra o montados sobre los troncos vecinos, en formidable desorden; pues no hay nada que dé más idea de un cataclismo que el desplome de un monte entero, como si de golpe el suelo hubiera faltado. (Quiroga 1971b: 77) [He who writes these lines retains the very vivid impression suffered when seeing for the first time a new plantation of yerba. In the middle of a subtropical forest, and in the vast space of two hectares, the hill had been completely taken down. There had not been the slightest foresight in the cutting down of the wooded area: the trees lay felled, smashed against the ground or piled on nearby tree trunks, in a formidable disorder; for there is nothing else that could give a clearer idea of the cataclysm than the collapse of the entire hill, as if suddenly the ground had given way.]

Here, Quiroga highlights the ecological devastation caused by mate production and portrays the scene as a “cataclysm” in which the ground seems to have “given way” and trees have fallen down, “smashed on the ground or piled on nearby tree trunks.” He is impressed by the sheer scale of the destruction that has systematically occurred in the plantation and contrasts the “abundance of the woods” with the decimation before him (Quiroga 1971b: 77). The beginning of the article sets the tone of surprise, as if Quiroga was not expecting to find what he encounters. Startled, he asks: “What objective could that systematic, cold, and sterile destruction have?” (Quiroga 1971b: 78). He portrays the plantation as lifeless, as a place cut down by the machete and axe—a land broken by the harvesting of mate without the “slightest foresight.” This contrasts with his earlier

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article “El oro vegetal,” where he concludes that “[t]he perfect adaptability of the land in Misiones to its [yerba mate] harvest; the robustness of the plant […] its great economic profitability, and the final distribution of the product, are more than enough reason for the aforementioned enthusiasm” (Quiroga 1971a: 33). After a decade as a small landowner, Quiroga had become acutely conscious of the unequal dynamics of capital accumulation in the mate industry, an industry in which the “big fish always win” (Quiroga 2010: 395). In “Tres impresiones sobre el cultivo de la yerba mate,” he paints a picture of large-scale mate monoculture as an “ignorant and sordid economy” (Quiroga 1971b: 79), making visible the deleterious local consequences of international market demand. Readers of Quiroga’s short stories will notice both the article’s lack of emphasis on the experience of human labour and the passive role that non-human nature seems to play in the depictions of the plantation. This is typical of the articles Quiroga produced about Misiones and the mate plantations, which tend to focus on the exploitation of “cheap nature” more than on the workers tasked with carrying out that exploitation. Thus, for example, in “El cultivo de la yerba mate,” the undergrowth is referred to in the diminutive as “thin little green plants” (“delgadas plantitas verdes”), emphasizing the fragility of the flora in the surrounding hills (Quiroga 1971b: 78). The yerbales are portrayed as suffocating the “tender” life of plants crushed by fallen branches. The entire article plays on the binary between the fragile native flora and the harvesting methods of the plantation. Disrupting the budding life of the forest, the imposed method of harvesting is seen as a scourge. The transformation of the mate leaves into a commodity involves treating the “tender little plants for ten days with quicklime” (Quiroga 1971b: 82). By emphasizing the vulnerability of the plant, the text anthropomorphically figures the chemical treatment as torture against a living being. The recurrent use of the diminutive channels the precariousness of life in the form of mate as it is cut, crushed, and bleached to be sold elsewhere. When the “cow-boy” administrator is questioned by Quiroga, the conversation turns on the possibilities of disease affecting the “little plants” being harvested: “The technical director—a distinguished young businessman—began laughing for a long while, saying that he was not going to waste the money of his business in scientific rubbish, and that when the epidemic should present itself, he would worry about using the capital in practical things” (Quiroga 1971b: 79). For Quiroga, the perverse logic of the intense harvesting of mate is necrophiliac in its devouring of the flora it seeks to produce as a

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commodity. Organic life is gradually stripped away, layer by layer. The ecology of the mate plantation is one of disruption and chaos, the disorderly effacing of the wooded area of the hills. Quiroga addresses the other element in the dialectic between “cheap nature” and “cheap labour” in several of his short stories. The theme of “cheap labour” appears most prominently in “Los Mensú” (1914), published in the magazine Fray Mocho. The story follows the failed escape of two mensú labourers—Cayetano Maidana and Esteban Podeley—from an extraction zone in the vicinity of the city of Posadas in Misiones. The language used by the first mensú, Cayé, seems to signal Guaraní ethnicity. His use of the interjection “Añá” (the Guaraní voice for “devil” or “evil”) or the reference to “yoparás” (the Guaraní voice for “mix” or “mixture”) suggests his knowledge of the Guaraní language and culture (Quiroga 2012:  146, 149). Podeley, in contrast, seems to be Argentine or Uruguayan, especially in his use of the “Vos tenés” expression (Quiroga 2012: 146). As with other characters in Quiroga’s fictions, the labourers manifest the mixing of languages and ethnicities brought together under the capitalist ecology of the region. Charlotte Rogers, however, suggests that the story concerns “monthly labourers” as “they are virtually enslaved to the rubber companies by their large debts” (Rogers 2016: 1056). Although I agree with Rogers on the centrality of semi-slavery in the narrative, I think it difficult to sustain that the extraction taking place is that of “rubber.” The geographical axis of the story is the Paraná river, which connects the extraction zone with the city of Posadas. No rubber exploitation took place in this region, and Quiroga makes no mention of such local industry in his correspondence. Moreover, no specific reference is made to rubber extraction in the short story. The fact that Rogers directly translates “mensú” as “monthly labourers” also effaces the significant link between the Guaraní and their semi-­ slavery as labourers in yerbales. Quiroga was keenly aware of this link when he chose the title of the short story, as demonstrated in a letter he wrote in 1917: “That was a yerbatero camp of the High Paraná, with eighteen or twenty peons—both men and women—with their dogs and guitars. […] A mensú, white and with a face like a gipsy, carries a handkerchief on his head” (Quiroga 2010: 325). Often the terms “peon” and “mensú” are interchangeable in Quiroga’s short stories, but they are also always linked to the “labour” of either logging or mate harvesting, both industries being predominant at the time.

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In “Los Mensú,” the reader is confronted with the costs borne by the labourers on the mate plantations as a result of their back-breaking toil carrying branches of trees to be weighed and then processed. The narrative emphasizes the degree to which the logic of commodification saturates every social relation in the extraction zone. Thus, the relationship of the story’s protagonists, Cayé and Podeley, to the women they encounter is refracted through the reifying optic of exchange value. Cayé, for example, looking at the “girl” and the “revolver” he has acquired while in the provincial capital Posadas concludes that “they were the only thing of value that he had” (Quiroga 2012: 147; my emphasis). Human life and material objects are rendered as mere equivalents in the extraction zone— as nothing more than goods to be used up. Interestingly, the tone of the narrator oscillates between sympathy and approbation towards the mensú and their behaviour. At times the Guaraní labourers are seen as immoral in the way they spend their money in Posadas, always willing to waste all of it on drinking: “the only thing that a mensú really possesses is a brutal disregard of their money” (Quiroga 2012: 145). The narrator even goes so far as to suggest that the vicious cycle in which these men find themselves is due to the “constant squandering” of their meagre salary (Quiroga 2012: 146). They are, it is implied, voluntary victims of a system that exploits them. French suggests that the ambivalent tone of the narrator in Quiroga’s short stories is due to the role of British colonial discourse in the author’s formation, a discourse that he gradually rebels against, opening “up the more limited structures of colonial literature” (French  2005: 42). An avid reader of Rudyard Kipling, Quiroga thus frames his stories—especially those that are set in extractive zones—through colonial tropes, all the while attempting to break free from them. After returning from the several days between contracts in Posadas, both protagonists become aware of the vicious circle they find themselves in, one in which they can never pay back their debt to the plantation owner. Following some thoughtful consideration, Cayé realizes that the only solution is to escape the plantation. “And from that moment onwards, he had the simple idea of escaping from there—as a fair punishment for his squandering” (Quiroga 2012: 146). Notice again the judgmental tone of the narrator, who sees the “escape” as “a fair punishment.” The narrator interprets the labourers’ fleeing from the extraction zone as a “punishment.” Yet this judgement is problematized by the depiction of the living conditions of the workers. Labourers up on the hills are obliged to survive

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on “flour, dried meat, and lard” for breakfast, and “beans and corn” for both lunch and dinner (Quiroga 2012: 148). Cayé insists that his escape is motivated because he is “sick and tired of revirados and yoparás” (Quiroga 2012: 149). A “revirado” or “mate revirado” is a Spanish term that refers to reused yerba for preparing mate, similar to using the same tea leaves over and over in each preparation. A “yopará” comes from the Guaraní voice and negatively refers to the mix of previously used ingredients, as is the case with the reusing of the beans and corn for the meals of the mensú. If at times, then, the narratorial consciousness is inflected by a form of colonial discourse that construes the labourers’ problems as the product of their own shortcomings, the narrative presentation of the Guaraní mensú lays the emphasis on the exhaustive modes of life- and environment-making through which the mate extraction zone operates. Perhaps the clearest indictment of the deleterious ecology of yerba mate monoculture takes place in the conversation between the overseer and Podeley. Feeling very sick, the mensú asks the overseer whether he could return to Posadas to rest until he feels better: El mayordomo contempló aquella ruina, y no estimó en gran cosa la vida que quedaba allí. —¿Cómo está tu cuenta? — preguntó otra vez. —Debo veinte pesos todavía… El sábado entregué… Me hallo muy enfermo… —Sabés bien que mientras tu cuenta no esté pagada, debés quedar. Abajo… podés morirte. Curate aquí, y arreglás tu cuenta enseguida. ¿Curarse de una fiebre perniciosa allí donde se la adquirió? No, por cierto; pero el mensú que se va puede no volver y el mayordomo prefería hombre muerto a deudor lejano. (Quiroga 2012: 152) [The overseer contemplated the human ruin before him, and did not much value the life that remained there. “How is your debt?” He asked again. “I owe twenty pesos still. … Last Saturday I delivered. … I am very sick…” “You know full well that while you still owe money, you must stay. Down there … you could die. Get better here, and you will pay your debt quickly.” Heal himself from a pernicious fever in the same place where he had gotten it? No, not really; but the mensú who leaves may not return, and the overseer preferred a dead man to a distant debtor.]

The response made by the overseer is testimony to the necrophiliac ecology of the plantation. He would rather have “a dead man to a distant

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debtor.” Yerba mate as a commodity is far more valuable than the life of a mensú. The steward’s words express the logic of “informal imperialism” insofar as “the internationalist capitalist market” dominates his understanding of the role of labourers (French 2005: 38). Moreover, this “commodification of nature” generates “spectral objects, integrated into neither ecological nor economic systems” (Menely and Ronda 2013: 32). The capitalist ecology of yerba mate plantations in Quiroga empties of value the ecosystem that makes possible its commodification, both the native flora and the indigenous inhabitants who are forced into semi-slavery as monthly labourers. Instead, a death-dealing logic structures the ecology of the plantation. Plants are crushed and bleached, while the mensú, valued only for their ability to perform work, are used up and spat out as waste. The conclusion of “Los Mensú” emphasizes the all-consuming logic of terror that characterizes the mate extraction zone: Cayé’s and Podeley’s attempt to escape ends in failure, and as Podeley lies dead in the waters of the Paraná river, Cayé is returned by boat to Posadas, “still suffering nightmares” (Quiroga 2012: 156).

Fleeing Yerbales in Augusto Roa Bastos The role of history is central to many of Augusto Roa Bastos’ novels and poems, and his Hijo de Hombre engages directly with what Hugo Rodríguez Alcalá calls the “intrahistory of Paraguay” through a series of nine episodes that reach up to the end of the Chaco War in 1935 (Rodríguez Alcalá 1973: 69). Each episode is a self-contained chapter, a single story within the book. Like the ruinous landscape of Paraguay after the war, the narrative structure is fragmented into the different tragic stories of the people involved. A polyphony of voices echoes through the book. Roa Bastos supplemented the revised edition of 1982—an edition that included a whole new chapter titled “Madera Quemada”—with an “Author’s Note” that suggests how the piecing together of different episodes in the book tells of “the strange and tragic events of [Paraguay’s] historic and social life” (Roa Bastos  2011:  29). Paraguayan history is retold as a sequence of “tragic” moments engraved in different sites throughout the nation. Roa Bastos is personally invested in such a retelling, as is underlined by the quotation from W.  B. Yeats he uses as the epigraph to the first chapter, which reiterates the intimate link between the author and the content of the book, the “intrahistory” of Paraguay: “Cuando retoco mis obras es a mí a quien retoco” (“When I revise my

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work, it is I whom I revise”; Roa Bastos 2011: 33). Roa Bastos is complicit in that relation between author, text, and nation in many of his novels, but more so in Hijo de Hombre, which reads as a historiographical and fragmentary account of individuals caught in the tragedies of the nation. In Jennifer L. French’s important article “‘Letras Terribles’: Mourning and Reparation in Two Poems by Augusto Roa Bastos,” she discusses the links between some of Roa Bastos’ earlier poems and his later fiction, especially El fiscal (1993). Her analysis brings to the forefront that “the fundamental theoretical problem is trauma, specifically the long aftermath of the massive collective trauma that was the Triple Alliance War” (French 2019: 171). The particular episode I will analyse in Hijo de Hombre is one iteration of this trauma after the Triple Alliance War (1864–1870), one of the consequences of which for Paraguay was the loss of the yerba mate monopoly that Dictator Francia and later Carlos Antonio López had struggled to build (Whigham 2017: 68; Linhares 1969: 149). As an international commodity, the rise in production of yerba mate in Brazil began to eclipse that of Paraguay precisely from 1860 to 1870, and it is the end of the war that is considered the starting point of the third cycle of mate harvesting and exportation in the region—with Brazil in the lead due in part to the establishment of the Companhia Mate Laranjeira in Mato Grosso by the Brazilian who pioneered mate monoculture, Tomás Laranjeira (Linhares 1969: 151, 168). A wave of Brazilian exports flooded the markets in Argentina and Uruguay, wiping out Paraguay’s hegemony in the production of the crop as a transnational commodity. Erected as a national symbol, yerba mate often plays into nationalist discourse in Paraguay up to the twentieth century. Take, for example, the claim “that Paraguayan yerba mate was better than that of Argentinean and Brazilian producers” made by Manuel Rodríguez in his report on soldiers’ diets for the Ministry of War and Marine in 1931 (Gomez Florentin 2016: 149). The annexation of large swaths of Paraguayan land following a “secret” agreement between Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay—the Triple Alliance Treaty of May 1, 1865—was one of the most controversial aspects of the war (Whigham 2018: 45). It was in those lands annexed by Brazil that the Companhia Mate Laranjeira began its operations as a monopoly under the decree no. 436 C on the July 4, 1891 (Linhares 1969: 151). To exorcise this national trauma, argues French in her analysis, Roa Bastos revisits a mate plantation in “Exodus,” the fourth episode of Hijo de Hombre (Roa Bastos 2011:125). Characterized by the biblical undertone that recurs throughout the book, the episode follows the flight from

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the plantation of the mensú family—comprised of Natí, Casiano, and their son—through the Chaco woodlands in an attempt to cross over to Brazil. They are being pursued by the stewards of a plantation named “Takurú-­ Pukú,” which is described as follows: Takurú-Pukú era, pues, la ciudadela de un país imaginario, amurallado por las grandes selvas del Alto Paraná, por el cinturón de esteros que forman las crecientes, infestados de víboras y fieras, por las altas barrancas de asperón; por el río ancho y enturbionado, por los repentinos diluvios que inundan en un momento el bosque y los bañados con torrenteras rojas como sangre. Pero, sobre todo, por la voluntad e impunidad de los habilitados. Estaban allí para eso. Tenían carta blanca para velar por los intereses de las empresas, aplicando la ley promulgada por el presidente Rivarola, un poco después de la Guerra Grande, “por la prosperidad y progreso de los beneficiadores de yerba y otros ramos de la industria nacional….” (Roa Bastos 2011: 129) [Takurú-Pukú was, thus, a fortress of an imaginary country, walled in by the large forests of the High Paraná river, by the belt of swamps that form the flooded areas, infested by poisonous snakes and beasts, by the high cliffs of limestone; by the wide and turbulent river, by the sudden downpours that flood in a mere moment the woods and wetlands with red as blood torrents. But, more importantly, by the will and impunity of the stewards. They were there for that. They had the sole authority to defend the interests of companies, executing the law issued by president Rivarola, sometime after the Great War, “for the prosperity and progress of those that would benefit from yerba and other branches of the national industry.”]

The name “Takurú-Pukú” is derived from the Guaraní voice “takurú” (a native species of termite in the region) and “pukú” (long), making the yerba mate plantation a “long termite mound” on which Guaraní labourers toil incessantly, dehumanized by the stewards of the plantation. The images used to portray the land on which the plantation is located are haunting and violent. As a “fortress” or prison, the plantation is sealed off from intrusion and prevents escape. It is the environment that walls in the plantation, be it through “high cliffs,” “swamps,” or the “Alto Paraná.” Nature literally encroaches upon the plantation on all sides. Particularly relevant is the simile of the flooded rivers with “red as blood torrents,” since it suggests the bloodshed that takes place in Takurú-Pukú, while also presenting the forest and rivers as a body that suffers the effects of monoculture. The sentence structure builds the crescendo of the simile at its end through the anaphora of “by the” to emphasize the elements that establish the natural walls of the plantation. Triggered by the consecutive

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semicolons, each clause is as a wave or torrent pulsing through the land as it surrounds the yerbal. This image of the surrounding environment as a living body is further reinforced when the narrator explains that the numerous mate plantations owned by La Industrial Paraguaya6 are “as cancerous cysts in the forestal kidney of the republic” (Roa Bastos 2011: 130). The land is bleeding profusely from the cancer that metastasizes in the form of plantations in the middle of the woodlands. Linking the nation as a body whose “forestal kidney” is affected by the “cancerous cysts” of the public limited company that came to be known (a year after the end of the Triple Alliance War) as La Industrial Paraguaya, the passage almost seems nostalgic for the years before the war. In fact, the narrator continues that the plantations “were three centuries away, making them seem idyllic and patriarchal, the delights of the Jesuit empire” (Roa Bastos 2011: 130). In other words, the opening up of Paraguay’s monopoly on yerba mate after the war is contrasted directly with the Jesuit role in founding the country’s yerbales hundreds of years earlier. This nostalgia for the past seems unwarranted, since the Jesuit plantations were not “idyllic,” but rather a systematic approach to the monoculture of yerba mate. As French argues, Roa Bastos here seems to be attempting a “nationalist historiography” as a way to come to grips with Paraguay’s national trauma (French 2019: 155). In this particular episode in Hijo de Hombre, the exorcizing of this trauma manifests itself through the escape of a mensú family from the subsidized plantations held by La Industrial Paraguaya. The commercialization of yerba mate beyond Paraguayan borders becomes a disease afflicting the nation itself, eating away at its organs in the forests. Partially privatizing the production of the native plant, President Rivarola is directly responsible for allowing “those that would benefit from yerba” to do so at the expense of the bloodshed of the Guaraní labourers and the environment. Fleeing from Takurú-Pukú, Natí and Casiano reflect on how the plantation has yet to allow anyone or anything to escape its limits: “The only thing that had managed to escape from Takurú-Pukú were the verses of a ‘composition,’ which on the backs of peasant guitars spoke of the miseries of the mensú, buried alive in the catacombs of the yerbales” (Roa Bastos 2011:  130). Again, a violent image of the plantations is presented, one that depicts them as “catacombs” where the Guaraní are “buried alive.” As in Quiroga’s stories, the monoculture of yerba mate here enacts a desire for death. The ontology of these plantations is built on necrosis—a gangrenous ecology that festers at the heart of the surrounding woodlands.

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Natí’s and Casiano’s escape is not merely an attempt to flee from the plantation, but also an exodus from the deadly logic of the production of yerba mate as a commodity. Yet nobody has ever escaped from Takurú-Pukú, only a song that tells of the tragic fate of the mensú caught in the monoculture prison. Hermetic and boundless, the plantation is portrayed as creating its own totality, as shaping those beings caught inside its ontology: El yerbal era inmenso. Nadie conocía sus límites. Cualquier rincón podía ser el centro. El poder del habilitado Aguileo Coronel se extendía implacable sobre toda la extensión del feudo, a través de mayordomos, capataces y capangas, a lo largo del río, de los esteros de las picadas, de los puestos más lejanos. Del otro lado del Paraná comenzaban los yerbales de las Misiones argentinas. Los mensús paraguayos pensaban en ellos con nostalgia, como los condenados del infierno deben pensar en el Purgatorio. (Roa Bastos 2011: 134) [The yerbal was immense. Nobody knew its limits. Any corner could be its centre. The power of the administrator Aguileo Colonel extended implacably over the entire extension of the fiefdom, through the stewards and foremen, throughout the river, the swamps of valleys, the most remote places. On the other side of the Paraná began the yerbales of the Argentine Missions. The Paraguayan mensús thought about them with nostalgia, as those condemned to hell must consider Purgatory.]

A space without centre, the yerbal is profoundly disorienting. It is so disorienting that nothing can escape from within. A power circuit spreads throughout it, and at the source of it is the administrator. Not unlike Bentham’s notion of the panopticon, the administrator invigilates and disciplines all the labourers inside the plantation. By narrating the escape of Natí and Casiano, Roa Bastos explores how the space occupied by plantations is not only oriented towards the necrosis of living creatures—human and nonhuman—but also suggests the oppressive role of yerbales throughout Paraguay. The escape from the plantation is a rupturing of that perverse totality that eats away at organic beings in the woodlands. Running from the “black earth” of Takurú-Pukú, the mensú protagonists are looking for a means of freeing themselves from the oppressive ontology of the plantation. From the “hell” in which they find themselves, they are trying to find “Purgatory” on the other side of the Paraná river. Theirs is a story of

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transition and transcendence. Unlike Cayé and Podeley in “Los Mensú,” the Guaraní family is able break away from the yerbal, escaping to the other side of the border. As they are pursued throughout the forest, encountering all sorts of obstacles as the administrator hunts them with dogs and Winchester rifles, Casiano considers the moment of rupture from the totality of the plantation that sets up their flight from Aguileo Coronel in the yerbal—the birth of their son: “He looks into the charcoal eyes of Natí as they entangle with that mystery that is germinating within her, the only eternal thing that a man and a woman can accomplish on earth, even if it is in a land of cemetery” (Roa Bastos 2011: 141). The narrative sets the birth of a newborn as the point of departure from the graveyard that is the plantation. Life thus opens a space for escape, no matter how small.

Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed how Quiroga and Roa Bastos portray the capitalist ecology of mate plantations as sites of life-threateningly exhaustive exploitation premised on the relationship between “cheap nature” and “cheap labour.” It is a dialectic that initiates the perverse cycle in which the human and non-human are consumed by the logic of producing an international commodity. I have explored how both writers engage with yerba mate monoculture as a particularly cruel form of harvesting that transforms the mate tree into “cheap nature” whose only value is set by international markets, whilst also only valuing the mensú workers in terms of their capacity for “cheap labour.” That the mate cash-crop failed as an international export commodity towards the middle of the twentieth century testifies to the necrosis inherent in capitalist ecology. Extraction zones and harvests gradually dwindled, leaving behind large swathes of burnt woodlands around the Paraná river. Contemporary production and consumption of mate are now primarily limited to Brazil and Argentina. Quiroga and Roa Bastos are witnesses to the fever of yerba mate production and its decline. Their narratives portray the darker side to yerba mate as a commodity— echoing the words of Hernandarias that open this chapter. For all its seemingly optimistic ending, Roa Bastos’ story of Natí and Casiano strikes a haunting chord when the narrator suggests that Ilex paraguariensis is a “cannibalistic plant, that feeds on human blood and sweat” (Roa Bastos 2011: 139). It is mate as a commodity that is the source of the necrosis. As a commodity, it is an example of the world-ecology of capitalism that has for

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centuries exploited the Paraná river basin and continues to do so to this day through the intensive monoculture of transgenic soy in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the author’s own. 2. When, in the eighteenth century, the French botanist Aimé Bonpland conducted a study into the mate tree, he gave it the scientific name of “Ilex theazans” (which is just one of the numerous species that exist in the region [Giberti 1990: 663]. The tree went on to be classified under the genus “ilex,” thus effacing the indigenous traces of its name. 3. I follow both Jason W. Moore and Macarena Gómez-Barris in my understanding of extraction sites or zones as inherent to capitalist ecologies. If Moore emphasizes how agriculture internalizes capitalist “extraction systems” (Moore 2015: 120), Gómez-Barris defines an “extraction zone” as a site of “extractive capitalism” that “rendered Native populations invisible” and “facilitated the taking of those territories’ resources” (Gómez-­ Barris 2017: 6). 4. It is worth noting that around this time, too, mate was implicated in one of the bloodiest of wars ever to take place in South America: during the Paraguayan War, or the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), large parts of Paraguayan territory—land that held mate plantations—were annexed by Argentina and Brazil in the clandestine Triple Alliance Treaty of May 1, 1865. 5. This short story, published in 1913, exploits the duality in the work of mensú labourers as woodcutting specialists. The indigenous protagonist is hired by the administrator of the Yerba Company to “fish” for a specific type of wood for personal use. It is the protagonist’s skill with the machete that allows him to rapidly cut the ropes that hold together the logs floating downriver (Quiroga 1968:, 131). 6. This corporation was established in 1886  in Paraguay, controlling “more than 2 million hectares in the oriental region and controlled the exploitation and commercialisation of the yerbales of this region” (La empresas transnacionales 1967: 10).

Works Cited Corrêa Filho, Virgílio. 1957. Ervais do Brasil e ervateiros. Rio de Janeiro: Ministerio da Agricultura. Crosby, Alfred. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Fleming, Leonor. 2012. Introducción. In Cuentos, ed. Horacio Quiroga, 13–110. Madrid: Cátedra. French, Jennifer. 2005. Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press. ———. 2019. ‘Letras Terribles’: Mourning and Reparation in Two Poems by Augusto Roa Bastos. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28 (2): 152–177. Giberti, Gustavo. 1990. Bonpland’s Manuscript Name for the Yerba Mate and Ilex Theezans C. Martius ex Reisseck (Aquifoliaceae). Taxon 39 (4): 663–665. Gomez Florentin, Carlos. 2016. Energy and Environment in the Chaco War. In The Chaco War: Environment, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, ed. Bridget María Chesterton, 135–156. London: Bloomsbury. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guevara, José. 1836. Historia del Paraguay, Río de la Plata y Tucumán. Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado. Jitrik, Noe. 1967. Horacio Quiroga: Una obra de experiencia y riesgo. Montevideo: ARCA. La yerba mate: el problema económico y fiscal. 1933. Buenos Aires: Cámara de comercio argentino-brasileña. Las empresas transnacionales en la economía del Paraguay. 1967. Chile: Comisión Económica Para América Latina y el Caribe. Linhares, Temístocles. 1969. História econômica do mate. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympo Editora. McCutcheon McBride, George. 1920. Cotton Growing in South America. Geographical Review 9 (1): 35–50. Menely, Tobias, and Margaret Ronda. 2013. Red. In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 22–41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moore, Jason W. 2011. Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology. The Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (1): 1–46. ———. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. ———. 2016. The Rise of Cheap Nature. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W.  Moore, 78–115. Oakland: PM Press. Quiroga, Horacio. 1968. Los desterrados. In Cuentos, edited by Raimundo Lazo, 133–138. Buenos Aires: Editorial Porrúa. ———. 1971a. El oro vegetal. In La vida en Misiones, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, ed. Ángel Rama, vol. VI, 29–33. Montevideo: ARCA. ———. 1971b. El cultivo de la yerba mate. In La vida en Misiones, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, ed. Ángel Rama, vol. VI, 77–82. Montevideo: ARCA.

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———. 2010. Quiroga íntimo: Correspondencia. Diario de viaje a París. Madrid: Páginas de Espuma. ———. 2012. Los mensú. In Cuentos, ed. Leonor Flemming, 144–156. Madrid: Cátedra. Reck, Hanne Gabriele. 1966. Horacio Quiroga: Biografía y crítica. Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea. Roa Bastos, Augusto. 2008. Cuentos completos. Madrid: Random House Mondadori. ———. 2011. Hijo de hombre. Buenos Aires: Editora Eterna Cadencia. Rodríguez Alcalá, Hugo. 1973. Hijo de hombre, de Roa Bastos y la intrahistoria del Paraguay. In Homenaje a Augusto Roa Bastos: Variaciones interpretativas en torno a su obra, ed. Helmy F. Giacoman, 63–78. Madrid: Anaya. Rogers, Charlotte. 2016. Mario Vargas Llosa and the novela de la selva. Bulletin of Spanish Studies 93 (6): 1043–1060. Ruffinelli, Jorge. 1971. Prólogo. In La vida en Misiones, Obras inéditas y desconocidas, ed. Ángel Rama, vol. VI, 7–18. Montevideo: ARCA. Sarlo, Beatriz. 2008. The Technical Imagination: Argentina Culture’s Modern Dreams. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weldt-Basson, Helene Carol. 2010. The Life and Works of Augusto Roa Bastos. In Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature: The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos, ed. Helene Carol Weldt-Basson, 1–24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Whigham, Thomas. 2017. The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866–70. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. ———. 2018. The Paraguayan War: Causes and Early Conduct. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

CHAPTER 8

“To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”: Dialectical Aesthetics in Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Banana Trilogy (1950–1960) Lucy Potter and Stephanie Lambert

The systemic violence of export banana production reverberates across the world-literary system. In his 1973 polemic Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano suggests that the forced specialization and longue dureé exploitation of the region’s seemingly boundless frontier demands fictional representation. Only “surrealist language”, Galeano (2009: 7) asserts, is commensurate with the “organized absurdity” of agricultural

We would like to thank Claire Westall for her valuable contributions in the early stages of Lucy Potter’s research on the world-food-system, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the doctoral work that underlies this chapter. L. Potter (*) • S. Lambert Independent Scholars, Leeds, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_8

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specialization  (101), whereby “expansion expand[s] hunger” and “the markets of the colonial world [grow] as mere appendices” (65, 3) to US multinationals such as the United Fruit Company (UFCO). The banana frontier is imagined most vividly in writing from the commodity enclaves of Latin America and the Caribbean, where the social realism of the novela de tierra [novel of the land] and European avant-gardism coalesce to evoke the extensive power and brutality of the UFCO.1 The magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez’s paradigmatic “boom” novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is directly tied to the oppressive conditions of the Colombian plantation and the hushed-up massacre of striking workers in Macondo in 1928. Yet the singularly destructive enterprise of banana production finds similarly macabre form in Bananos y hombres [Bananas and Men] (1931), Carmen Lyra’s earlier protest novel,2 in which labourers are “swallowed up […] amid the pitiless damp of the banana trees” (50), and in Mamita Yunai (1940), by fellow Costa Rican novelist Carlos Luis Fallas, wherein disillusioned workers “leave their bones as fertilizer for the bananas” (2010: 152; qtd. in & trans. by Bohme 2015: 9). The gothic force of the banana plantation likewise pervades Honduran writer Ramón Amaya Amador’s novel Prisión verde [Green Prison] (1950), which ventriloquizes a sepulchral spray worker (1990: 60–62), and Canto General [General Song] (1950), wherein the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda casts C.I.A.-installed dictators and the UFCO as vampiric “flies sticky with / submissive blood and marmalade” (1991: 179). Even after the tentacular grip of “El Pulpo” [the Octopus] had loosened, banana imperialism continued as the US secured its fruitful world-hegemony through structural adjustment. This neoliberal moment forms the backdrop to the Jamaican poet Olive Senior’s “Meditation on Yellow” (1994), which charts the uneven transition from British to US imperialism with its remonstrance: “I’ve been slaving in the cane rows / for your sugar […] I’ve been dallying on the docks / loading your bananas” (2005: 14). The poem’s movement across commodity frontiers exposes strange resonances between histories of slavery-driven sugar production and the agricultural restructuring that rendered Jamaican produce both locally unaffordable and globally uncompetitive. In Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem “Bananas” (1995), the quest for organic, “no-spray” produce in Colorado prompts an imaginative traversal of the longue durée of indigenous expropriation, connecting Green Revolution technologies to Cold War nuclearism, murdered mestizos in Colombia to irradiated Navajo uranium miners, and deformed Marshallese children to banana pickers with “tomato size / tumors” from exposure to

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toxic pesticides (2006: 24). Tracking from “caravelled conquistadors” to “jet-propelled technocrats” (Galeano 2009: 8), banana literature captures the haunting reality observed by Galeano in 1973, that “the ghosts of all of the revolutions that have been strangled or betrayed through Latin America’s tortured history emerge in the new experiments, as if the present had been foreseen and begotten by the contradictions of the past” (ibid.). This chapter explores the world-literary inscription of mid-twentieth-­ century banana production in Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Banana Trilogy (1950–1960), arguing that the novels simultaneously presage and plot a way out of the “singular” yet strangely protracted crisis of capitalism unfolding today. Foregrounding the specifically ecological dimensions of Asturias’ texts, we contend that the trilogy’s recourse to the surreal and supernatural blossoms from the proliferating contradictions of banana monoculture, but also points towards utopian possibilities for resistance. Emerging from a “decisive moment in the agrarian class struggles and geopolitics of the Cold War” and interlinked ‘Green Revolution’ (Moore 2015a: 18), the Banana Trilogy’s revolutionary aesthetics provide an instructive case for reading what Jason W. Moore (2011) describes as the “intertwining of resistances” arising from the exploitation of human and extra-human natures within capitalist world-ecology (46). This dialectical friction finds its counterpart in Sylvia Wynter’s (1971) influential argument that, so long as subsistence plots coexist with cash-crop production, resistance will remain immanent to the plantation regime (105). For Wynter, the collision of peasant and capitalist agriculture sparked “a change of such world historical magnitude” that the Caribbean is “still ‘enchanted,’ imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic in its bewitched reality” (95). Nevertheless, invoking Asturias’ “unbelieving despair” over the fantastic machinations of the C.I.A., she connects the “prolonged fiction” of the plantation regime with the emergence and development of the novel into “a form of resistance” to the very bourgeois order from which it evolved (97). Asturias’ own history of Latin American literature complicates this genealogy; in his 1967 Nobel lecture, he calls for a remobilization of the “imponderable magic” of pre-Colombian texts to “see how the lifeblood of the working people is drained in our lands” and to “raise demands in favour of the masses who perish in the plantations, who are scorched by the sun in the banana fields, who turn into human bagasse in the sugar refineries” (Asturias 1967: n.p.) Elsewhere, Asturias cites “the magic of our climate,” which he argues “gives our stories a double

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aspect—from one side they seem dreams, from the other they are realities” (qtd. in Draugsvold 2000: 107). Michael Niblett (2012) has brought Wynter’s ideas into dialogue with both Moore’s (2000) conception of “commodity frontiers” and Stephen Shapiro’s (2008) contention that capitalism’s systemic cycles of accumulation can be “marshalled as a means of understanding the rise and fall of aesthetic forms [and] generic conventions” (35; qtd. in Niblett 2012: 19). Niblett contends that the oneiric, irrealist aesthetics of plantation fictions arise from the radical periodic upheaval and temporal dislocation engendered by cyclical “ecological regimes and revolutions across the longue durée” (2012: 20). Following Niblett’s world-ecological intervention, this chapter insists on the irreducibly material roots of Asturias’ experimental aesthetics by mapping the dynamic described by Moore (2015a) in his work on “negative value” onto the contradictory valuerelations that structure the Banana Trilogy.3 First, we demonstrate how the opening text’s dialectical aesthetics capture the self-negating deployment of toxic pesticides, formally encoding the socioecological contradictions of capitalist fruitfulness whereby endless value extraction undermines the very conditions of profitability on which accumulation depends. We suggest that this formal contradiction registers what Moore (2015a: 7) describes as “the dynamic of an impending and catastrophic shift for capital: a radical increase in the costs of production” owing to the cumulative toxification of the biosphere and (extra-)human natures.4 The accumulated toxicity embedded in Asturias’ prose thus illustrates the “latent negative value” around which social and ecological resistance coalesce (Moore 2015a: 42), culminating in the devastating supernatural cyclone on which the first novel closes. Our reading then turns to the trilogy’s final entry, wherein dialectical tropes established in the first two novels are radically inverted and remobilized as the expropriation and toxification of the land ultimately generate the “energies of intoxication for the revolution” (Benjamin [1929] 2005: 215). Asturias’ revolutionary triptych hereby redeploys capitalism’s internal contradictions to radically reimagine Guatemala’s suppressed 1944 revolution and envision alternative futures beyond the looming, potentially terminal crisis of capitalism, as “socioecological shifts within the web of life” promise to make “possible new, emancipatory and egalitarian vistas” (Moore 2015a: 42).

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“A tree that has no springtime”: Fictitious Fruitfulness and Toxic Irrealism Export banana production has played a critical role in expanding and consolidating US capital across the world-hegemon’s systemic cycle of accumulation. Pioneering US fruit merchants expedited the “long” nineteenth-century transition by carving out specialized banana enclaves throughout “neighbouring” tropics; meanwhile, agricultural magnates strategically invested in large-scale infrastructure projects, simultaneously streamlining and expanding the production and distribution of fruit, labour, and agricultural materials (Bucheli and Read 2006: 212). After 1945, the industry’s unprecedented integration, modernized marketing techniques, stock-market investments, and strategic use of debt further augmented US corporate monopoly and core-capitalist hegemony. Establishing “banana republics” throughout Central and South America, fruit companies soon became central to the Cold War power struggles that accelerated the collapse of transnational socialism at the behest of the US core. Latin American banana production thus served “as a springboard,” as Ana Patricia Rodríguez (2009) writes, “for the ascendency of the United States as a new hemispheric empire” (49). Published at the height of Guatemala’s “Ten Years of Spring,” Strong Wind (1950), the trilogy’s first instalment, is clearly fuelled by the revolutionary energies of 1944 that toppled the US-backed dictatorship of Jorge Ubico and established the nation’s first democratic government under Jacobo Árbenz. Yet, by the time The Green Pope (1954) and The Eyes of the Interred (1960) had appeared, these energies and the administration they ushered in had been violently suppressed. The country’s democratic spring of socialist agrarian reforms and improved labour rights was brought to an untimely close in 1954 when a C.I.A.-backed coup toppled Árbenz, whose modest land reforms had posed a threat to United Fruit’s territorial monopoly. Having been the largest landholder in Guatemala since the 1930s (Soluri 2005: 6), the company mobilized their considerable lobbying power and Árbenz’s perceived communist sympathies to persuade the Senate that this popular left-leaning administration should be “contained.” Asturias’ novels not only chronicle but imaginatively restage this repressed revolution through a fictionalized insurrection in which workers and peasants rise up against the corporate state, reasserting indigenous claims to land and labour appropriated and exhausted by the notorious fruit company.

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The horror of the plantation regime infects the form of Strong Wind from the outset, plunging readers into a radically instrumentalized landscape where labourers are already at work carving out the tropical lowlands for banana monoculture: Man’s will had been imposed. Hands and mechanical equipment had modified the terrain. The natural course of rivers had been changed, structures had been built for the passage of iron roads, between sliced-out hills, over bridges or fills, through which voracious machines consuming trees that had been reduced to greenish logs carried men and crops, hunger and food. Trees fell while others appeared, planted as a defense against the whipping of the wind for fields prepared for certain crops, and in the gullies, as in the intestines of some poor fabulous beast, tamed, demeaned, but still alive, work was going ahead for the removal of rocks. (Asturias 1968: 7)

The violent simplification of nature–society relations is encapsulated in the density of Asturias’ prose, tightly bound by compounding zeugma and parallelism. Whilst the zeugma of “carried men and crops” brutally elides labourer and commodity, the parallel structure of “men and crops, hunger and food” indicates the disjuncture between workers and the crops they harvest. Just as the hills and gullies have been “sliced-out,” eviscerated, leaving their “intestines” on display, synecdoche severs workers from the “hands” that “had modified the terrain,” the accumulation of passive constructions figuring their progressive alienation. Our first named character, Adelaido Lucero, appears as a configuration of dissected body parts moving independently of one another: as he feeds the stone-crushing machine’s “gullet,” Lucero’s body contorts in repetitive, mechanical movements: “Squat, rise, […] squat, rise, the hinge of this waist opening and closing” (7–8). As in Capital  (1867), specialized labour “converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity,” “a mere fragment of his own body” (Marx 1990: 481), as humans are reduced to merely “conscious linkages” in the agro-industrial machine (Marx 1993: 692). In his seminal work, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), Marxist anthropologist Michael Taussig (2010) argues that the forcible incorporation of world-systemic peripheries generates epistemological as well as agricultural transformations: “market organization not only tears asunder feudal ties and strips the peasantry of its means of production but [engenders] a change in the mode of perception” (121). However, as agrarian ecologies are radically restructured, autochthonous

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modes of perception denaturalize capitalist production, exposing what Taussig refers to as “the peculiar character” of capitalism’s fetishistic abstractions whereby human and extra-human natures are “rationalized in accord with cost accounting” (10, 4). Asturias’ irrealist aesthetics perform a similar denaturalizing function by fusing indigenous myths with Surrealist juxtapositions in response to capitalization.5 His 1967 Nobel Lecture credits Mayan mythology with the capacity to summon “a reality that we might call surrealist”: This characteristic of the annulment of reality through imagination and the re-creation of a more transcendental reality is combined with […] the use and abuse of parallel expressions, i.e. the parallel use of different words to designate the same object, to convey the same idea and express the same feelings […] permitt[ing] a poetic gradation destined to induce certain states of consciousness which were taken to be magic. (Asturias 1967: n.p.)

Even as Asturias’ plantation conjures crops with the precision of an assembly line, the realities of monoculture are mystified by the capitalist imaginary of limitless growth predicated on tropical fecundity. The “large, broad green expanses” of monoculture form a boundless “sea” (Asturias 1968: 25, 69): Rows and rows of banana trees. On all sides. Everywhere, until they became lost on the horizon. Thousands of plants that seemed to multiply in successive mirrors. So much alike and so symmetrically planted that they looked like the same plant, equally spaced, the same height, almost the same colour, the same eternal growth and flowering. (25–26)

The striking infinite regression of seemingly self-replicating plants captures the rationalized homogeneity of plantation nature, but also gestures towards the parthenocarpic propagation required to reproduce this infertile cultivar. Cloned from a seedless, sterile mutation, the export banana’s lack of genetic diversity accounts for its notorious susceptibility to pests and pathogens. Plantations are ideal breeding grounds, necessitating ceaseless frontier expansion as well as costly, toxic, and labour-intensive measures of containment. As the demise of the dominant Gros Michel variety in the 1950s attests, banana cultivation exhausts its own conditions of profitability with perilous rapidity (Soluri 2005: 54). With  Strong Wind, Asturias reproduces the fiction of “self-propagating” money only to repudiate it, transposing the fruit’s sickly nature onto humans and

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ecologies as plants succumb to blight and labourers—the “other fruit” (1968: 117)—to malaria and tuberculosis. The equivalence the plantation regime confers on human and extra-human natures breeds horrific convergences: “Chiggerfoot,” an indigenous worker named only for his affliction, sprouts “toes like rotten potatoes” (14); “incurably ill” labourers develop “concave backs,” “shaped like swaying hammocks” (119); and leprosy transforms Cucho into a “professional corpse” who “instead of feet […] had a pair of bananas” (22). As the plantation devours cheap labour, Cucho’s fetishistic claims about the seemingly effortless wealth generated by the “golden” fruit are likewise belied by the reiterative demand for “more men, more men” to “work on the coast […], to work on the coast” (26). Asturias consistently juxtaposes bodily deterioration with ecological exhaustion. When a bananero travels inland from the coast, he discovers that forest clearances and soil erosion have left locals with “burned-off land, scraped away down to bedrock” (63), and corn and bean crops “like liver spots on a pregnant woman’s face” (85).6 The wasted peasants’ land confirms Marx’s well-known assertion that capital “asks no questions about the length of life of labor-power,” only the abstract labour-time that can be extracted, thus creating surplus value “by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility” (1990: 376). Nevertheless, Cucho convinces his godson along with “a whole army of young people” (Asturias 1968: 84) to abandon the depleted land and head to the coast, enchanted by what Ericka Beckman (2013: 6) terms the “export reverie” of the banana enclave: the “dream visions” (ibid.) that reify capitalism’s “cumulative, but cyclically punctuated, tendency to search out and appropriate new  ‘physically uncorrupted’  zones” of unpaid work/energy to exploit (Moore 2015b: 75). Fittingly, even as Cucho vaunts the fertility of the coast, a family mourns a young woman who has died under the strain of multiple, closely spaced pregnancies: If it were left in my hands, I would take my dead daughter and bury her far away, far from these rock patches, far from this dismal bed of clay, so that in the future, tomorrow even, she would be a flower, a fruit, a leaf, and not adobe, because the dead who are buried here have no future except someday to be part of an adobe wall, of some sickly plant, of some tree that has no springtime. (Asturias 1968: 87–88)

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The ghostly conflation of this “victim of frustrated motherhood” (79) with a tree that will never bear fruit illustrates Moore’s (2015b) suggestion that “it is not just the reproduction of labor-power that has become capitalized [but] also the reproduction of extra-human natures” (99). Telluric and bodily exhaustion combine to preclude collective futures in this cultivated “land of ashes,” where a person can be nothing “besides a poor exhausted stump, a dry forest decorated with spider webs” (SW 88). Moore (2015b)  explains that (re)producing cash crops means endlessly “appropriating nutrients, energy, and water through global capital flows, credit especially” (99), and, indeed, one grief-stricken relative concedes “that the land is overworked […], but maybe if we used some fertilizer…” (Asturias 1968: 83). This lacklustre solution is deemed prohibitively expensive, however, leaving the family with little besides wage labour for subsistence and bananeros [banana workers] attempting to form a cooperative “with only debts for possessions” (112). The exchange gestures to the “technological treadmill” triggered by the Green Revolution’s introduction of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, locking farmers “into a regime of rising costs through dependence on commodified seeds, machines, and poisons” (Moore 2015b: 100).7 Toxic agrochemicals permeate the colour palate of Asturias’ plantation. The landscape is awash with “flaming green” valleys (Asturias 1968: 7), the horizon a fluorescent “line of blue fire” (8), and the countryside “full of luminous dots of green colour, as if the banana grove had let loose eyes in the form of fireflies” (194). Paradoxical phrases capture the self-­ destructive logic of capitalism’s technological fixes, imparting the sense of a system under increasing strain: at once “in movement and motionless” (69), “emerald green” banana trees form “part of the immense bonfire, like flames that did not burn” (209). Asturias’ lurid toxic spectrum highlights the plantation’s dependence on Bordeaux mixture: a fungicide composed of copper sulphate and slaked lime that was used to prevent Sigatoka, a leaf spot disease that dramatically curtailed banana yields and ripening windows. The presence of copper sulphate is adumbrated by the suggestive imagery of green flames—and, indeed, the workers’ “copper-coloured faces” (108)—but also through more explicit references to the infamously “blue-coloured acids” being sprayed on trees that later “wept acid water” (16, 186). Perceived by the overseer’s wife as “white rainbows”, the arcs of “artificial rain” drenching the plants betray the labour-intensive methods forced upon workers (33), who had to use “an arc-like motion […] so that the spray fell as a rain onto the leaves” to avoid being “reprimanded”

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by their superiors (Soluri 2005: 121). Soluri (2005) suggests that, though ultimately ineffectual, “controlling the pathogen and disciplining the human spray applicators” were symbiotic in the minds of company managers and foremen (119). Strong Wind’s Mr Pyle articulates this brutal imbrication with his lament that, “unfortunately, [the company] can’t count on any poisonous substance to do away with socialism the way the Bordeaux broth holds back Sigatoka” (Asturias 1968: 51). However, like all previous attempts to stem such epidemics, the Bordeaux “fix” itself dented labour productivity and eventually became unprofitable for the fruit company, as intensive agrochemical use introduced new inefficiencies into the production cycle. As Moore (2015a) writes, “[i]ndustrial agriculture appears to be ‘intensive’ but is in fact extensive [as] every act of producing surplus value requires an even greater act of appropriating the unpaid work/energy of nature, humans included” (35). Tellingly, sprayed bananas required extensive cleaning and detoxification to be fit for US consumption: The movements of the cutting crew at the foot of a banana tree which looked like a green cross resembled those of Jews with ladders and spears as they tried to lift down a green Christ who had been changed into a bunch of bananas [and] was received with great care, as if it were a case of an overdelicate being, and carried off in small carts to receive its sacramental bath and be placed in a bag with special cushions inside. (Asturias 1968: 25)

The “sacramental” acid and water bath required to cleanse the copper-­ sprayed fruit bespeaks the immense labour of resurrecting and purifying the “fruit of death” ready for export (25, 82), satirizing the missionary zeal that infused United Fruit’s purported ambitions to “‘tame’ tropical landscapes and enlighten their human inhabitants” (Soluri 2005: 61–62); or, in the words of Asturias’ Green Pope, “to make unhealthy countries worth something” (Asturias 1968: 103). Such exalted, exoticizing narratives masked the absurdity of a low-input subsistence crop coming to depend on the exorbitant labour-, capital-, and water-intensive work—not to mention racialized degradation—of controlling Sigatoka (see Soluri 2005: 108). Considered demeaning and deleterious to one’s health, spray work was typically inflicted on the indigenous and migrant workers ranked lowest in the plantation’s racial hierarchy (see Marquardt 2001: 16). Indeed, even as the consecrated trees are anointed by Bordeaux, the maligned and

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racially divisive task of spraying the agrochemical leads Lino Lucero to declaim that “if you’re going to end up as a sprayer, you’d be better off begging outside a church!” (Asturias 1968: 186). In one of the other rare moments where this devalued labour shifts to the foreground, human and plant life form a toxic union: A team of crop sprayers appears in the distance, looking more like soldiers of a war among divers at the bottom of the sea. To shield themselves somewhat from the calcifying force of the sun, they have covered themselves with intertwined branches until, closer now, they look like moving plants. Some quickly connect the hoses to the spray pipes, while others direct the liquid onto the emerald showcases, some loaded down with bunches weighing over 200 pounds. The banana grove is becoming covered with a light, sky-­ blue layer of perspiration under the rain of the ‘Bordeaux broth’. (33)

The displacement of “calcifying” human sweat by an alchemical veil of “sky-blue” perspiration is suggestive of the deadly transferral of the costs of production onto (extra-)human natures, as Bordeaux temporarily protects productivity but devastates the unequal workforce and unpaid natures on which it depends. Steve Marquardt (2001) describes the “virulent blue-green crust” that formed on spray-workers, providing their demeaning nickname “pericos” [parakeets], but also the “blue-green sweat” they expelled after the “poison” had “penetrated [their skin and] mucous membranes” (8); in fact, veneneros [poison applicators] commonly exhibited blue-green skin, teeth, lung, and brain tissue, and described respiratory symptoms similar to—and often misdiagnosed as—tuberculosis (see Soluri 2005: 125). The Banana Trilogy is laced with this blue-tinted “poison.” Just as its veiled ubiquity taints the texts’ narrative form, the epidemiology of copper toxicity contaminates Asturias’ irrealist prose. Strong Wind is replete with images of “sick plants” and “coughing” leaves (Asturias 1968: 15), as if the symptoms of “sprayer’s lung” are assimilated by the very plants it is meant to ‘cure,’ while their lush foliage burns under the “lead-heavy sun” in an “atmosphere of white fire” (93). Meanwhile, the tropical blue-green groves are imagined as a ghostly “sea without fish” (69)—a financialized expanse where aquatic life perishes for the sake of unlimited accumulation—presenting an uncanny spectre of the consequences of fungicidal run-off, or “toxic drift” (see Daniel 2007: 84). The toxic irrealist imagery of respiratory constriction metastasizes across the trilogy, polluting all three texts: in Strong Wind, banana trees are seen as

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“bodies that could be breathed” while human workers “become asphyxiated, without the coolness of perspiration” (Asturias 1968: 45, 93); in The Green Pope, the coastal lowlands are visualized as “depths exposed to the wrathful blue of a torturing afternoon,” “so suffocating that for moments one could barely breathe” (Asturias 1971:  124–125); and even as the plantocracy “breathes through the green lungs of their plantation” in the The Eyes of the Interred (Asturias 1973:  534), the President’s terminal “asphyxia” (526) vividly recalls the company engineer’s earlier terror of being “strangulated, asphyxiated, turned to dust” by the “strong wind” of the Atlantic coast (Asturias 1968: 126).

“Green gold”: From Negative Value to Terminal Crisis Asturias’ sickly trees and workers manifest not only the exhaustion of the Guatemalan banana frontier, but the hidden yet cumulative toxification of the biosphere on which the wider agroecological regime rests. In so doing, they presage the world-ecological crisis signalled by what Moore terms the “rise of negative value”  (2015b:  290): the moment when capitalism’s cumulative biophysical contradictions can no longer be externalized and begin to threaten labour productivity and, therefore, world accumulation. For Moore, the shift from “latent” to “active” negative value is manifested in the emergence of “forms of nature that elude and frustrate [capitalist] ‘fixes’” (2015b: 275), including plants, pests, and pathogens that develop agrochemical resistance. “Superweeds,” Moore avers, “can now be controlled only with great toxification and greater cost,” even as “toxification from capitalist agriculture feeds, with increasing force, into new forms of negative-value: climate change, cancer epidemics, and so forth” (ibid.). It is appropriate, then, that Asturias’ veneneros “[look] more like soldiers of a war among divers at the bottom of the sea” (1968: 32)—a comparison that carries resonances of the novel’s epigraph, taken from Robert Browning’s epic 1835 poem, Paracelsus: “Two points in the adventure of the diver? / One, when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge, / One when, a prince, he rises with his pearl?” (1.829–1.831). Notwithstanding dark colonial histories of pearl diving, this opposition between soldiers and divers implies that the enterprise of fighting to extract the “vegetable emeralds” (Asturias 1968: 32) will be singularly and cumulatively destructive. Bananas are often imbued with the fictitious solidity of precious minerals  in Strong Wind, described as “future emeralds” or, more frequently,

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“green gold” (26). A polyvalent symbol, “green gold” emerges from a play on the colloquial designation of export bananas as “oro verde”, owing to the market-driven necessity of shipping unripe (green) bananas combined with the easy wealth supposedly gained by growing the leafy green plants. However, like the “cells of future emeralds” (26), the expression increasingly indexes the speculative wealth promised by the cash crop: The banana groves, Cucho told them with his voice of a damaged man, his laughless laugh, have green leaves like gold-backed banknotes. […] And the bunches are like many leaves, a lot of green banknotes all pressed together, turned into green-gold bricks. (65)

Green gold figures both the privileging of financial exchange-value over agricultural use-value and the fictitious stability underwritten by the Bretton Woods Agreement, pegging global exchange rates to the “gold-­ backed” dollar. While Cucho presents the cash crop as if it were fixed capital, as the moneyed “bricks” of property, his “damaged” voice betrays the uneven metabolic flows of profit, nutrients, and health from resource peripheries to capitalist cores. Even so, as Green Revolution technologies flood the industry, incurring both economic and ecological deficits, Asturias floods his textual economy with green-gold signifiers that become increasingly immaterial, self-referential, and unmoored from the fruit itself. Codifying US corporate greed, “green” tints the American characters’ eyes, hair, monocles, even phones, as well as the self-given moniker and inflated rhetoric of the corporate dictator himself. The “Green Pope” earned his sobriquet, we learn, after being struck by a tropical “lightning bolt,” following which everything he “touched turned to gold” (Asturias 1971: 139). Coupled with Asturias’ irrealist devices, this semiotic devaluation of green gold refutes the fantasy of fixity that underpins the US hegemon’s fealty to the Gold Standard, transforming the neocolonial adventurer into “the Green Pope, a name that newsboys carried like a standard through the streets of Chicago […], while on the stock exchanges […] banana shares rose” (ibid., emphasis added). Rather than a financialized loss of the referent that would elide material production, Asturias’ dialectical invocation of green gold exposes the reification of socioecological violence and the interlocking forms of primitive accumulation that unevenly bind core and periphery. As the Warwick Research Collective (2015) avers, “the appearance and growth of fictitious capital, the most virtual or immaterial form of capitalisation, and primitive

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accumulation, the most bloody and material, are interlinked” (114). Material accumulation and financial accumulation by dispossession operate symbiotically in the trilogy: while the Green Pope plots “de facto annexation” via dollar diplomacy (Asturias 1971: 141), protects the company’s “credit” by securing investments from global oil companies (19, 151), and plays off shareholders and “capitol werewolves” to gain monopoly power (381), indigenous peasants are brutally massacred for their collective refusal to sell their land “at any price” (57). The spectral collapse in banana prices similarly manifests as bodily violence at the end of Strong Wind. Issuing an impassioned plea on behalf of the workers, Lester Mead—the novel’s bourgeois-liberal representative—castigates Tropbanana Inc.’s attempts to overcome overproduction by rejecting swathes of healthy bananas, urging the Green Pope to consider what it must feel like when “everything a person owns becomes so much battered fruit discarded alongside the railroad tracks”: “to be left with the corpse of a living thing that cost him so much,” that is still alive, “but since it was not purchased [has] lost its value in relation to the market that you people manipulate at your whim” (Asturias 1968: 102). Lucero had previously explained to Mead that “[i]t’s better just to sell [or the] fruit’ll go by and everything’ll be lost” (94), and later, as if to confirm such fears, Mead claims that earlier planters were ruined because they “thought that a fatted calf would live forever […] and when the price of bananas went down, they were left without anything” (156). Here, we begin to see what Marx (1989) calls “the ruinous effect of the fall in the prices of commodities” rendering increasingly precarious the lives of those whose very survival now depends upon the whims of the global market (206). The “dietary moment” of uneven development unfolds (Moore 2010: 237), as we learn that the ruined planters now have nothing but “snail stew for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” (Asturias 1968: 156). Such embodied violence is particularly acute on the banana frontier where cultivated overproduction of the caloric fruit yields, not only forced underconsumption, but agroecological depreciation, toxification, and spiralling household and national debt. The symbolic currency of green gold anchors the high outputs and profligate inputs of banana production to the industry’s reliance on artificially “fertilizing accounts” in order to stave off cumulative crises (Asturias 1968: 140). Yet the irresolvable contradictions of banana production prevail, culminating in the devastating, curiously anthropogenic hurricane with which Strong Wind closes. In her discussion of literary storm-events, Sharae Deckard (2016) argues that tropical cyclones make visible “the

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possibility of opposition to oppression” by revealing the implicit vulnerability of the colonial plantation system (31). The eponymous cyclone that wreaks havoc at the end of Strong Wind performs just this function; Asturias’ storm-burst is “not the ultimate climax but merely a precursor to the real climax: the historical eruption of organized revolution” on which the trilogy concludes (Deckard 2016: 37). The much-discussed prospect of a destructive storm haunts and enlivens the narrative of Strong Wind. Mead capitalizes on the company’s fears of conjoined  socialist and ecological upheaval by portending that, one day, “the ‘strong wind’ […] will raise its voice of complaint from beneath the entrails of the world, and sweep us all away” (Asturias 1968: 130). Yet he also mobilizes the regional cyclone to offer hope to workers whose lives he concedes “may not be long enough […] to finish off the Green Pope; but the ones who come after us in the trenches, yes, if they move like us, like the strong wind that leaves nothing standing when it passes...” (108). For Deckard (2016), Asturias’ cyclone is particularly significant because, in the absence of substantial sociopolitical resistance, it “stands in as the hope of future revolt” (37). This prophetic storm-burst not only symbolizes or “stands in” for the brewing revolution, however, but actively manifests the signal crisis of the ecological regime. Summoned by the local shaman, Rito Perraj, the cyclone palpably emerges from the interlinked material phenomena of socioecological exhaustion and market price collapse—that is, from a crisis of overproduction. The storm finally breaks after a  desperate bananero gives his life to the shaman out of sheer frustration with “Chicago” (Asturias 1968: 211), an abstract omnipresence whose “indeterminate will” to expand profit at all costs leaves him with “bunches of bananas larger than a normal-sized man, unpurchased by them” (213). With “nothing concrete” to oppose (211), Hermenigilo Puac calls upon the shaman who invokes both the mythological power of the Mayan gods “Huracán and Carbracán” (212) and the elemental forces of Caribbean nature to launch an “avalanche of a hurricane, an aerial earthquake, a dry tidal wave”: a “wind that sinks its teeth into the earth […], and unburies everything, even the dead” (212). The tempest that descends on Tropbanana Inc.  is not the collective social uprising that Mead portends. Nevertheless, the fictitious cyclone shatters the artifice of bourgeois society as the Gothic horror of the plantation turns back onto the expatriates: company houses are hollowed out, “as if they had been disemboweled” (214), leaving “bureaus with clothes

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hanging out like entrails” (220), while plantation infrastructure is demolished in just three days and one paragraph: That night. The following day. The second night. The second day. The third night. The third day. The boxcars on the railroad lines began to move against their will, jumping off the rails. […] Little by little, houses were leaving their foundations, […] iron towers broken into pieces, telegraph poles pulled up out of their mud, and in the banana groves nothing was standing, […] an unmoving vegetable misery. (212–213)

The temporal opacity of this passage marks Strong Wind’s climactic conclusion as a striking example of what Deckard (2019) describes as “the formal capacity of Ecogothic to evoke situated periodicity [by telescoping] multiple periods of crisis into one moment of revelation [...], imagining past catastrophes as cumulative processes undergirding compound crises in the present” (180). With the “wind that never stops” (Asturias 1968: 229), the trilogy’s opening text reaches back into capitalism’s longue durée as the lumbering era returns to haunt the company’s investors: The shadows of ghost trees, of trees that did not exist, but which did exist there, began to prowl around and come into the cave like gigantic animals. Lester knew it. Sarajobalda had told everybody. When there was a storm, the shadows of the trees that had been cut down many years ago during the lumbering come into the Gambusino caves like ghosts, and the person they discover inside will have everything alive under his skin taken out and he will be left as a doll of skin and bones. (218)

The ecocidal consequences of deforestation erupt as a biodiverse group of “ebonies, mahoganies, matilisguates, chicozapotes, guayacanes” materialize to avenge their deforestation for the sake of “twelve million banana trees” (218, 217). The zombie trees militate against the “living death” of plantation monoculture, summoning a “return of the ecological repressed” to reveal the slow-fast catastrophe of endless accumulation (Oloff 2012: 38). This surreal image of undead trees prowling around “like gigantic animals” poses a radical riposte to the plantation regime, signalling tropical nature’s capacity to outlast and thereby resist ongoing exploitation. Indeed, just before the long-awaited cloud-burst, an ecogothic plague of spiders emerges from the stones of the drought-stricken cemetery, “not by hundreds but by thousands in an endless outpouring, coming out so as not to burn up inside” (Asturias 1968: 209). Shapiro (2008) has

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attributed gothic representation to core-capitalist fears of a “contracting economic long-wave” (31), where the “treasure-producing world” becomes a terrifying force “of un-rationalized power,” ripe for appropriation and plunder by a new core-hegemon (35). Asturias’ uncanny, agential nature takes on this force as it avenges its own exploitation by the newly hegemonic cash crop: the formidable “green gluttons” (Asturias 1971: 107), who continue “sucking up all the dampness of the earth for their thirst” (1968: 208), ominously foreshadowing the insatiable extractivism and climatological instability that signals capitalism’s terminal crisis. Threatening to uproot the plantation “forever” (Asturias 1968: 212), the supernatural storm pits mythological and geoecological time against the short-sighted logic of corporate capital. Tropbanana agents are likened to “myopic” “blond rats,” unable to perceive what was “annihilating them, in spite of their foresighted system to avoid all possible causes of loss” (213). This temporal tension reveals the maelstrom as a simultaneously destructive and productive force, underlining the impossibility of capitalist futures while renewing the conditions for profitable material and financial expansion. Indeed, the storm actively facilitates uneven bourgeois development by bringing about the deaths of Leland and Lester Mead, just after the latter bequeathes his entire financial estate, “in the event of [his wife’s] decease,” to “the Mead-Cojubul-Lucero-Ayuc Gaitán organization” (203). Upon inheriting this unexpected fortune, the banana cooperative moved to the US to pursue their own entrepreneurial ambitions, perpetuating the property-system they had once sought to reform and frittering away the wealth they had planned to redistribute. The novel concludes by focalizing the “lock of greenish-golden hair” peeping out of Leland and Lester’s casket as the train rolls away (224), gesturing towards this ongoing core-hegemonic expansion even after the storm has sounded the call for revolution.

“To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”: Dreams and Resistance Though the cyclone only destroys profitability temporarily, its mythological invocation and material implications unleash revolutionary spectres that return to haunt the company in the final text, The Eyes of the Interred, which sees the banana tycoon installed as head of the now fully integrated, hyper-militarized state. The arachnid plague that precedes the

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storm conspicuously returns as the leader of the newly organized resistance movement contemplates the company’s capacity to hold out against “not just the work stoppage, but the rapid invasion of underbrush onto the plantings, the avalanche of insects, which in a matter of hours would eat everything up, devour it, destroy it, make it rot” (Asturias 1973: 692). As the accumulated debts of the “Bordeaux era” begin to threaten productivity, the revolutionary organizers are thus forced to recognize that the insects, weeds, and pests the denigrated pericos had been required to eliminate were in fact “their best allies, and they had never thought about them until now” (693). Organization likewise enables extra-human nature to activate sublimated agency and unite with labour-power in opposing the plantocracy—and its racialized divisions—since even a momentary pause in crop-spraying allows these profit-sapping pests and pathogens to flourish. As Marquardt (2001) explains, “[w]ithdrawal of labor in Sigatoka control” offered strikers a powerful leveraging tool, disrupting “future production” and profitability in addition to productivity at the time (19). The shift in the strikers’ perception of insects and the uncontainable nature they represent signals the “tipping point” of negative-value accumulation (Moore 2015a: 34), where intersecting efforts to control labour and pathogenic resistance become increasingly toxic and self-negating, and the resistance movement is able to stoke fears by “spreading panic, like […] the way sulphate is spread on the banana groves to kill the diseases” (Asturias 1973: 538). The dialectics of resistance built into negative value become increasingly visible in The Eyes, the trilogy’s final instalment, culminating in the radical call for a collective reappropriation of indigenous lands. As the “expropriators are expropriated,” this final novel formalizes the Marxian “negation of the negation” ([1867]1990: 929) by exploding the trilogy’s symbolic schema and radically subverting its key tropes. Recurring oxymoronic references to fire and burning are upended, and the blue-green flames of toxic monoculture are reinscribed as a sign of the elemental potency of peripheral nature: No one […] will ever win against the green fire! No one will ever dispute the rule over the land by the green fire, which is red inside and turns green on the outside! Destructive light! Light mixed with salt! Light mixed with the sea! Machines will grow weary someday! Someday the foreigners will be overcome by a desire to sleep, and at that instant, by just closing their eyes, by just slowing down their machines, they will be buried along with everything else that is theirs. (Asturias 1973: 524)

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The covert reference to land disputes in this speech implicitly criticizes United Fruit’s territorial monopoly in Guatemala by lauding the temporary sovereignty of capitalist technology, whose “machines will grow weary someday,” while conveying the radical resolve of the people in expressly future-oriented terms. Provocative gestures towards volatile biochemical reactions (“light mixed with salt!”) likewise reactivate and subvert  the toxic violence of banana monoculture: the fire that is “red inside and turns green on the outside” again gestures towards copper, but this time set alight, promising to destroy the plantation and its corporate overlords. As guerrilla troops trek through the “blue-green mangroves” in  an “intoxication of heat,” they are exposed to “bonfires of colors” and  a “luminosity of burning liquid […,] increasing in brilliance until it blinded them” (529). The passage illuminates the biochemistry of negative value, whose latent oppositional and mobilizing effects are increasingly infused with signs of nature’s revenge: “the blindness of advancing vegetation, drunk and spongy, will take over everything alive and everything dead” (525). This web of allusions to blinding light, fire and burning unites the disparate time-spaces of the trilogy, linking the alienated workers toiling in the ashen land of Strong Wind with the massacred indigenous peasants in The Green Pope through the newly organized labour force of The Eyes of the Interred. Asturias expands the temporal scales of solidarity in the second text when, just as the company sets the massacred peasants’ village ablaze, the history of violent incorporation is compressed into the flame: “fire, which in the hands of the Spaniards had burned the Indians’ painted wood, their manuscripts on amate bark, their idols and insignias, now, four hundred years later, was devouring and reducing to smoldering ashes, christs, virginmarys, saintanthonies, holycrosses, books of prayers and novenas, rosaries, relics, and medals” (1971: 102). A key turning point in the revolution, one of the central chapters of The Eyes then ends with the mythic claim that “having come out of the ashpit, demanding the tyrant’s head,” the “people were being reborn”—“as if the idea of drawing fire out of the ashes would really be fulfilled” (Asturias 1973: 621). Through these dialectical movements from fire to ash and ash to fire, the trilogy remobilizes the accumulated death-bound toxicity of the plantation in order to call into being ontological, ecological, even systemic transformation. The oneiric unreality of the plantation is also redeployed to radical ends in The Eyes through feverish dreams and visions triggered by “firewater”— a paradoxical term used to describe the cyclone in Strong Wind (Asturias 1968: 213), but elsewhere to refer to the fermented sugarcane imbibed by

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plantation workers. Despite propping up productivity by providing cheap calories to supplement meagre diets, the high-volume alcohol is routinely pathologized by company managers who list “cane liquor” as one of the many tropical “diseases” afflicting the plantation, and perceive workers as being “drowned in cane liquor” and living “like animals in heat” (135). Cane liquor thus both morally and physically degrades the workers, suppressing potential agitation; however, just like the chemicals used to discipline sigatoka, its consumption cuts both ways. Offering an insurgent form of “folk culture” (Wynter 1971: 100), “firewater” first returns in The Eyes when Don Nepo seeks to reconnect with “reality” after his night shift by consuming “straight cane liquor, pure rotgut”: Burning, he needed burning more than a drink. […] And a need to tell … that’s it, that’s it, the burning of a strong drink, not to forget, the way most mortals say, […] but to burn himself up, rage, wrath, dislike, contrariness, everything he felt; and to put his tongue into motion. (Asturias 1973: 37)

Nepo’s need to “burn” his throat  with cane liquor in order to unearth obliterated memories and reignite repressed anger highlights the importance of collective recollection to political consciousness. Evoking the plantation’s violent longue durée, he reframes “firewater” from a substance responsible for inducing drunken paralysis to one capable of mobilizing action by putting one’s “tongue into motion.” Like the agrochemical treadmill, then, the disciplinary use of alcohol affords the overseers temporary control whilst sowing the seeds of radical resistance. Moreover, cane liquor–induced delirium further galvanizes revolutionary desires by allowing workers to envision alternate futures. Mayarí, the indigenous fiancé of the Green Pope, argues that “a person who dreams lives for centuries” (Asturias 1971: 27), positing dreaming as an indigenous form of consciousness, detached from capitalist time and the rationalized discipline of the working day. In so doing, she implicitly positions the dreamscape as a space for individual and collective autonomy, for imagining beyond capitalist reality, and perhaps the only indigenous territory that cannot be expropriated by imperial capital. Although drunken fevers are prominent throughout the trilogy, the hallucinatory qualities of Asturias’ prose intensify in The Eyes where the impenetrable fecundity of Strong Wind dissolves into a spectral “forest of dreams” (1973: 529), and characters are tormented by a procession of phantasmagoric creatures, apparitions, dreams, and premonitions. Fatigue

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transports Nepo to “a world in which houses and trees wandered about, […] no longer fastened to reality, shifting about in the dream zone at ground level” (36). This dreamscape is populated with irrealist images of “automobiles with caterpillar wheels and ghost men” (31), vehicles with “wheels as large as worlds” (26), and “houses that were trembling as if in their death throes, shaken from foundations to roofs by the rolling passage of that herd of steel mastodons” (26). Nepo’s oneiric visions reflect the sense of estrangement wrought by Bananera’s rapid urbanisation and unevenly developed infrastructure and transport system. Yet the irrepressible “alien […] vegetable life” (30) that spreads tentacularly across the city is equally charged with the utopian potential inscribed within plantation agriculture, transfiguring the interloping forces of “modernity” with its pyrotechnic “green fire.” Collapsing perceived barriers between past and present, core and periphery, the unevenly modernized and gringoized city generates inspiration for Nepo’s fitful cane liquor–induced dream. Nepo observes that he does “not seem [to] be sleeping but working,” and that this must be the reason “they paid double wages for night work”: “an advance for the work spent sleeping in the daytime” (52). As labour-time and time spent reproducing labour blur, reality and dreams commingle: the mice in Nepo’s house become “no less real” than the ones in his dream (55), and he is “overcome with fear [that] if he closed his eyes he would transfer reality to his dream; if he opened them he would tumble his nightmare among real things” (59). The brutal conditions of night work paradoxically allow Nepo to access a pre-capitalist past in which the categories of work and leisure were not discrete, and “productive labour was merged with everyday life” (Lefebvre 1991: 30). The linear time of the dream’s central chase sequence is disrupted by disjunctive, ancestral intrusions: the Americanized Cojubul family are revealed as “Indians dressed up as golfers” (Asturias 1973: 56); a deathly former lover tells Nepo that his bicycle “reminds [her] of when our ancestors went around on all fours” (53); and an antiquated carriage, apparently sent to kill him for “being disrespectful to the Banana, Inc.,” transforms into a hoot owl—the stay of execution arriving in the form of a Mayan symbol of impending death (52). This carriage is then superseded by “a cart the size of a theatre, golden in the light of a fire […], carrying men and women out of a storm who were carrying flags, plows, and rifles in their hands,” issuing the rallying cry: “Up the people!” (56). The demise of the banana company is presaged as the first carriage falls behind, becoming riddled with “shadow, soot, and mourning,” and we are left

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with the image of the President “holding in his green-gloved hand a banana stalk with no fruit on it”: an infertile “banana scepter” whose phallic resemblance is so strong it induces castration anxiety in one of the horses (55–56). In his somnolent state, Nepo decides that Tabío San, a dissident who has taken refuge in his bedroom, is the man in the dream who first shouts “up the people!” and together they begin to plot the overthrow of the regime and reclamation of ancestral lands. Dreams here attain the mysterious potential identified by Walter Benjamin in his 1929 essay on the Surrealist movement, possessing the power “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution” (2005: 216). Advancing “in a kind of dream lucidity” (Asturias 1973: 687), the striking masses gathering at the end of The Eyes are figured in particularly haunting terms: an unconcealed “spectre of communism,” the protestors form a “ghostly column,” a “procession of silence,” so “real” the strikers have to be revealed to the Green Pope as “bolsheviks” rather than actual “ghosts” (599–600). Yet the material conditions and motivations for this spectral revolt consistently reassert themselves: “made from the dreams of a tree” (681), the “slow march of human ants kept coming and coming,” “among trees that were drunk with fatigue” (687). The images of impotence in Nepo’s dream likewise come to fruition as, in his final moments, the President attempts to sate his “urge for self-manipulation [by] scratching in his damp, dirty pockets made of cloth used on the backs of maps,” his imperial-patriarchal desire to protect and propagate his “seed” becoming evermore urgent as his “blood [pounds] in rivers with no outlet” (660). This speculative expenditure of presidential ejaculate binds the financialized paralysis of corporate monopoly to a deeper, more systemic crisis in accumulation—a crisis that the intensified plunder and lightning-­ bolt fix of financialization is, ultimately, unable to resolve. Despite its recourse to dreamlike imagery, The Eyes moves beyond the “undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication” with which Benjamin charges Surrealism (2005: 216). Asturias’ “occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric” (ibid.)  forms intertwine with organized material resistance staged by massing bodies, illustrating Benjamin’s caution that only when “body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto” (216–217). Tabío San also urges the amassing crowds of strikers not to overestimate the supernatural: while acknowledging the revolutionaries’ debt to the

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myth-bound figures of Strong Wind, he argues that “waiting for another Hermenegilo Puac to give his head to a witch doctor and unleash a new ‘strong wind’ is to leave in supernatural hands problems that we have to solve ourselves with a single will: that of the strike!” (Asturias 1973: 684–685). Elsewhere, Tabío likens the “the arms of a people united in a single will” to “a hurricane, blinding, implacable, mute, silent, deadly, the dust and residue of other winds” (689). The storm-as-resistance figure here becomes vividly materialized as Asturias recasts the uncontainable violence and intensity of peripheral nature from an immobilizing source of oppression into the mobilizing substance of revolution. Collective action enables a revival of subsistence farming and communal leisure: letting the banana groves grow wild, the “fumigation teams” drop their “gloves, masks, helmets, equipment” (687) and former employees celebrate, drink, hunt, and fish (693). Alienated families likewise reform, “brother with brother, […] fathers with their sons” (670), mending the generational rift inaugurated by expropriation, and forming a “knot of survivors” who have the capacity to not only reject the forcibly imposed reality of the plantation but also undermine the powerful imaginative and fictitious apparatus on which capital increasingly depends (ibid.). The latent negative value amassed on the banana frontier thus triggers a radical shift from individual alienation to collective autonomy, allowing the workers to dream and author their own reality. Asturias’ revolutionary texts stage the creation of “a new world in which action [becomes] dreaming’s sister,“to borrow a phrase from Michael Löwy (1996: 20)—a world the characters now know will not “disappear […] with the dream when one awakened” (Asturias 1973: 667).

Conclusion The dream of cheap bananas might finally be reaching its terminus. Efforts to outrun pathogens and extend bananas’ “artificial springtime” (Asturias 1973: 627) are rapidly giving way to spiralling toxification, pesticide dependence, and the “superweed effect” (Moore 2015b: 270): the catastrophic, ever-mutating dynamic that “shows our future in the present” (Moore 2015a: 42). A virulent new strain of the soil-borne fungus that causes Panama Disease, or “Fusarium Wilt,” now threatens to render the Cavendish cultivar commercially and, even, biologically extinct. Originating in Taiwan, Tropical Race 4 (TR4) has already destroyed plantations across South Asia, and has recently reached Australia, Jordan, and

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Mozambique. With this development, the banana’s formerly fruitful sterility jeopardizes not only corporate profits but planetary futures, as the possibility of worldwide banana collapse portends pandemic levels of food insecurity across the global south. Recognizing the catastrophic implications of a spread to Latin America, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2017) has urged local and international “collaboration” in efforts to “contain” the disease, while funding the development of transgenic TR4-resistant Cavendishes (5). Once a peculiarly profitable form of “cheap nature,” bananas instantiate Moore’s (2015b) observations about the increasing difficulties capitalism faces in obtaining nature’s “‘free gifts’ on the cheap” (1), suggesting that we “may be experiencing not merely a transition from one phase of capitalism to another, but something more epochal: the breakdown of the strategies and relations that have sustained capital accumulation” over the longue durée (ibid.). Banana production therefore offers a paradigmatic example of the “singular and manifold” crisis of global capitalism already manifesting in spiralling forms of debt, biodiversity loss, climate change, and microbial revolt (Moore 2015b: 4). Yet, as this chapter has sought to demonstrate, the increasingly irresolvable contradictions accrued through the toxification and financialization of industrial agriculture simultaneously generate the conditions for revolutionary change. Asturias’ Banana Trilogy not only anticipates capitalism’s terminal crisis, then, but imaginatively plots its implosion and the surreal possibility of systemic transformation.

Notes 1. For a genealogy of pre-Boom Latin American literature that offers a corrective to the simplistic opposition between the naïve realism of the novela de tierra and the experimentalism of the ‘new novel,’ see Philip Swanson (1995), Chap. 1: “The Boom and beyond: Latin America and the not so new novel”, 1–20. 2. For a reading of Lyra’s work as an example of “banana social protest literature,” see Ana Patricia Rodríguez (2009), Chap.  2:  “Nations Divided: U.S. Intervention, Banana Enclaves, and the Panama Canal”, 44–75. 3. Negative value is a nebulous concept, and its relationship with Marx’s theory of value remains somewhat unclear. Moore (2015a) understands capitalist world-ecology as a “set of relations through which work/energy is transformed into value, understood as socially necessary labor time” (SNLT), which he takes in turn as being “determined through a dialectic of capitalization and appropriation” (9, 23). For Moore, “negative value”

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emerges with surplus at the nexus of paid/unpaid work, accumulating as a result of the inherent and intensifying contradictions of this dialectic. The “epochal” shift from “latent” to “active” negative  value occurs when the “unpaid costs” of the expanded reproduction of surplus—that is, the unceasing requirement for more work/energy to flow through each hour of SNLT—can no longer be externalized owing to the progressive closure and toxification of capitalism’s commodity frontiers. In our view, negative value does not necessarily require us to dispense with Marx’s notion of value based on SNLT, but rather provides a departure point for thinking through neoliberal capital’s failure to reproduce abstract social labour or maintain rising labour productivity, in accordance with Marx’s observation about capitalism’s evermore extensive and destructive crisis. Our interest lies in the dynamic negative value describes, rather than its conceptual solidity, and in how this might be productively employed to read texts from the Green Revolution era in relation to the crisis unfolding today. 4. Whilst acknowledging this shift in capitalism’s ability to transfer or defer its unpaid costs, it is difficult to determine whether world accumulation has reached the tipping point that Moore describes, as to do so would involve not simply attending to fragmented profits and forms of productivity, but taking into account (and valuing) capitalism’s displaced costs on a world-­ systemic scale. As Moore (2015a: 20)  concedes, “the translation of such externalities into the register of accumulation is imprecise,” and their impact on capitalism as a world-system is still unknown. We nevertheless find the notion of negative value both critically and politically useful, as it articulates our sense of capitalism’s latent, cumulative counterproductivity, and uses the contradictions inscribed in its value-logic to beckon forth systemic transformation. It is this idea of latency, moreover, that makes returning to Asturias’ trilogy and other commodity fictions of his time particularly intriguing and pertinent to the project of mapping Marx’s understanding of capitalism’s ever-deepening crisis onto the present conjuncture. 5. For an account of Asturias’ time in Paris from 1923 to 1933, and his intellectual ties to Breton, Eluard, and Aragon, see Reni Prieto  (1993). On Asturias’ interest in Surrealist techniques, see also Joel Wainwright and Joshua Lund (2016). 6. Galeano ([1973] 2009) draws attention to the racialized logic of this agroecological unevenness, observing that “subsistence agriculture barely ­survived on the high semi-barren lands to which the latifundio drove the Indians when it appropriated the lower and more fertile areas. The Indians who work[ed] on the plantations at harvest time spen[t] part of the year on tiny mountain plots raising the corn and beans without which they could not survive. […] In general—but especially in Guatemala—this structure of labor force appropriation is visibly identified with racism” (106).

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7. This pattern was also discussed by David Weir and Mark Shapiro in their landmark 1981 book, Circle of Poison, which describes how “economic poisons” deemed toxic and outlawed in the US are exported to agricultural frontiers and used to produce food destined for consumption in capitalist cores.

Works Cited Amaya Amador, Ramón. 1990. Prisión Verde. Tegucigalpa: Editorial Universitaria. Asturias, Miguel Ángel. 12 December 1967. Nobel Lecture. Trans. Swedish Trade Council Language Services. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1967/asturias/lecture/. ———. 1968. Strong Wind. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Delacorte Press. ———. 1971. The Green Pope. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Delacorte Press. ———. 1973. The Eyes of the Interred. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New  York: Delacorte Press. Beckman, Ericka. 2013. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter. [1929]2005. Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia. In Selected Writings, Vol. 2: Part 1, 1927–1930, ed. Michael W.  Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith, and Trans. Edmond Jephcott, 207–221. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bohme, Susanna R. 2015. Toxic Injustice: A Transnational History of Exposure and Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bucheli, Marcelo, and Ian Read. 2006. Banana Boats and Baby Food: The Banana in U.S. History. In From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000, ed. Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, 204–227. Durham: Duke University Press. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. 2006. Bananas. In Drive: The First Quartet: New Poems, 1980–2005. San Antonio: Wings Press. Daniel, Pete. 2007. Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press. Deckard, Sharae. 2016. The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature. In The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, ed. Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett, 25–45. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ———. 2019. Ecogothic. In Twenty-First Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 174–188. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Draugsvold, Ottar G., ed. 2000. Nobel Writers on Writing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Fallas, Carlos Luis. 2010. Mamita Yunai. San José: Editorial Costa Rica.

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Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2017. The Global Programme on Banana Fusarium Wilt Disease, 1–8. http://www.fao.org/3/a-­i7921e.pdf. Galeano, Eduardo. 2009. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Trans. Cedric Belfrage. London: Serpent’s Tail. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. Critique of Everyday Life I. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso. Löwy, Michael. 1996. Walter Benjamin and Surrealism: The Story of a Revolutionary Spell. Radical Philosophy 80: 17–23. Marquardt, Steve. 2001. Pesticides, Parakeets, and Unions in the Costa Rican Banana Industry, 1938–1962. Latin American Research Review 37: 3–36. Marx, Karl. 1989. Critique of Political Economy (Manuscript 1861–63). In Marx/ Engels Collected Works 31. New York: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1990. Capital I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. ———. 1993. Grundisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin. Moore, Jason W. 2000. Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-­ Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization. Review (Fernand Braudel Center): 409–433. ———. 2010. Cheap Food and Bad Money: Food, Frontiers, and Financialization in the Rise and Demise of Neoliberalism. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 33 (2/3): 225–261. ———. 2011. Wall Street is a Way of Organizing Nature: Interview. Upping the Anti 12: 47–61. ———. 2015a. Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology. Critical Historical Studies 2 (1): 1–43. ———. 2015b. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Neruda, Pablo. 1991. Canto General. Trans. Jack Schmitt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Niblett, Michael. 2012. World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature. Green Letters 16 (1): 15–30. Oloff, Kerstin. 2012. ‘Greening’ The Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-Ecological Degradation. Green Letters 16 (1): 31–45. Prieto, Reni. 1993.  Miguel Angel Asturias's Archeology of Return. (Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature, no. 7). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodríguez, Ana Patricia. 2009. Dividing the Isthmus Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press. Senior, Olive. 2005. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: Insomniac Press. Shapiro, Stephen. 2008. Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-system and Gothic Periodicity. Gothic Studies 10 (1): 29–47.

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Soluri, John. 2005. Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. Austin: University of Texas Press. Swanson, Philip. 1995. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taussig, Michael T. 2010. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wainwright, Joel, and Joshua Lund. 2016. Race, Space, and the Problem of Guatemala in Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Early Work. GeoHumanities 2 (1): 102–118. Warwick Research Collective. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Weir, David, and Mark Shapiro. 1981. Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World. San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy. Wynter, Sylvia. 1971. Novel and History, Plot and Plantation. Savacou 5: 95–102.

PART III

Consumed by Crisis

CHAPTER 9

Alimentary Gothic: Horror, Puerto Rico and the World-Food-System Kerstin Oloff

Much gothic horror revolves around food: from vampiric bloodsucking to flesh-eating zombies to the apocalypse during which normal foodways have collapsed, anxieties around food and eating are never far from the surface.1 Food’s gothic potential has become increasingly visible in recent decades, most notably perhaps in mainstream movies such as Zombieland (2009), in which “[t]he grocery store, the vending machine, the coffee franchise, and the fast-food restaurant have increasingly become recognizable as sites of alienation and even terror” (Newbury 2012: 111). Like many apocalypse narratives, these films highlight the fragility of the delocalized capitalist world-food-system; foodways rapidly collapse and survivors raid stores in search of high-sugar foods. In a similar vein, in Puerto Rican author Ángel A. Rivera’s zombie novel La rabia útil de los muertos (The useful rage of the dead) (2016), the zombie apocalypse initially

K. Oloff (*) School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Durham, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_9

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provokes food scarcity in Puerto Rico, highlighting the island’s extreme dependency on food imports. Satirizing the economic benefit derived by capital from the underdevelopment of food production on the island, the zombie apocalypse is eventually brought under control by fast-food companies that feed the walking dead a sugar-laced, processed diet, transforming them into a subservient unpaid labour force.2 What these brief examples from mainland US and Puerto Rico, the ‘Free Associated State,’ show is that whether by highlighting the contemporary global diet as a mechanism of control or by exposing the world-food-system’s inherent drive to food delocalization, many twenty-first-century films and literary texts emphasize the link between gothic imaginaries and globalized capitalist foodways. While, as we will see, the gothic emphasis on foodways has a longer history,3 it is in light of the increasing visibility of food horror that gothic studies critics have begun to reformulate their categories and methods. Piatti-Farnell, for instance, posits the “food gothic” as “a separate representational entity” (2017: 25), one in which the consumption and preparation of food function as the principle sites of horror. Building on these insights, I propose a modification in optic to embed food horror within its world-systemic, world-literary, and world-ecological context. The term alimentary gothic—as a shortened version of the more unwieldy term agro-alimentary gothic—signals this shift. It functions as a heuristic category that enables us to adopt a perspective that circumvents divisions between anxieties around food-getting, food consumption, and food production. To the kitchen and the vending machine as sites of horror we must add the plantation and the farm, as well as degraded landscapes and soils, deforested hills, and the genetically modified organism (GMO) laboratory. This is crucial, since food horror tends to be animated by the increasing delocalization of food-getting that underpins increasingly unequal global food regimes, creates hunger, gives rise to intensifying commodity fetishism, and fragments the everyday experience of food relations. The gothic is here understood as a broad phenomenon that functions as a mode (Hillard 2009: 689). Within Latin American literary studies, the ‘gothic’ has often been rejected as an inherently European category (Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz 2017: 2–3). Yet, if we accept that the gothic powerfully registers global capitalism’s pressure points, then it makes sense to expand these disciplinary and geographical boundaries beyond the Eurocentric gothic canon and revise our notion of the ‘gothic.’

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Indeed, building on the work of critics who have emphasized the central role of the Caribbean and Latin America in gothic cultural history (Braham 2012; Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz 2017; Loichot 2013; Paravisini-­ Gebert 2002), as well as drawing on world-systemic approaches to literary studies as proposed by the Warwick Research Collective  (WReC), the gothic mode can be read as a particularly compelling instance of “world-­ literature,” defined as registering in form and content the processes shaping the capitalist world-system. This allows us to draw connections between seemingly disparate texts, the ultimate horizon of which is the world-system. More specifically in this context, the ultimate horizon of the alimentary gothic is the world-food-system.4 Further, one might argue that the relations between ‘gothic spikes,’ which are of particular interest to gothic scholars (Shapiro 2008; Bishop 2010), and the difficult-to-grasp world-food-system come into sharper focus in cultural productions from certain locations (see also Niblett 2012). Puerto Rico is one such location. Here, under US imperialism, food delocalization and alimentary underdevelopment have been particularly pronounced—so much so that the island nowadays imports over 85% of its food, an arrangement that benefits US food corporations. “US food power,” to borrow Allison Carruth’s term, has had a devastating socioecological impact on the island (2013). It is hence unsurprising that the penetration and consolidation of imperialist-capitalist foodways has long occupied the island’s writers, particularly during moments of crisis. The present chapter is organized around two such moments: the crisis of new imperialism and of the first global food regime of the 1930s, and the global post-2008 recession. I here focus on the short stories of one of the key members of the Puerto Rican generación del treinta, Emilio S. Belaval, alongside the gothic sci-fi stories of Jotacé López in Arboretum (2016) and Alexandra Pagán Vélez in horrorReal (2016). One of my aims of reading Puerto Rican neo-criollista texts registering the crisis of the 1930s in dialogue with the island’s recent gothic sci-fi spike is to show how López’s aesthetics in particular suggest a return to those earlier texts for a thorough understanding of the present.

From Colonialism to the Corporate Food Regime If gothic anxieties revolve around capitalism’s pressure points, then food has been one of the most concrete ones in the age of US imperialism. The alimentary gothic plays on anxieties around rifts in socioecological

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metabolism and, more specifically, around food delocalization, the lack of (affordable) food, the dispossessions and proletarianization of the farming class, and the alienation of workers from lands increasingly employed for export production. One might here draw on the insights developed within food regime studies, which have highlighted the central role of “particular relations of food production and consumption” within global capitalism (Holt Giménez and Shattuck 2011: 110). As foodways have become more thoroughly capitalized, global food production has risen but many communities find themselves increasingly priced out of the world-food-­ system—especially in times of elevated global food prices, such as during economic depressions and oil crises. In this scenario, food scarcity exists alongside global food surpluses, with hunger in its contemporary form an “effect of the global market” (Bartolovich 2010: 44). The world-food-system is also fundamentally environmentally unsustainable, since it is heavily reliant on monocultural growing (which destroys local ecosystems) and on fossil fuels for transport, pesticides, fertilizers, and machinery. Capitalist agro-industrialization is detrimental to soils, causing erosion and aridification, and one of the main contributors to climate change and pollution, producing “at least 13.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions” (Holt Giménez et  al. 2017: 15). Given its emphasis on profit over sustainability, the world-food-system is prone to regularly recurring crises that are only momentarily overcome through expansion and intensification. Historically, the problems of the exhaustion of soil fertility and pollution were addressed through short-term fixes rather than long-term solutions such as land reforms. While the oil-fuelled transformations since the 1940s, for instance, were able to partially mask the “problem of urbanization and the metabolic rift” (Holt Giménez et al. 2017: 131), the underlying problems of the capitalist organization of foodways did not disappear as the re-emergence of global food riots in the 1970s, and then in 2008, demonstrates. The long roots of the contemporary world-food-system lie in colonial capitalism’s transformation of entire geographic areas into extraction zones for food commodities (including sugar, coffee, and tea). More immediately, the system was decisively shaped by the crisis of the first global food regime (1870–1930s) and, more broadly, of the ecological regime of new imperialism (see Holleman 2018). During this period, the United States had been emerging as a new hegemonic power, partly through the expansion of imperial food relations into the Caribbean and Latin America. As a result, the socioecological make-up of Haiti, Cuba,

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Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic were profoundly reshaped by the imperialist ‘American Sugar Kingdom’ (see, for instance, Ayala 1999), which would follow the boom–bust patterns of the capitalist world-­ ecology. Out of the economic and environmental crises of the 1930s, there then emerged the heavily oil-fuelled second food regime (1950s–1970s) characterized by increasing agro-industrialization, rapid urbanization, and the growing importance of multinational agribusiness. Within this new order, the United States functioned as the dominant global food power, exporting its Green Revolution–fuelled surpluses to “its informal empire of postcolonial states on the strategic perimeters of the Cold War” (McMichael 2009: 141). Ideologically coded as “aid,” this produced a damaging dependence on food imports and destroyed local markets. By the mid-1970s, this unsustainable regime propped up by cheap oil was again in crisis. The current “corporate food regime” emerged out of this crisis as part of the neoliberalization of the global economy (McMichael 2009: 151). It is characterized by new waves of primitive accumulation, the intensifying exhaustion and destruction of natural resources and habitats, extreme levels of hunger, and the “creation of a global diet, consisting of an array of manufactured meals and ingredients” (Friedmann 1993: 55). It has also led to the concentration of wealth and record profits for agri-food corporations “from Monsanto, Bayer, and Syngenta on the farm input side, to huge grain and livestock companies like Cargill and Smithfield, and the global grocery giants Walmart and Carrefour on the output side” (Holt Giménez 2017: 85). Yet, as Moore has observed, neoliberalism has not been able to restore conditions for reviving capitalist accumulation since “the frontiers that could yield a cornucopia of nature’s free gifts [are] fewer than ever before,” while the “scientific-­technological revolution in labor productivity, greatly anticipated in the 1970s, never materialized” (2010: 229). Due to the nature of its relationship to mainland United States, Puerto Rico has been subjected to the forces of agro-alimentary imperialism in peculiarly intense fashion. The upshot has been high levels of food insecurity, extreme social and economic inequality, and environmental degradation. From the late nineteenth century onwards, US colonialism and monopoly capital reshaped Puerto Rico’s socioecological and political make-up in the search for new markets, raw materials, and cheap labour. It transformed the island into an “increasingly wage-based site of cheap colonized labor” that produced exports, including sugar, coffee, tobacco, and needlework (Santiago-Valles 1994: 21). Over the first decades of the

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twentieth century, the “principal uses given to farmland” thus changed radically (Santiago-Valles 1994: 28), which forced small-scale agricultural producers into the labour market and began to erode the subsistence economy. In contrast to official rhetoric on the health benefits of US rule, the effects of increasing wealth concentration and the capitalist dispossession of the peasant class worsened the health conditions of the majority (see Briggs 2002), and made them more vulnerable to the vagaries of the market and the effects of ‘natural’ phenomena like hurricanes. Increasingly, “death from hunger was just a crop failure away […] throughout the first half of [the twentieth century]” (Santiago-Valles 1994: 55). The years of the Depression—a time of (often violent) class struggles and social unrest—exposed the inherent problems of capitalist foodways, but simultaneously prepared the conditions for the rapid shift towards manufacturing and urbanization and the second global food regime (Dietz 1989: 153). With the global economic boom after WWII, Puerto Rico partook in some of the benefits of expanding welfare and improving living standards, and thus functioned as a showcase for the supposed achievements of US ‘involvement’ in the Caribbean. Food dependency, however, was exacerbated by rapid industrialization and urbanization. Following the global crisis of the 1970s, it would increase further with the onset of neoliberalism and the implementation of federal assistance nutritional programmes, which served to mitigate social tensions while maintaining a highly unequal and exploitative colonial relationship with mainland United States. Thus, while enabling the lower classes to “escape hunger,” it did not help them to escape poverty (Colón Reyes 2011: 40). Through coupons, the programmes favoured large supermarkets over smaller shops or local markets. Further, they resulted in the dominance of an unhealthy, sugar-laced diet and hence elevated obesity and diabetes rates (Colón Reyes 2011: 45). While, as elsewhere, healthy eating became increasingly a privilege of the wealthier classes, on an ideological level, the responsibility was shifted to the individual as consumer (Colón Reyes 2011: 42). Alimentation thus functions as a political and economic “instrument of subjection” (Colón Reyes 2011: 47). With the onset of the global recession and the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, food insecurity, food delocalization, and malnutrition have re-emerged as highly visible pressure points in a world in which extreme hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin, and in which giant multinationals impose an unhealthy global diet produced at massive social and environmental costs.

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At moments of systemic crisis—whether the 1930s, the 1970s, or post-2008—the inherent inequalities of the world-food-system are exacerbated and become more visible, especially from peripheralized locations most exposed to the processes of primitive accumulation, most strongly affected by environmental degradation, and often most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. As we will now see, in Belaval’s stories from the 1930s and 1940s, the anxieties produced by these processes are relatively weakly transcoded: foreign-owned plantations swallow up people’s livelihoods, degrade local ecosystems, and erode food relations.

Cuentos para fomentar el turismo (1946): Sugar, Coffee, and the Gothic The radical transformation of Puerto Rican ecology over the course of the ‘Long American Century’ is intimately linked to the aesthetics of the gothic and the monstrous. As elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America, regionalist and neo-criollista writers of the first half of the twentieth century, including Emilio S. Belaval, turned towards the rural and, more broadly, ‘nature’ in their writing. As Ericka Beckman has noted, “regionalism’s turn toward ‘nature,’ and the ‘land’ marked anything but an escape from commercial culture: instead, the settings examined by regionalism were precisely those at the center of export-led modernization” (2013: 158). The gothic mode often formed an integral part of this turn towards nature and registered the anxieties produced by these transformations. Indeed, the gothic registration of the devastating impact of US imperialism spreads across the Caribbean and across different media. One might here think of the gothic depictions of exploited workers in other novelas de la caña; of the proliferation of zombie tales in the Haitian context; or of visual works, such as Julio Tomás Martínez’s El genio del ingenio (1910), a painting in which the smoke produced by a sugar mill magically forms into a robotic humanoid, into a “mechanic spirit,” that devours one of the workers, blood flowing liberally from his hand, squeezing out his “humanity to the point of transforming him into bagasse” (Rodríguez Juliá 2004: 49). In his short stories included in Cuentos para fomentar el turismo, originally published individually from 1939 onwards, Belaval presents us with a gothic turn to the ‘rural’ in the form of the sugar plantations and the coffee haciendas. Known for his essays, plays, and short stories, Belaval

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was a key figure of the generación del treinta, which was defined by the anti-colonial fight against “aggressive modernization and transculturation” (Díaz 2010: 31). Many of his texts were marked by a conservative nostalgia for the Spanish patriarchal-colonial order and by an ideological ‘whitening’ of puertorriqueñidad and accompanying racism.5 For these reasons, they have rightly been subjected to criticism by postcolonial and feminist scholars. Yet his ironically titled Cuentos para fomentar el turismo (1985) also offers a strong denunciation of Puerto Rico’s socioecological problems during the Depression, worsened by the hurricanes in 1928 and 1932. His influential short story collection still functions as an important reference point in Puerto Rican literary history and further gains in significance through the retrospective lens provided by contemporary gothic sci-fi narratives. In the stories, the lack of food produced by new rounds of colonial-­ capitalist appropriation features prominently: the stories are punctuated by the omnipresence of hunger, malnutrition, anaemia, and child death. In “Santiguá de santigüero” [Healing by the Healer], “hunger” has become a new disease that a traditional community healer struggles to recognize and that ultimately kills his patient. The “disease” here represents, as Ramón A. Figueroa notes, a loss of control and agency for both the healer and the community, since it is driven by outside forces beyond their control: the takeover of lands by the sugar companies (2006: 177). The latter reign supreme within Belaval’s narrative universe: the ‘American Sugar Kingdom’ provides the ultimate horizon against which the stories unfold. The sugar companies occupy the most fruitful lands, while the jíbaros work on infertile land, often battling with water scarcity—an environmental phenomenon that typically accompanies monocultural agriculture. Experiences of dispossession or displacement are commonplace: Isabello Carillo in “Tormenta platanera” [strong wind that uproots banana and plantain trees] ends up landless in San Juan, losing several plots over the course of his lifetime. The work on the arid land degrades the jíbaros, reducing them to “beasts’ backs curved over the land” (25). While hunger, ill-health, and malnutrition are the most obvious results, in “Mantengo” [Support/Welfare],6 Belaval suggests that alimentary support would not solve the problem created by food dependency and land degradation: after years of hunger and struggle, Chiche Malpica gives up on his infertile plot and refuses food—a gesture ironically seen as subversive by the Central and met with the abundant provision of food, which indirectly ends up killing him. Unhealthy overindulgence, fostered by the

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attempt to quell dissent, is here critiqued as the flipside to food scarcity in a situation of food dependency. While the jíbaro characters often seem passive and docile (in contrast to the actual class struggles of the 1930s but in line with the vision of other influential intellectuals of Belaval’s generation), two stories centre on vengeance and the restoration of justice through fire (something that resonates with the history of cane workers’ strikes, during which the burning of cane fields functioned as a form of resistance). This includes the story that employs the gothic mode most extensively, namely “La viuda del manto prieto” [The widow in the dark mantle]. Luis Rafael Sánchez characterized the story as magical realist in style, since it emphasizes popular myths, communal lore, and legends within an overall realist frame (1979: 146). This entanglement of the magical realist and gothic modes was not uncommon at the time: the Caribbean writer most strongly associated with the theorization and practice of “lo real maravilloso”—Alejo Carpentier—also prominently employed the gothic mode in his famously ‘magical real’ novel, El reino de este mundo (1949), particularly when narrating the poison campaign of Makandal. While in Carpentier’s novel, the gothic mode is employed when the narrative is focalized through the perspective of the white plantation owners, in “La viuda,” the gothic mode is associated with a North American sugar mill that hires a character named Flor Colón to dispose of a nameless widow in a ragged dark mantle who haunts the cane fields at night. The widow—a figure symbolizing a noble past destroyed by the North American sugar interests—lives in her “maleficent farm” that continues to resist the spread of the plantation, despite having been set on fire twenty times by the overseers (15). In part, her myth is created by the stories told by the community (Figueroa 2006: 172): she is described as having “eyes full of ashes” and “bony hands that don’t finish dying” (15), and the villagers are unsure whether she is alive or living-dead. Flor’s failed attempt to kill her, her purported lack of the need for food, and her rumoured immunity to cholera, all seem to confirm to Flor that she is not one of the living. The gothic secret at the heart of her unrest is a history of poverty, involving the loss of her children, land, and, finally, her husband, who was murdered by an overseer, who behaved as if he was above the law. The widow’s status as one of the ‘undead’ points towards familiar representations of characters lacking agency, which often register the capitalization of the countryside. However, unlike many of Belaval’s more docile jíbaro characters, not only does she resist the spread of the plantation but

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she is also eventually transformed into a symbol of collective resistance (Báez Arroyo 2017: 37): her story provokes Flor and other villagers to set the cane fields on fire in an act of vengeance—yet, problematically with the widow still in her hut in the fields. Her death is narrativized as a magical realist metamorphosis, as she is imagined as donning “a mantle of fire.” The fire itself replicates the widow’s previous haunting of the plantation: “the smoke spread towards the sky, as if it wanted to place on the dispossessed earth a sinister widow’s mantle” (22). Overall, the widow combines the sense of dispossession of zombified workers with the desire for resistance—a desire that is equally encapsulated by the zombie, a figure long linked to the Haitian Revolution. Through the titular “widow in the dark mantle,” Belaval thus offers a figure that both registers the horrors of the farmers’ dispossessions but also symbolizes resistance through its magic realist transformation (Sánchez 1979: 148). Vengeance is also central to “La candelaria de Juan Candelario,” a story that equally uses a gothic vocabulary to depict the transformation of socioecological relations through imperialism. Juan, who comes from a line of now impoverished hacendados, is a smallholder who grows vegetables and coffee and might thus seem emblematic of a way of life that is getting lost. Coffee-growing was viewed nostalgically by the creole elite, partly because, unlike sugar, it was not directly controlled by US monopolies.7 Yet, as many historians have pointed out, that nostalgia was misplaced: like sugar, coffee-growing was driven by foreign capital, displaced subsistence farming, and was “linked to higher mortality rates” and a poorer diet for the workers (Picó 2014 : 212). Interestingly, in Belaval’s story, coffee is also connected to some of the most gothic images and scenes: it is presented as a destructive force, with Juan falling victim to the illusory promises of coffee, as well as to the usurious lending practices of the shopkeeper Teodorito Valdepié. Characterized in gothic vocabulary, Teodorito is described as a “bloodsucker”—a character who, to borrow Karl Marx’s description of capital, “vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” (1976: 342). It is Juan’s doomed turn to coffee that inserts him firmly within capitalist relations and a cycle of debt, and which drives him into the clutches of the ‘American Sugar Kingdom.’ Like in the previous story, Belaval evokes a reduction of the characters’ agency with the intensification of capitalist relations. Juan’s only way out of accrued debt is to attempt to access governmental compensation by fraudulently staging an accident in a nearby sugar plantation. With the help of three (paid) witnesses and a “crucifier,” Juan sacrifices three and a

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half fingers for compensation. Capital—embodied by Teodorito—deprives Juan of his personhood, as a result of which his monetary value is literally expressed in body parts that he sacrifices to pay off his debt and save his farm. Symbolically, the story thus literalizes “the systematic assaults on bodily and psychic integrity that define the economic infrastructure of modernity, the capitalist market-system” (McNally 2011: 5). Within the story, the accident transforms Juan into “a man who had already started dying by three and a half fingers and who the resentment of the injustice was rotting little by little” (33), into a man beginning to resemble the zombie-esque living-dead widow. Yet, even before this transformation and mutilation, his life had been characterized by a lack of agency, proceeding in “monthly cycles of unalterable content” (Sánchez 1979: 154) as he sank further into debt. In both of Belaval’s stories, the gothic is thus firmly linked to the horrors of the market, represented by the North American sugar industry. The restoration of justice, however, is conceived along patriarchal lines that bear the imprint of Belaval’s romanticized notion of the hacienda system. Like the widow, Juan turns into a symbol of vengeance, in this case through the play on the word “candela,” ranging from literal fire to metaphoric light to the anger burning in his chest. During the festivities in honour of the Virgen de la Candelaria, whose light is said to guide towards redemption, Juan sets Teodorito’s store and Teodorito himself on fire. In the gothic ending to the story, the insurance company discovers that all that remains of the store is Teodorito’s skeleton, still blissfully ensconced in his money-extracting business. Unlike the widow, the male protagonist Juan is able to restore his personhood through this act, conceived as retributive justice. In an ironic twist, no one suspects the docile-looking jíbaro of having anything to do with the arson attack, exposing some of the treintistas’ ideological projections onto the rural classes as misguided. In the ending to “La viuda,” on the other hand, one might pause on the patriarchal implications of the male-dominated vengeance: the female is ultimately sacrificed in a gesture towards a restoration of the masculine-­ criollo hegemony that Belaval desired (Báez Arroyo 2017: 32). Belaval’s texts, then, could be said to highlight—even if in negative—the importance of thinking the processes of (gendered and racialized) appropriation alongside the appropriation of lands and the exploitation of workers.

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Alimentary Gothic Sci-Fi: Monsters in the Age of Monsanto Recent years have seen a noticeable spike in gothic and gothic sci-fi literary works in Puerto Rico, often combined with a return to the earlier generation’s anxieties around food consumption and production. While gothic and sci-fi imaginaries have long been overlapping, as encapsulated by Martínez’s aforementioned painting, a thorough intertwining of the gothic and sci-fi is a more recent phenomenon that is well illustrated by the fiction of Jotacé López and Alexandra Pagán Vélez. López’s short story “Coffea Arabica+” in Arboretum and Pagán’s horrorReal can be classed as gothic science fiction—or cyberpunk, the “paradigmatic form of gothic science fiction”—combining the genres’ respective projections of contemporary anxieties onto the past and the future (Wasson and Alder 2011: 4). Both texts evoke monsters (including cannibals and zombies) that are associated with a colonial, as well as a more recent colonial-­ imperial, past.8 These older monsters feature amongst sci-fi cyborgs and holograms, creating eco-apocalyptic dystopias dominated by the corporate food regime.9 In López’s “Coffea Arabica+,” the sense of capitalism as spiralling cycles of recurring crises and intensifying exploitation—rather than a story of linear progress—suggests itself via the invocation of earlier narratives critical of the American Sugar Kingdom, both on the level of plot and the level of imagery. In the story, “the Corporation,” a transnational coffee producer who covers 67% of global coffee consumption and dominates most of the island employs a horde of zombified coffee harvesters who hail from different islands and are unable to show emotion or pain. The brutally exploitative culture created by the sugar industry is replaced in this fictional universe by one structured around coffee-growing, dispensing with any potentially remaining nostalgia for the latter (at least if grown for the global capitalist market and under the conditions imposed by monopoly capital). By returning to the aesthetics of these earlier sugar narratives, the story points towards the similarities of the crises of the 1930s and the present, including the untrammelled power of capital in the form of multinationals, increasing militarization and extreme disciplinary surveillance at the disposal of capital, the super-exploitation of the workers within an export-driven market, and an intensifying racializing discourse that seeks to naturalize the exploitation of the exploited as an “underdeveloped species” (23).

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Central to the story are tropes of zombification that, like in the narratives from the 1930s, register an intensification of exploitation, appropriation, and accompanying feelings of alienation. The story is told by a narrator who, it becomes increasingly clear, is unreliable due to his gradual zombification by a cocktail of injections that are changing his emotional responses and their physical manifestations. He is increasingly unable to express emotions or show dissent, not even responding to his boyfriend’s apparent attempts to rescue him. After a blow on the head and the mutilation of his arms as an implicit punishment for not volunteering to collaborate in the trafficking of human limbs, the narrator is confined to a hospital bed and connected to an “exaggerated quantity of stands and tubes” (11), a treatment paid for by the Corporation’s “excellent” medical insurance plan (12). While he had been originally part of the military surveillance class, after his downfall he is eventually released as a water carrier into the army of lower-class coffee pickers, who are equally unable to express emotions and are confined in crowded caserios [low-cost residential buildings] surrounded by barbed wire. Throughout, the story registers in style and form the realities of uneven and combined capitalist development, which produces an experience of multiple, coexisting temporalities. It thus mixes elements that are traditionally associated with the gothic’s backward-looking fascination with the magic and the ‘primitive,’ with sci-fi’s investment in technological advances, such as holograms, new computerized weaponry—or indeed the novel techniques used to create zombies via injections. The Corporation possesses highly advanced technological weaponry and has developed ways to manipulate the growth process of coffee bushes to such an extent that they produce mature grains within three days. Technological ‘progress’ here translates into the extreme intensification of capitalist agriculture, at the expense of the zombified workers, who are employed to harvest all year round. Like in Belaval’s story, workers are reduced to the value of their physical labour-power and, quite literally, their body parts. Already in the title, López gestures towards the dehumanizing effect and power of the coffee industry in a global capitalist market: “the plus sign [in the title] refers to the capitalist interest of the coffee industry and the contraband trade of the pickers’ body parts, which constantly accumulate” (Figueroa 2017). That is, the sign refers to surplus value extraction, as well as to the wider network of “appropriation” (Moore 2015) on which this extraction depends. The corporate food regime is central to this, as the story makes

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abundantly clear: different levels of experience—eating, the global food system, agro-technology, and the domination of the individual—are expertly woven together from the very beginning, as the narrator refuses his food when he suddenly remembers his former colonel Frank, subconsciously making a connection that otherwise seems to elude him. From the confines of his sick bed, the protagonist imagines the ongoing expansion of the giant agribusiness corporation that is “devouring in silence all the coffee-workers” (11), while his own sense of self is also slowly being ‘devoured’ by it as a form of control and management of dissent. Further, the story brilliantly explores some of the features of neoliberal capitalism that Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff identify, including the ‘“forces” of hyperrationalization’ (which reduce humans to units and functions), the rise of occult economies that mirror the speculative financialization of global capital, and the (re-)emergence of “anxieties over the pilfering of human bodies and body parts for profit” (2000: 333; 312). In López’s story, the Corporation not only employs dehumanizing rationalization reinforced by brutal methods to keep the working classes subdued, but also tolerates a flourishing black market in bodily limbs, led by Frank, one of its senior officers. Frank, who is also the narrator’s former colonel, embodies both the gothic and the sci-fi modes: appearing in some ways to behave and act like an android, he is also a gothic villain, displaying lascivious ways of interacting with children and butchering workers. The black market is aimed at satisfying the demands produced by the religious beliefs of the lower middle classes who, by embalming and sacrificing the workers’ bodily limbs, hope to advance their own financial well-being. In a financialized global economy apparently uncoupled from the workings of capitalist production, irrational occult practices seeking to conjure wealth proliferate, providing a distorted mirror for the spectral world of high finance (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). While López’s story evokes the imagery of the 1930s to comment on the present, horrorReal by Pagán even more strongly emphasizes the specificities of the neoliberal corporate food regime. horrorReal is a collection of seven interlaced short stories that highlight the near-total control of the world-food-system by a small number of monopolies that make up the agri-food industrial complex and that dominate the way the world is organized. Pagán’s dystopian world is characterized by extreme economic, social, and environmental inequalities: while some work in the mines, go to prison for being unable to pay for medical services, or die being eaten by fellow humans during the eco-apocalypse, others are able to buy new

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bodies for deceased relatives, become millionaires in evermore extreme reality shows that push ethical and moral considerations beyond all limits, or retreat to walled-off enclosures, as is suggested at the very end of the last story. In a powerful narrative arc, Pagán depicts a nightmarish but recognizable future, in which gendered violence, authoritarianism, the complete alienation of mind and body, and the privatization of the commons (and accompanying commodification of the private sphere through social media and reality TV) reign supreme. The first story, “Apocalipsis” [Apocalypse], narrates a suicide and infanticide epidemic, as a result of which cyborgs take over the ‘nurturing’ of the young, and child-rearing is rationalized to authoritarian extremes. Over the course of the next five chapters, the total hold of multinationals on individuals, often via authoritarian, patriarchal, and corrupt governments, increases exponentially, spiralling towards a final apocalypse in the last story entitled “Hambre” [Hunger]. In it, the starving survivors live in underground bunkers in a deforested landscape of environmental destruction, in which food scarcity has led to cannibalism becoming part of everyday diets. While not featuring literal cannibalistic zombies, the survivors live in fear of undefined beasts that might eat them, as well as of the cannibalistic “Armada,” composed of the leftovers of the former government (which has always lacked real power as compared to the power of agribusiness). Like in many classic zombie movies, the “humanity” of the survivors—who are cannibals and increasingly resemble the “living dead”—is progressively undermined: They spent decades as cadavers, each attempt to survive transformed them into beasts that tear each other to threads, chewing and eating each other with a colossal hunger that made their bones and their spirit stoop, that tangled up the humanity they had left in a regression that was more tortuous than any preying danger. (55)

Cannibalistic hunger and zombification—the reduction of humans to their instincts and bodily functions—defines the survivors’ new being. “Hambre”—like many twenty-first-century zombie films—plays on the anxieties produced by industrial food production and the fear of its eventual collapse. Locally produced food here no longer exists, and the world-­ food-­system has broken down as part of an eco-apocalypse. Within this trajectory towards the food-apocalypse, the multinational Monsanto—“maquiavelically efficient in its expansionist

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ambitions”—plays a key role, alongside MacDonald’s, Walmart, and Trump embassies (Negrón Medina 2017). The final story suggests that Monsanto has profited even from the apocalypse: while the majority feed of each other in a deforested wasteland, a green horizon that is inaccessible to the main characters seems to exist, located beyond a massive wall inscribed MNSNT. While hyperbolic, this is not too remote from our own reality: as Raj Patel and Eric Holt Giménez note, “while many food activists assert that the global food system is ‘broken’, for these companies, it works extraordinarily well” (2017: 20). Monsanto, in particular, is not only dominant in the agrochemical industry (where its revenues globally make up one-fourth), the commercial seed industry (one-tenth), and the GMO market (estimated 90%), it is also more generally one of “the most profitable companies in the world” (Carruth 2013: 14–15). Pagán’s short story collection thus highlights the role of agribusinesses like Monsanto in twenty-first-century imperial domination and the corporate food regime. It is here worth highlighting that Puerto Rico’s position as a transgenic testing centre benefits multinational seed corporations like Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Dow AgroSciences, Syngenta Seeds, and AgReliant Genetics, “who already occupy 14% of public lands with the best potential to produce food” (Martínez Mercado 2016). They test soy and corn seeds for their herbicide-resistance to the benefit of the major soybean- and corn-producing countries, while being subsidized by the Puerto Rican government, despite the fact that the economy was spiralling into the post-2006 debt crisis (Martínez Mercado 2017), and ignoring the fact that Monsanto has a long record of damaging workers’ health and degrading environments. The gothic sci-fi mode of horrorReal is explicitly linked to the environmental, social, and economic threat posed by these multinational companies. As I have argued elsewhere, the use of herbicides including, infamously, DDT has provided an important context for zombie-apocalypse movies, starting with Night of the Living Dead (1968) (Oloff 2017). This oft forgotten history of the genre of the zombie movie re-emerges in “Hambre,” where the dystopian landscapes created by Monsanto are peopled with monstrous humans. Pagán takes the critique of Monsanto beyond its use of herbicides and seed experiments. In the cyberpunk story “Ella” [She], Monsanto is placed in direct conjunction with extreme gender violence and the alienation of mind and body characteristic of capitalist societies. Having previously experimented with “genetic manipulation,” the fictional version of Monsanto has discovered the genome of memory and consciousness.

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Following well-established sci-fi tropes, this discovery allows for their re-­ localization within a new body.10 The positive spin by Monsanto on its commitment to “nutrition, health and life” (27) is juxtaposed throughout with the story of a wife who, after having been beaten to death by her husband, wakes up horrified in a younger body that her husband and the male doctors have chosen for her, at the expense of a woman who had a history of non-subordination. The story thus takes the control of multinationals over the distribution and production of traditional knowledge to dystopian extremes. The alienation of the majority from the lands they live on and their labour-power, as well as their knowledge-production and even their own bodies, is thus literalized through the notion of ‘body transfers.’ Further, through the link between a story of femicide and Monsanto, Pagán forces us to think patriarchal oppression alongside the current domination of multinational companies. Indeed, the burden of the global food crisis is disproportionately shouldered by women. The corporate food regime is, in other words, inherently patriarchal. While the generación del treinta nostalgically longed for a restoration of a masculine, criollo hegemony, López and Pagán portray a power-hungry masculinity as an integral part of capitalist food regimes.

Worlding the Alimentary Gothic This chapter grew out of an attempt to understand the current spike in Puerto Rican monstrous, gothic, and gothic sci-fi writing, in which certain gothic tropes, including the cannibal and the zombie, recur with more frequency.11 Within this spike, food anxieties, and the alimentary gothic, play a significant role, as we have seen. From Rivera’s zombie novel to Rafael Acevedo’s brilliant cyberpunk novels (e.g. Exquisito cadáver (2001) and Al otro lado del muro hay carne fresca (2014)), to the gothic sci-fi short stories discussed here, the alimentary gothic appears in many different forms and texts. While this spike is not unique to Puerto Rico, its form and overt criticality speak to the particular realities of a location systematically exploited, appropriated, underdeveloped and environmentally degraded by capitalist (colonial and imperial) interests over centuries. The often explicit references back to the literatures produced in response to the crisis of the 1930s help to establish a world-historical understanding of the present moment and lend depth to its criticality. Belaval’s stories in this context fulfil an exemplary function, since they bear similarities with stories produced elsewhere in response to capitalist modernization and its

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crisis in the 1930s: narratives involving the gothic mode, and zombie-­ esque figures, and addressing issues of food scarcity and dispossession, were common across the Caribbean and even the United States. This is not particularly surprising if we understand the social and environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, for example, and the food scarcity experienced by Puerto Rican agricultural workers previously displaced by the sugar plantations, as part of the larger global crisis of new imperialism. One of the first moments of flourishing of the alimentary gothic as a world-literary genre might be located, then, during the period when the foundations for food delocalization created by imperialism were laid.12 Thus, to understand the alimentary gothic as a world-literary phenomenon will require both analysis of the specificities of particular national contexts across time, as I have offered here, and comparative studies that situate such specificities in wider socio-economic and literary networks.

Notes 1. Thanks to Dr Yarí Pérez Marín for suggestions in response to an early draft. 2. A comparable critique in the realm of visual culture is offered by Miguel Luciano’s Exterminio de nuestros indios (2003), in which smiling Ronald McDonald is depicted with a sword in one hand and fast food in the other, towering over a slain indigenous man. 3. This is most notably the case in the Caribbean context, in which Africans and Amerindians have long been linked to “pathological eating” in racist colonial discourse (Loichot, 2013: viii). 4. The hyphenation of the world-food-system is to be read as “a relational and systemic gesture” (Westall 2017: 272) and follows the logic of hyphenation for “world-system” and “world-literature.” 5. These were especially evident in Los problemas de la cultura puertorriqueña [1935] (1977), in which he writes that “we are Spanish to the marrow” (26), nostalgically locating “the genesis of our rural psychology […] in the disappeared Puerto Rican Hacienda” (43) and its supposedly benevolent white European patriarch. “The African element,” Belaval opined, “for being negligible in numbers and national astuteness, has not helped us to settle on our land” (56). 6. According to Lugo, “mantengo” in popular speech also referred to the New Deal agency PRERA [Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration] (1972: 65).

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7. Enrique Laguerre’s La llamarada (1994,  originally published in 1935), for instance, contrasts the sugar plantations, where the workers live in a “simulacrum of life” (181), with a nostalgic vision of the coffee haciendas. 8. As Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz point out, López’s story employs zombified figures that are similar to their Haitian predecessors (2020: 34). 9. One of the contemporary Puerto Rican authors with the most consistent focus on food domination has been Rafael Acevedo, in his brilliant novels Exquisito cadáver (2001) and Al otro lado del muro hay carne fresca (2014), as well as the collection of poems Canibalía (2005). 10. In the Caribbean context, we might here think of the Cuban sci-fi tradition, including Agustín de Rojas’s El año 200 (1990) and Yoss’s Se aquila un planeta (2001). 11. Some further examples of books that employ zombie tropes include John Torres’s Undead (2013), Ana María Fuster Lavín’s (In)somnio, Rafael Acevedo’s Al otro lado del muro hay carne fresca (2014), Pedro Cabiya’s Malas hierbas (2010), and Josué Montijo’s El killer (2007). 12. Haiti nowadays imports 60% of its food (see Steckley and Shamsie 2015).

Works Cited Ayala, César J. 1999. American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898–1934. Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press. Báez Arroyo, María I. 2017. Estrategias narrativas en la construcción de las feminidades y masculinidades en Cuentos para fomentar el turismo. ámbito de encuentros 10 (2): 30–47. Bartolovich, Crystal. 2010. A Natural History of Food Riots. Imperial Ecologies, New Formations 69: 42–61. Beckman, Ericka. 2013. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Belaval, Emilio. 1977. Los problemas de la cultura puertorriqueña. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural. ———. 1985. Cuentos para fomentar el turismo. 4th ed. Rio Piedras, P.R.: Editorial Cultural. Bishop, Kyle William. 2010. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Braham, Persephone. 2012. The Monstrous Caribbean. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle. New York: Routledge. Briggs, Laura. 2002. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Carruth, Allison. 2013. Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food. Cambridge University Press. Casanova-Vizcaíno, Sandra, and Inés Ordiz. 2017. Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge. ———. 2020. Latin American Horror. In The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom, 31–48. Cham: Palgrave. Colón Reyes, Linda I. 2011. Sobrevivencia, pobreza y “mantengo”: La política asistencialista estadounidense en Puerto Rico: el PAN y el TANF. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón. Comaroff, Jean, and John L.  Comaroff. 2000. Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343. Díaz, Luis Felipe. 2010. De charcas, espejos, infants y velorios en la literature puertorriqueña. San Juan: Isla Negra. Dietz, James L. 1989. Historia económica de Puerto Rico. Río Piedras: Ediciones huracán. Figueroa, Ramón A. 2006. Los equilibristas: Emilio S.  Belaval, Juan Bosch, Lino Novás Calvo y el cuento del Caribe Hispano (1930–1940). Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Editorial Letra Gráfica. Figueroa, Melissa. 2017. Arboretum. Jotacé López. San Juan: Editorial del Instituto de Cultura. 2016. 67 Pages. Latin American Literature Today. http://www.latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/en/2017/october/arboretum-­ jotacé-­lópez. Friedmann, Harriet. 1993. The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis. New Left Review 197: 29–57. Hillard, Tom J. 2009. ‘Deep into that Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 16 (4): 685–695. Holleman, Hannah. 2018. Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Holt Giménez, Eric. 2017. A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat. New York: Monthly Review Press. Holt Giménez, Eric, and Annie Shattuck. 2011. Food Crises, Food Regimes and Food Movements: Rumblings of Reform Or Tides of Transformation? Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (1): 109–144. Holt Giménez, Eric, and Raj Patel with Annie Shattuck. 2017. Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice. Pambazuka Press. Laguerre, Enrique A. 1994. La llamarada. Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural. Loichot, Valérie. 2013. The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. University of Minnesota Press. Lopez, Jotacé. 2016. Arboretum. San Juan: Editorial del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.

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Lugo de Marichal, Flavia. 1972. Belaval y sus cuentos para fomentar el turismo. San Juan: Coquí. Martínez Mercado, Eliván. 2016. Puerto Rico regala más de $519 a semilleras multinacionales como Monsanto. 13.06.2016. http://periodismo.investigativo.com/2016/07/Puerto-­rico-­r egala-­mas-­de-­519-­millones-­a-­semilleras-­ multinacionales-­como-­monsanto/. ———. Sick Employees of Transgenic Companies Report Their Cases to the Government of Puerto Rico. 09.03.2017. http://periodismoinvestigativo. c o m / 2 0 1 7 / 0 3 / s i c k -­e m p l o y e e s -­o f -­t r a n s g e n i c -­c o m p a n i e s -­r e p o r t -­ their-­cases-­to-­the-­government-­of-­puerto-­rico/. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin Editions. McMichael, Philip. 2009. A Food Regime Genealogy. The Journal of Peasant Studies 36 (1): 139–169. McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Leiden: Brill. Moore, Jason. 2010. Cheap Food and Bad Money: Food, Frontiers and Financialization in the Rise and Demise of Neoliberalism. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 33 (2–3): 225–261. ———. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Verso Books. Negrón Medina, Eduardo. 2017. Genealogía de la cosmovisón contemporánea: “horror-REAL de Alexandra Pagán Vélez. Revista Trasunto, 31.03.2017. https://revistatrasunto.com/2017/03/31/genealogia-­de-­la-­cosmovision-­ contemporanea-­horror-­real-­de-­alexandra-­pagan-­velez/. Newbury, Michael. 2012. Fast Zombie/Slow Zombie: Food Writing, Horror Movies, and Agribusiness Apocalypse. American Literary History. 24 (1): 87–114. Niblett, Michael. 2012. World-Economy, World-Ecology, World-Literature. Green Letters 16 (1): 15–30. Oloff, Kerstin. 2017. Sugar to Oil: The Ecology of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53: 316–328. Pagán Vélez, Alexandra. 2016. Horror-REAL. San Juan: Editorial del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2002. Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. J.E.  Hogle, 229–225. Cambridge University Press. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. 2017. Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film. London: Palgrave. Picó, Fernando. 2014. History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of its People. Princeton: Markus Wiener.

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Rivera, Angel A. 2016. La rabia útil de los muertos. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Disonante. Rodríguez Juliá, Edgardo. 2004. Musarañas de domingo. San Juan: Universidad de Puerto Rico. Sánchez, Luis Rafael. 1979. Fabulación e ideología en la cuentistica de Emilio S. Belaval. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Santiago-Valles, Kelvin A. 1994. “Subject People” and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898–1947. State University of New York Press. Shapiro, Stephen. 2008. Transvaal, Transylvania : Dracula’s World-System and Gothic Periodicity. Gothic Studies 10 (1): 29–47. Steckley, Marylynn and Yasmine Shamsie. 2015. Manufacturing corporate landscapes: the case of agrarian displacement and food (in)security in Haiti. Third World Quarterly, 36 (1): 179–197. Wasson, Sara, and Emily Alder. 2011. Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010. Liverpool: Liverpool +University Press. Westall, Claire. 2017. World-Literary Resources and Energetic Materialism. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53 (3): 265–276. WReC. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Zombieland. 2009. Dir. by Ruben Fleischer.

CHAPTER 10

Made in Cod’s Image: Food, Fuel, and World-Ecological Decline in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland Michael Paye

For over 400  years, the cod fishery of Newfoundland dominated every aspect of life around the island, dictating the “settlement patterns” of numerous outport1 communities (Canning 1986: 142–5). Contemporary Newfoundland writers such as Donna Morrissey, Patrick Kavanagh, Kevin Major, and Kenneth Harvey often plot their narratives around the cod and its history, writing about communities who rely upon the sea for their economic survival, but find themselves trapped by the fishery that sustains them. Author Michael Crummey, whose 2014 novel Sweetland is the focus of this chapter, finds in the cod fishery a network of cultural and affective meanings that can offer solace in times of difficulty. In his short narrative “Rust” (1998a: 9), millworkers who have left the fishery

M. Paye (*) College of Future Education, Beijing Normal University (Zhuhai Campus), Zhuhai, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_10

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replicate “[m]otion and rhythms repeated to the point of thoughtlessness,” a psychological and somatic attachment to pre-industrial cod culture that grew from “the habits of generations.” Similarly, in his poem “Learning the Price of Fish” (1998b: 69), a labourer at Little Bay Mines returns to fishing, re-energized by the “[s]alt air like a handful of brine held to the face of an unconscious man coming slowly to his senses.” In his multigenerational, magical realist novel of outport life Galore (2009: 19), Crummey captures the long-historical mythology around cod that created a whole culture: They spoke of the days of plenty with a wistful exaggeration, as if it was an ancient time they knew only through stories generations old. My Jesus, the cod, the cod, the cod, that Crusade army of the North Atlantic, that irresistible undersea current of flesh, there was fish in galore one time. Boats run aground on a school swarming so thick beneath them a man could walk upon the very water but for fear of losing his shoes to the indiscriminate appetite of the fish.

Strikingly, it would be the indiscriminate appetite of capitalists that would cause fishermen to lose more than just their shoes. When Newfoundland and Labrador2 joined Canada in 1949 following a narrow vote for confederation the previous year, cod fishers and their families found themselves pushed from a network of small boats and inshore fishing into a petromodern regime of trawler and factory work, with quotas controlled by central Ottawa (Harris 1998: 70). By 1975, 307 outport communities had been “resettled” in larger villages and towns to facilitate the province’s modernization (Brinklow 2016: 135). In 1992, 43,000 people were directly employed by the cod industry when the government declared a moratorium on cod, which evolved into an indefinite shutdown of the commercial fishery (Wright 1997: 727). Crummey’s novel of contemporary resettlement, Sweetland, is a particularly acute representation of the interconnections between post-cod trauma, petromodern precarity, and outport clearance. The narrative follows sixty-nine-year-old Moses Sweetland, a former fisherman, labourer, and lighthouse keeper, who refuses to accept a resettlement package to leave Chance Cove, on the eponymous island of Sweetland. Part I, “The King’s Seat,” focuses on Moses’ daily routine, his conflict with neighbours, and ends after Moses accepts a resettlement package following the death and possible suicide of his young grand-nephew, Jesse. In Part II,

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“The Keeper’s House,” the plot moves from a sense of growing entropy to permanent apocalypse, as Moses fakes his death to remain on the island, facing extreme weather, growing food and fuel shortages, and his own demons. The present-day tale is punctuated by interchapters depicting past events, drawing the novel towards larger questions around social reproduction, precarious labour, and the systemic nature of capitalist violence at the outport. Previous readings of Sweetland have tended to focus on the connection between Moses’ sense of place and personhood (Brinklow 2016; Chafe 2017; Rae 2018), with Charman arguing that the novel is an ‘anti-Robinsonade’ that undoes the mythos of capitalist approaches to ‘environmental management’ (Charman 2020). Using a world-ecological, petrocultural framework, I move between local and systemic scales, arguing that Sweetland mediates a sense of general displacement at the regional and global level that can be productively linked to the boom and bust of food and fuel regimes. After exploring Sweetland’s early critique of Newfoundland outport tourism, I demonstrate that the novel’s flashback sequences represent formal responses to localist insularity and capitalism’s erasure of historical traumas. In the final section, I show how the growing irrealism of the novel emerges in relation to petromodern dependence and foodway decline, as Sweetland collapses multiple temporal, spatial, human, and extra-human crises into a micro-apocalypse confined to the island. The world-ecological approach, pioneered by environmental historian Jason Moore, elucidates how ecological catastrophe is not simply a result or by-product of capitalism, but the materialization of its internal contradictions. These contradictions are most evident at the frontier, where hegemonic powers appropriate masses of oil, sugar, fish, and other natural resources, “a constitutive spatial moment unlocking the epoch-making potential of endless accumulation” (Moore 2015: 63). Literary scholars have drawn productively upon Moore’s work, articulating how major commodity frontiers have a palpable impact on literary form.3 Michael Niblett (2015: 271), for example, convincingly demonstrates that “where a commodity so overdetermines all facets of society, its influence on aesthetic practice will be correspondingly marked.” He singles out oil as the resource through which the relations of the world system are most evident, due to its interrelation with governance, finance, and global conflict. Like Niblett, Graeme Macdonald (2017: 291) neatly summarizes how petro-dependency offers a baseline for comparing different cultures: “Petroleum culture is enacted wherever there is detectable reliance

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(conscious or otherwise) on fossil energy.” Niblett and Macdonald’s theorizations represent an expansion upon a particular mode of world literary criticism that reads texts for their formal mediation of the combined and uneven development of the capitalist world economy (WReC 2015), which manifests most visibly in environmental violence. For Newfoundland, the petro-social relations around the cod boom, as well as the island’s recent development of offshore petroleum reserves, represent pivotal moments in its uneven development, and make a world-ecological literary reading particularly suitable in the context of Sweetland.

Foodways, Energy, and the World Ecology Before drawing out how Newfoundland’s cod and oil crises are at once regional and world-ecological, a brief outline of Jason Moore’s world-­ ecology theory is required. Moore argues that capitalism maintains its profitability by reducing most of the earth to a series of frontiers that provide food, energy, and raw materials, the “free gifts” of nature. The appropriation of such gifts is a precondition of “large-scale industrial production” and labour exploitation, providing an “ecological surplus” that fuels productivity and raises the rate of profit (Moore 2015: 91–5). As a host of scientific and technological might is brought to bear on the frontier, waste products tend to build up, capitalization increases, food and energy prices rise, and the flow of “free gifts” slows down, eventually leading to a “falling ecological surplus” (96–106). While a petroleum-based food and fuel revolution brought a boom in cheap energy in the post-war era (249), the long-term results have included declining yields, superweeds, and pollution, as neoliberalism has been unable to instigate a “cheap nature” revolution (291). Moore thus argues that capitalism may be approaching its stage of “terminal exhaustion” (141), a wholescale “peak appropriation” where the “world-ecological surplus” cannot be revitalized by the “nature– society relations” of the capitalist mode of production (106). The industrialization and eventual bust of the cod frontier can be usefully interpreted within neoliberalism’s larger failure to trigger a cheap productivity boom. Up until the 1940s, Newfoundland fisherpeople “jigged” for cod, using a weighted fishing line with a lure that was moved about (jigged) to attract fish, while wives and daughters salted cod for preservation, which was sent to markets around the Atlantic (Wright 1997). With Confederation, the Canadian government sought the more profitable frozen food markets of the UK and the USA, an oil-fuelled

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revolution that moved women to factories and men to waged, trawler labour (728–9). The development of the interstate, improvements in preservation technologies by food companies like Birds Eye, and a boom in private freezer sales brought a culture of convenience to the middle classes of Canada’s southern neighbour, who developed high expectations that their food would be cheap, nutritious, and nicely packaged (Hamilton 2003: 34–49). A plethora of new convenience foods similarly swamped Newfoundland in the 1950s, giving people cheap food options on which they could spend their wages, compensation for the free time that they had previously used for gardening and hunting (Lowitt 2012: 66). The pillage of the North Atlantic and displacement of outport communities thus fed into a wider cheap food regime unleashed by a petroleum revolution that would keep food prices low and quality of life high for metropolitan populations across the Global North for decades (Moore 2015: 249–55). Responding to a drop in prices in the US market in the late 1970s, large loans were taken on by the provincial government to prevent widespread unemployment of Newfoundlanders and bankruptcy of fishery firms (Schrank 2005: 408). This represents a post-peak moment, in which rising costs of labour and technological power signalled the decline in ecological surplus unleashed by industrial cod extraction. The bubble burst in 1992, condemning Newfoundland to a post-cod future in which memories of plentiful cod became part of a collective trauma. Many young Newfoundlanders from fishing families had already abandoned the fishery by the 1970s, frustrated by a lack of representation and drawn towards the better wages offered by construction and oil companies across Canada (House 1986: 132–50). With the discovery of offshore oil reserves around Newfoundland, oil represents a post-cod, neoliberal deus ex machina, bringing huge gains in provincial revenue and encouraging a culture of labour flexibility, normalizing submission to the demands of an unmoored market (Cadigan 2015: 34). Strikingly, a nostalgic narrative around salt-­ cod has played well with tourists, part of a “fossil fuel-dependent global mobility network” that ferries and flies in hundreds of thousands of visitors every year and, as of 2015, employs 13,000 people (Stoddart & Sodero 2015: 445, 452–3). From its earliest days through to its forced resettlement, Newfoundland was made in cod’s image, and now faces an uncertain future tied to an energy regime that has hastened cod’s decline. Sweetland not only registers how fishery bust is bound to this history of precarity and market

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fetish, but also articulates how cod became part of the psychic make-up of outport communities long before industrialization. The post-cod moment, therefore, does not begin with moratorium, but has slowly emerged since the earliest industrialization of the fishery, and now manifests in nostalgic imaginaries of outport sovereignty and kitsch tourism experiences. A tension between nostalgia for pre-industrial cod culture and dependence on petromodernity emerges early in Sweetland, as the narrative locates outport collapse within a wider sense of community displacement and loss.

Oil, (Salt-) Cod, Tourism In Sweetland, Crummey’s focus on the notions of absence and forgetting evokes a post-cod moment in which a traditional culture built around salt cod has become estranged from the outport way of life. The characters on the island are products of outport decline and outmigration (Delisle 2016: 42), their names either nostalgic invocations of better times and landscapes (Sweetland), or symbolic of their demise (Queenie Coffin does not survive the full narrative). The trauma of fishery collapse, precarious employment practices, and state bureaucracy combine early in the novel, as Moses battles the threat of resettlement in defence of his island. The present-day narrative introduces a cynical Moses Sweetland, who is irritated to see yet another representative from Ottawa visiting his home to push the resettlement package. Moses refuses to engage, referencing his family’s long history on the island: “People been fishing here two hundred years or more. I expect my crowd was the first ones on the island” (Sweetland 2014: 9). Despite this invocation of a society built upon cod and family ties, he re-evaluates his village “through the stranger’s eyes” as the government man leaves. He sees “[a] straggle of vinyl-sided bungalows, half of them sitting empty. Saddle-roofed sheds and propane tanks and ATVs and old lumber in untidy piles, like trash dumped on the slope by some natural disaster” (11). The novel counterpoints this vision of petrolic decay and waste to outport commodification, as Moses turns to “[t]he white church on the point, the Fisherman’s Hall with Rita Verge’s hand-lettered MUSEUM sign at the side entrance” (11). This museum is the result of Rita’s petition for a “make-work grant from the feds” (47), a grant that requires a focus on the economic potential of cultural production (Bill 2009: 94). The museum’s position amongst the rubbish and “geriatric boats” of the cove is suggestive of the museumification of the fishery, as the cultural logic of waste-capitalism capitalizes upon waste

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through the production of “culture” itself. Nicholas Brown (2005: 7) writes: [T]he museum […] only becomes necessary in a society predicated on the tendential annihilation of all other cultural forms—and which is therefore not only an institution for the preservation of a multitude of different cultural forms but […] also a symptom of one thing, namely their eradication.

Newfoundland’s first Premier, Joseph Smallwood, considered Newfoundland culture a lure for tourists, leading to value-driven attitudes towards art and traditional practices that continue to the present day (Bill 2009: 93–4). Though a generation has passed since cod traps needed to be maintained or fish cleaned and salted for the market, Moses “kept the [salting] building in pristine condition. […] Your little museum, Clara [his niece] called it” (Sweetland 2014: 33–4). Positioned next to discarded tanks and ATVs, the museum symbolizes the post-cod era’s erasure of folk- and foodways, an erasure Moses rejects in his hunting, fishing, and gardening. Indeed, immediately following the meeting with the government man, Moses plants potato seeds in his garden, his daily tasks a recapitulation of the traditional foodways of the outport, where salt-fishing in spring and summer was topped up by harvesting root vegetables, picking berries, and hunting game, practices that have faded away with the turn towards industrialization (Lowitt 2012: 66). Sweetland explicitly links the Newfoundland tourism economy to the wider displacements of oil expansion. On the same morning as the inspector visits, the reader learns that the Priddle brothers have returned, two oil labourers in their forties on a “see-saw contract” at Fort Mac Murray (Sweetland 2014: 56). They represent a post-bust masculine aggression, one of brief sexual encounters, cocaine, and zero-hour contracts fuelled by oil-boom wages. They have greater plans for the outport beyond the small museum opened by Rita Verge, fantasizing about turning the island into an “authentic” tourist spot, in their words (Sweetland 2014: 67). Once they purchase the land, Barry outlines their vision of a twee forever-past that might appeal to tourists: “So we leases it or some such. […] Paints the whole place up with ochre and whitewash, puts outa couple of dories behind the breakwater. And we sells package tours to a vintage Newfoundland outport. It’ll be like one of them Pioneer Villages on the mainland. Only, you know—”

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“Authentic,” Keith said. “That’s exactly right. The real McCoy. We could have people out here dressed up in oilskins, take the tourists fishing, show them how to split and salt cod. “No one knows how to salt cod anymore,” Sweetland said. […] “Whatever the fuck,” Barry said. Get someone to play the accordion, put on a dance.” (67)

Though the twins are high on drugs and the scheme is typical of their character, the novel nonetheless critiques the touristic ideal of timeless fishery culture in this moment, captured in the hackneyed phrase, “the real McCoy.”4 The Priddles are unconcerned with Moses’ suggestion that people have forgotten how to preserve cod, recognizing that they can pick the bones of a foregone foodway, selling an experience of “authenticity and historicity” (Stoddart and Sodero 2015: 450). Here, the traditional fisherman’s disposability morphs into a commodity within a new economy that recycles previous folkways. The Priddles comprehend the importance of men like Moses to creating an imagined fishery culture, threatening to “put him on display for tourists” (Sweetland 2014: 68), bypassing the museum towards the simulacrum of Newfoundland cod. Most residents of Sweetland express little concern over the fate of the island, eager to move to a more central location for better services, work opportunities, and education. Labourers like the Priddles, little more than cogs in a massive extractivist regime, are a particularly violent manifestation of life after cod, and allow Crummey to reduce cod tourism to the realm of the absurd while making explicit the upheaval of resettlement. Sweetland, as such, articulates a complex sense of rootlessness, from cod fisher to oil worker, precipitated not only by continued displacement, but the draining of the material and cultural lifeworld that built the outport system.

Displacement, Mobility, Migration In an interview in 1955, Premier Joseph Smallwood suggested that the Canadian government felt little compunction in shrinking provincial communities and disbanding the traditional fishery, since Newfoundlanders “could always find work in some other part of Canada” (Smallwood, qtd. in Blake 1994: 260). Smallwood, whose government kick-started the resettlement programme two years previously, was playing upon a

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populist, anti-confederation narrative that neoliberal provincial governments have continued to roll out to obfuscate their role in the underfunding of provincial services (Cadigan 2015: 22). The “factory labour force” unleashed by outport clearances plugged into Canada’s wider cheap labour regime, as workers sought opportunities in construction and oil work in numerous regional hubs and metropolitan centres (Sider 1980: 31; Delisle 2016: 42). While migrant labour from rural areas and the Global South was essential to the labour force of numerous core zones in the Keynesian era (Moore 2015: 138–9), increased mobility for elites in the neoliberal era has been accompanied by tighter restrictions on immigration for people from capitalist peripheries (Murray and Overton 2016: 428). In stark contrast to the petromodern joys offered to mobile tourists, Moses’ memories evoke the harsh world of labour migration forced upon Newfoundlanders and other peripheral communities. Through a series of flashbacks that interrupt the plot’s progression, Crummey embeds a combined critique of capitalist temporal compression and outport insularity in the novel’s form, connecting the arrival of a group of refugees, outport social and sexual reproduction, and alienated labour to systemic violence. Sweetland opens with a short sequence that depicts Moses rescuing refugees left stranded on a lifeboat several kilometres from land, echoing the real-life rescue of 152 Tamil people in 1986 off the coast of Newfoundland by a fisherman named Gus Dalton.5 The novel privileges a sense of mystery around the unexpected encounter: “He heard them before he saw them. Voices in the fog, so indistinct he thought they might be imaginary” (Sweetland 2014: 3). Moses follows the noise, discovers the overcrowded craft, and ties it to his motorboat. In order to navigate his way through the thick fog, he “put out a jigger, letting the line run until it touched the bottom eighteen fathom down. He was over the Offer Ledge” (24). Cross-generational memory and fishing technology synonymous with the glory days of cod allow Moses to bring “the ghostly arrivals” to safety (25). As he moves, he glances backwards, “startled each time to see what was following in his wake” (4), an eerie forewarning of the continued presence of past trauma that becomes more insistent as the narrative continues. Uncertain of these people’s place of origin, the narrator lists a number of possibilities: “Mongolian, some said. Trinidadian. Tibetan. Sri Lankan, according to the Reverend” (Sweetland 2014: 72–3). This list of former colonies and capitalist peripheries gives credence to the idea that Crummey is here setting up a larger registration of regional conflict, neoliberal violence, and the afterlife of a hegemonic narrative of US

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opportunity. Sri Lanka is just one zone where pre-existing tensions were aggravated by neoliberal adjustments (Deckard 2010: 158), and the Tamils’ emergence in Sweetland highlights the spectre of placelessness for this outport community. Though Caroline Rae suggests that Sweetland “places himself above the refugees in a highly anthropocentric hierarchy” (2018: 84), it is arguable that his sense of compassion and solidarity with their experience comes out in the novel’s flashbacks. Furthermore, this event also triggers an epiphany for Moses about the danger of localist exceptionalism. As he goes to fetch his sister, Ruth, to help with a sick refugee staying in her home, he discovers that she is having an affair with the reverend, and dismisses the incident as “a quick fuck” (Sweetland 2014: 198). Sharing a cigarette with one of the refugees the next morning, Moses invokes a universal idealism beyond cultural difference and hierarchy, recalling a sermon from the reverend, that each and every person is “[l]ost on the ocean, like” (199). As the two men smoke in silence, Ruth appears in the background, helping another boat-person to walk across the church. She stops upon seeing her brother, “her face set. Defiant” (245). Moses is enlightened of Ruth’s right to control her own body through the scene’s conjunction with the boat-people’s non-communicable trauma, and realizes his culpability in her unhappiness, having forced her to marry Pilgrim, an older blind island man. Her mysterious death, along with that of the Priddles’ mother in childbirth, is highly suggestive of the violence of a form of community reproduction that might provide Moses with some level of comfort, but entraps many others in an isolated outport. Indeed, his refusal to accept resettlement is interpreted like this by many islanders eager to move on from a way of life that collapsed decades before. The linkages drawn between women, refugees, and Moses’ life articulate a sense of shared history, trauma, and victimization that, though not reducible to the mode of production, is part-determined by a culture of capitalist disposability. The flashbacks are a combined formal interrogation of outport insularity, the unevenness of capitalist development, and the wider geographies of peripheralization. Capitalism tends to combine numerous temporal and spatial processes into its logic of “instantaneity” (Moore 2015: 97), and the novel’s analepsis becomes a tool for revealing the intersecting violence such a short-term ethos creates. The flashbacks thus encourage reflection upon both Moses’ culpability and victimization in a capitalist, chauvinist totality. This interpretation enables a complex understanding of why Crummey counterpoints migrancy with his sister’s

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sexual independence, despite their seeming lack of connection. Further flashbacks reveal that Moses has never had penetrative sex, and has been left feeling violated or confused from his two sexual encounters. His reticence in writing to Effie, a schoolteacher who he has been courting for several months, and who indicates that a marriage proposal would get a positive reaction, comes from the “drudge” of manual labour and “homesickness” during his time in Toronto (113). As such, his rejection of sex and companionship should be read in the context of his own sense of displacement. Instead of working his garden and fishery, Moses spends his twenties among “Italians and Hungarians and Caribbeans” building bungalows on the mainland (234). After losing this construction job, he ends up labouring in a steel mill in Hamilton, an environment that is wildly different to that of his island: The steel mill was a city unto itself. Massive coke ovens, storage tanks and elevators, engine rooms, stock houses the size of city churches, miles of train tracks and gas lines and elevated piping that criss-crossed the blackened acres. Cooling stations, smoke and creosote and slag, the molten glow of the pour-offs at the open hearths like some evangelical’s vision of hell. Everything was in motion, cranes and railcars, conveyor belts shifting ore pellets to the blast furnaces, coal cars shuttling from the battery to the ovens, sheets of heated strip steel rolling through rotating cylinders. All of it seemed to be moving at cross purposes. […] Men darting among the machinery like rats, their faces grimed with soot. (252)

The constant motion of the mill is mediated by the exhaustive description of machinery, combustion, and toxicity, its sudden irruption in the text symbolic of the intensive physical and psychological demands of mobile, industrial labour. The soot-covered men, reminiscent of a Dickensian proletariat updated to the twentieth century, scuttle around during the seventy-­hour workweek, drinking heavily in the evenings and smoking pot during shifts. The novel here indicates how the shiny modernity of petrocapitalism so enjoyed by metropolitan elites is built on the backs of exhausted labourers trapped in a nexus of coke, coal, and oil. In a moment evocative of capital’s ceaseless appetite, Moses is consumed and spat out by the factory machinery, “suck[ed] into that vortex,” leaving him with horrendous facial scarring and a “[t]raumatic degloving lesion of the penile and scrotal tissue” (287). When asked by his doctor if he has any children, Moses responds, “I was thinking […] some day” (289). Upon

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hearing that this will not be possible, though sexual function will return in six months, he rejects a final cosmetic surgery, telling the doctor that “[t]here’s no one waiting” for him at the outport (290). Though literary critic Laurie Brinklow (2016: 136) states that the accident leaves Moses “impotent,” the fact that he will retain sexual function without the ability to reproduce is a significant one in terms of his figuration as fishery archetype. Moses, now physically scarred and made sterile by the labour that has stunted his emotional development, rejects any opportunity of life with Effie, symbolic of the collapse of community futurity, as well as his emasculation in an increasingly precarious economy (Charman 2020: 45). After this hospital sequence, there are no more interchapter flashbacks, though memories continue to interrupt the flow of the present-day narrative. Forgotten and dead characters begin to emerge more explicitly after Moses’ neighbours all leave the island, forcing him to come to terms with the traumas and horrors he has spent his life repressing. The novel’s dual registration of the exhaustion of exceptionalist fishery culture and a coming exhaustion of supplies leads to a more overtly gothic register, as Moses faces an outport world that becomes more unrecognizable to him as his story draws to a close.

“Sweetland eating against his end” In the post-war era, a global market of food products undercut traditional staples, “shifting [much] of the world’s population away from direct access to food” (Friedmann 1982: 255). Mass enclosures for “agrofuels” have left approximately one billion people hungry, bereft of the land and water necessary for sustainable foodways (McMichael 2009: 32–3). This crisis has been exacerbated by the failure of capital to source the conditions necessary for cheap energy and cheap food that were unleashed in the Green Revolution (Moore 2015: 1, 50–7, 121). At first glance, it might seem a stretch to argue that neoliberalism’s “petrochemical” food regime is registered in Sweetland; and yet, in the final chapters, dystopian tropes around food and gasoline shortages combine with the failure of traditional foodways, as the novel articulates the roles played by petromodernity and insular tradition in the collapse of the cod fishery. As permanent fishing settlements began to expand across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Newfoundland, new populations learned to become “hunters, trappers, fishers, and gardeners” to provide for themselves in a harsh environment, while imports of flour, cooking oil,

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sugar, rum, and salt beef were added to staples taken from the sea and land (Lowitt 2012: 65–6). Moses takes pleasure in his gardening, woodcutting, rabbit catching, and food preservation techniques, plugging into old ways of seasonal work that have punctuated his everyday life for years. And yet, though much of Moses’ daily routine focuses on these traditional practices, his usual diet relies upon a combination of cheap foods from beyond the province and home-cooked meals. As well as dinners of cod or rabbit, accompanied by potatoes and vegetables, the text abounds with descriptions of his lunches, usually consisting of tinned Del Monte peaches, as well as flavourless sandwiches of “tasteless bread” (64), tinned tuna, and miracle whip. These eating habits are not just a recent phenomenon, as he recalls taking along “potted meat sandwiches on white bread” for sustenance during a poaching trip in the 1970s (137), an allusion to the influx of cheap foods into Newfoundland that followed Confederation. As his ability to grow, catch, and cook fresh produce declines with the weather, he starts consciously cataloguing where he can pillage supplies, as he goes from house to house looking for durable foods. Crummey counterpoints this sense of limited rations to the bountiful meals of previous generations. During the summer fishery, when fishers are allowed to catch just five cod per day, Moses tells Jesse about his childhood, detailing how, after Moses’ father buys his sons a pig, which they take as a pet for several months, he kills and serves it to them. The boys are distraught and angered, and their father dies soon after. Moses recalls how, having barely consumed a morsel for many weeks due to illness, his father “eat[s] against his end” at the time of his death, consuming an enormous meal (130). In the present day, as Moses continues to hoard supplies, “hauling up his seaweed and planting his garden, cutting and stockpiling firewood,” he wryly sees it as “Sweetland eating against his end” (166). Yet there is a sense that the work of gardening is only a nostalgic retreat from the imperishable foods of his diet and erasure of traditional foodways, as Moses Sweetland, still able to catch fresh fish, realizes that he cannot preserve them: “he’d forgotten how to salt the fish properly” (192). His preservation techniques and home-grown staples thus fail to wholly replace those “food[s] from nowhere” (McMichael 2009: 39) that men like Moses became accustomed to following fishery industrialization. As such, the durable foods created to feed a growing proletariat, combined with what little he can grow and catch, undernourish Moses’ body, forcing him to hitch his clothes to his emaciated frame (Sweetland 2014: 274).

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The incoming outport apocalypse is thus built on a sense of food deterioration and localized starvation, registering a loss of cod-ways precipitated by industrialization, as well as the global decline in food sovereignty in the post-war era (McMichael 2009; Friedmann 1982; Moore 2015: 287). The use of chemicals in “petro-farming” not only degraded centuries of natural soil fertility, but precipitated the disappearance of traditional foodways, “compelling a growing share of humanity to ‘eat’ fossil fuels” (Moore 2015: 104). In a striking fusion of chemical foodways and petrolic dependence, Moses recalls the story of his neighbour, Loveless, drinking “a pint of kerosene when he was younger. […] He’d suffered a twenty-­ four-­hour attack of hiccups while he passed the fuel, his diapers reeking of oil and shit” (7–8). Loveless’ actions symbolize a baptism into oil modernity, a petroculture forced down the throats of Newfoundlanders that Moses himself is part-reliant upon. Crummey here draws a connection between abundance and hydrocarbon overdetermination, as fossil fuels course through bodies and cultures, embedded in every facet of life, from the global food system to local diets. The comedy of Loveless’ story registers the correlation often drawn between oil and shit, their “dirtiness and faecal qualities” speaking to “oil’s primal associations with earth’s body” (LeMenager 2014: 92). In twentieth-century US culture, oil’s “permeability, excess, […] multiplicity, [and] spectacle” are accompanied by a sense of “ambivalence as we recognize the scarcity” of oil and the mobilities it promises. Fittingly, food, oil, ingestion, and excretion conjoin at the only moment in the narrative when the term scarcity is mentioned, as Moses realizes that he does not have enough toilet paper: “That scarcity worried him as much as his meagre store of food” (Sweetland 194). Fuel is not overtly mentioned here, which allows an interpretation, following LeMenager, that it is figuratively present in Moses’ concerns around toilet paper. Indeed, fuel scarcity has a deciding impact on his routine. By September, he is forced to leave his house in darkness in the early morning, “walking to the northend light to spare what was let of the two containers of gasoline” (190), planning to use his ATV to transport provisions to the abandoned lighthouse. With only a quarter tank of gas in the quad left when he gets it working after he floods the engine (237), oil shortage forces him to cross the island to “plunder” the Priddles’ house, but his ATV dies on the way (240). The Priddles’ unoccupied cabin only yields enough gasoline for a few short trips around the island, and Moses eventually abandons the machine completely, as searching for fuel nearly gets him killed on several occasions. Most distressingly, much of the food he does

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manage to preserve and pillage gets sealed in the lighthouse by the coastguard, whom he fails to reach because the ATV stalls, as oil dependence lets him down at the moment he decides to ask the men for help. Traditional outport communities relied upon a “seasonal, resourcebased cycle of food production” (Lowitt 2012: 66), but in the novel’s final chapters, even the seasons betray Moses’ relationship to his island. The weather features moments of familiarity, but more often “revert[s] to its regular schizophrenia. […] None of it matched the forecast he was getting on the radio” (269). When he picks up reports of “Moderate winds. […] Flurries. Minus one” (292), he looks outside to see the water breaking into the cove “for the first time in a generation.” Even the birds and fish no longer use the same well-worn patterns due to the extremeness of environmental change. Moses finds dozens of bullbirds floating in the water, “emaciated,” though he uses the little flesh on them to feed himself, near starvation (276). He marvels at the image of “floating dead” (277), the aviacide appearing organized in comparison to the extreme weather: “The birds so delicately calibrated they’d starved within hours of each other.” Moses connects this event to the “Fisheries Broadcast” that he used to listen to: “apocalyptic weather, rising sea levels, alterations in the seasons, in ocean temperatures. Fish migrating north in search of colder water and the dovekies lost in the landscape they were made for” (277). He realizes that “[t]he birds and their habits were being rendered obsolete […] like the VHS machines and analogue televisions dumped on the slope beyond the incinerator. Relics of another time and on their way out” (277). Capitalism’s “general law of overpollution” (Moore 2015: 280) combines with its cyclical tendency to externalize waste which, in the current moment, has become a significant barrier to its accumulation regime (98). The failure of Moses’ radio to accurately give him information localizes the new temporal and spatial crises of a system that has found its limit in environmental collapse, as climatic changes, precipitated in part by activities around petroleum extraction and industrialization by which Newfoundland has recently redefined itself, converge on his cove. Sweetland’s dystopian tropes around delocalization, migration, starvation, entrapment, and gasoline shortages thus drag the novel into an irrealist register that is explicitly linked to crises of climate, food, and fuel. Simultaneously, the outport itself becomes unheimlich as Moses struggles to survive. Pathetic fallacy combines with palpable descriptions of his isolation, as the empty houses “seemed to lean down toward him with a hand at their ears, listening intently” (222), and an unknown figure fires shots

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in answer to Moses’ rifle fire when he rings in the New Year (261). The ghosts of the past, previously buried in flashbacks or brought to mind consciously by Moses, also begin to impose themselves. He sees Queenie Coffin’s “phantom” light when hiding in the woods for ten days after the resettlement (Sweetland 2014: 165), even though “[t]here were no lights in Chance Cove after the living cleared out” (181). In a more overt reference to a post-fuel uncanny, upon entering his home after those ten days, he notes the “eeriness to the kitchen’s silence that he couldn’t dismiss, a subtle absence it took him hours to place—the hum of the fridge that had underlined the quiet in the house for decades” (183). Stepping back from the petrolic regime, Moses takes out a small boat to go cod-fishing, and hauls a giant cod, only to discover a rabbit’s head in its stomach. Someone had been mutilating the rabbits in Moses’ snares in an attempt to unnerve him throughout the campaign for resettlement, and here, the past once again catches up with him even as he retreats into traditional foodways. Strikingly, the very food source whose decline in size and biomass ushered in the moratorium has grown to “the size of a goat” (223); however, the text makes no reference to Moses eating the cod, its size symbolic of the weight of the cod mythology that arguably entraps him. Though such a large cod would usually be considered a welcome gift in a time of food scarcity, the combination of rabbit’s head, giant fish, forgotten preservation techniques, and petrolic dependence suggests that Moses’ attempt to reproduce outport culture has morphed into a grotesque prison from which he is unable to escape. This gradual disassociation from reality builds up to the major confrontation with the trauma of fishery closure in the novel’s final moments, when Moses is confronted first with a gothic vision of the government man, who asks him inane questions about his living circumstances, and then with the spectre of his dead brother, Hollis. Michael Niblett (2015) has argued that oil is often displaced onto the bodies of those who are victimized by it in literary representation, arguably true in the case of Moses’ injury and Loveless’ gluttony for gasoline. It is fitting that in the post-cod moment, the horror of fishery collapse manifests in the body of Moses’ dead brother, a casualty of the trawler regime. Down with a severe fever, Moses notices a silent figure sitting at the window, its “[r]ough woollen trousers dripping wet. A pool gathering on the floor beneath the feet, the raw smell of salt water in the room” (308). He recognizes Hollis, who, as we learn late in the narrative, drowned himself in a trawl net fifty years previously, an incident that Moses claimed was an accident. Hollis is a hybrid of sea and man figured in an ecogothic spectre, “[t]he kelpy hair

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streaming, his dead eyes glassy and expressionless” (308). The figure only distractedly nods, resembling Hollis’ actions in real life, always “seeming to live elsewhere half the time” (309). The novel never presents a rationale as to why Hollis killed himself, but the symbolism of suicide by trawl net cannot be misunderstood in a text that maps out the damaged physical and mental health of precarious labourers in a collapsing fishery. To protect his mother, Moses creates a story of a giant cod catching his eye, which causes him to mistakenly reverse the boat and knock Hollis overboard, hence the affective significance of actually catching a large cod while fishing alone on the island. Although covering for his brother’s suicide, it seems a fitting tale in the context of a province overdetermined by a petromodern regime of cod extraction. Drowned in a nylon net off the back of a motorized trawler, Hollis re-emerges before Moses, a combination of petrolic and fishery unconscious, symbolizing a non-communicable trauma around both depression and moratorium. Against the “authenticity” sought by the Priddles, Hollis’ actions imply that the fishery moratorium, though dressed up in nostalgic exhibits and tourist experiences, must eventually be reckoned with for the province to find new ways to move forward. The final vision of Hollis is followed by Moses being woken up by the sound of a motor, which causes him to “thumb through the catalogue of families and [the] engines” he associates with them (309). It is an oddly touching, pointedly petrolic, moment, but turns out to be a fantasy, as we learn that Moses has died on the island having come face to face with myriad personal traumas, as well as the cod decline that sealed his fate long before his self-willed destruction on an abandoned cove. In the end, Moses, who represents both fisherman and island, goes the way of the generations before him, as Crummey restores a sense of dignity and pathos to a way of life that lasted for centuries and was destroyed in decades.

Conclusion: The Limits of Crummey’s Apocalypse Crummey articulates a vision of Atlantic fishery collapse that is systemic and dialectical, a complex interweaving of global precarity, regional chauvinism, and world-ecological decline. He rejects the post-cod commodification of outport culture by insisting on the fishery’s place within a wider world of structured unevenness. However, Sweetland does not suggest a way beyond the systems it critiques, rather limiting itself to revelations and eventual uplifting closure through death, as Moses Sweetland joins the past generations of the island on the cliff, finally dead himself: “They

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seemed resigned and expectant standing there, their eyes on the fathomless black of the ocean. Sweetland anonymous among that congregation. He felt of a sudden like singing” (319). This final tableau grants a sense of optimism through self-embraced destruction, as the community look away from an apocalyptic landscape into the sublime ocean. More generally, Sweetland reflects the sense of impotence that fishing communities feel in relation to the northwest cod fishery’s extended shutdown, as well as the limited political possibilities of retreat from modernity. With memory and history reasserted in Crummey’s telling of the tale of outport collapse, what might come next remains an unknown, as systemic decline ultimately overdetermines Crummey’s outport imaginary.

Notes 1. Outports were the earliest settlements along the coast of Newfoundland outside of St. Johns, often built around the fishery. 2. Newfoundland and Labrador is a single province, with Labrador on the mainland and the island of Newfoundland to its south-east. 3. In my own work, I have used a world-ecological approach to explore the aesthetics and effects that manifest around fisheries and the Atlantic oil frontier, focusing on documentary films and fiction (Paye 2019). 4. Cod jigging and salting have become major attractions for visitors to Newfoundland, as tourists can catch a small number of cod with a veteran fisherman using the traditional cod jig, learn the basics of gutting and salt preservation, and bring their catch back to the mainland (see Paye 2017). 5. h t t p s : / / w w w. c b c . c a / n e w s / c a n a d a / n e w f o u n d l a n d -­l a b r a d o r / gus-­dalton-­tamil-­refugees-­obit-­sri-­lanka-­1.4491302.

Works Cited Bill, R. 2009. Culture vs. policy vs. culture: The evolution of cultural policy in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1967–2007. Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 24 (1): 91–109. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/nflds/article/ view/12687/13591. Accessed. 11 February 2017. Blake, R. 1994. The Problem of Newfoundland: The Fisheries and Newfoundland’s Integration into Canada, 1948–57. In Twentieth-Century Newfoundland Explorations, ed. J. Hiller and P. Neary, 239–272. St. John’s: Breakwater Books. Brinklow, L. 2016. A Man and His Island: The Island Mirror in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland. Island Studies Journal 11 (1): 133–144. www.islandstudies.ca/sites/ islandstudies.ca/files/ISJ-­11-­1-­H-­Brinklow.pdf. Accessed 30 March 2017.

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Brown, N. 2005. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cadigan, S.T. 2015. Newfoundland and Labrador, 1979–2011: Contradiction and Continuity in a Neoliberal Era. In Transforming Provincial Politics: The Political Economy of Canada’s Provinces and Territories in the Neoliberal Era, ed. B.M. Evans and C.W. Smith, 21–48. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Canning, S.G. 1986. Prospects for Co-existence: Interactions Between the Established Fishery and New Offshore Petroleum Development in Newfoundland. In Fish Versus Oil: Resources and Rural Development in North Atlantic Societies, ed. J.D.  House, 141–161. Newfoundland: Institution of Social and Economic Research, MUN. Chafe, P. 2017. Entitlement, Anxieties of Possession, and (re)working Place in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland. Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 32 (1): 7–41. Charman, C. 2020. ‘Newfoundland’s Robinson Crusoe?’ Mobility, Masculinity, and the Failure of Ecological Management in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland. In Negotiating Waters: Seas, Oceans, and Passageways in the Colonial and Postcolonial Anglophone World, ed. A. Dodeman and N. Pedri, 41–57. Delaware: Vernon Press. Crummey, M. 1998a. Rust. In Hard Light, 9. Ontario: Brick Books. ———. 1998b. Learning the Price of Fish 1876–1887. In Hard Light, 68–73. Ontario: Brick Books. ———. 2009. Galore. Corsair. 2010. Kindle. ———. 2014. Sweetland. New York: Norton. Deckard, S. 2010. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden. New York: Routledge. Delisle, J.B. 2016. Michael Crummey: The Presence of the Past. In Ten Canadian Writers in Context, ed. M. Carriere, C. Gillespie, and J. Purcell, 39–45. Alberta: University of Alberta Press. Friedmann, H. 1982. The Political Economy of Food: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order. In American Journal of Sociology, vol. 88, 248–286. Supplement on Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labour, Class, and States. www.jstor.org/stable/3083245. Accessed 11 January 2019. Hamilton, S. 2003. The Economies and Conveniences of Modern-Day Living: Frozen Foods and Mass Marketing, 1945–1965. Business History Review 77 (1): 33–60. https://doi.org/10.2307/30041100. Accessed 6 February 2018. Harris, M. 1998. Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery – A True Crime Story. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. House, J.D. 1986. Fish Is Fish and Oil Is Oil: The Case for North Sea Comparisons to Atlantic Canada. In Fish Versus Oil: Resources and Rural Development in North Atlantic Societies, ed. J.D. House, 129–138. Newfoundland: Institution of Social and Economic Research, MUN.

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LeMenager, S. 2014. Living oil: Petroleum culture in the American century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowitt, K. 2012. The Reinvention and Performance of Traditional Newfoundland Foodways in Culinary Tourism in the Bonne Bay Region. Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 27 (1): 63–78. Macdonald, Graeme. 2017. ‘Monstrous transformer’: Petrofiction and World Literature. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53 (3): 289–302. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/17449855.2017.1337680. Accessed 1 January 2019. McMichael, P. 2009. The World Food Crisis in Historical Perspective. Monthly Review 61 (3): 32–47. Moore, J. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Murray, E.W., and J.  Overton. 2016. Peripheries of Neoliberalism: Impacts, Resistance, and Retroliberalism as Reincarnation. In The Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. S.  Springer, K.  Birch, and J.  MacLeavy, 422–432. Oxon: Routledge. Niblett, M. 2015. Oil on Sugar: Commodity Frontiers and Peripheral Aesthetics. In Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. E. DeLoughrey, G. Didur, and A. Carrigan, 268–285. New York: Routledge. Paye, M. 2017. The Fishy-Atlantic Fossil Fix. Briarpatch, December 21. ———. 2019. Beyond a Capitalist Atlantic: Fish, Fuel, and the Collapse of Cheap Nature in Ireland, Newfoundland, and Nigeria. Irish University Review 49 (1): 117–134. https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2019.0384. Accessed 8 April 2020. Rae, C. 2018. Altering Subjectivities: Place and the Posthuman in Michael Crummey’s ‘Sweetland’. Studies in Canadian literature / Études en littérature canadienne 43 (2): 79–98. Accessed 10 April 2020. Schrank, W. 2005. The Newfoundland Fishery: Ten Years After the Moratorium. Marine Policy 29: 407–420. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2004.06.005. Accessed 3 March 2017. Sider, G. 1980. The Ties That Bind: Culture and Agriculture, Property and Propriety in the Newfoundland Village Fishery. Social History 5 (1): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071028008567469. Accessed 2 November 2016. Stoddart, M., and S. Sodero. 2015. From Fisheries Decline to Tourism Destination: Mass Media, Tourism Mobility, and the Newfoundland Coastal Environment. Mobilities 10 (3): 445–465. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.201 3.860281. Accessed 7 July 2016. WReC (Warwick Research Collective). 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Wright, M. 1997. Frozen Fish Companies, the State, and Fisheries Development in Newfoundland, 1940–1966. Business and Economic History 26 (2): 727–737.

CHAPTER 11

White Flight from Planet Earth: Reading Race, Cheap Food, and Capitalism’s Crisis State in Interstellar Michelle Yates

Introduction Interstellar (2014) opens by offering a powerful representation of capitalism’s crisis state in the era of the end of cheap food. The film is set in the future when anthropogenic climate change has culminated in limited agricultural yield production and food precarity for the masses. In Interstellar, Blight has affected the world’s food supply, rendering Earth an uninhabitable Dust Bowl where human survivability is quickly coming to an end. Most agriculture has already been wiped out by Blight. The only remaining crops are okra and corn, and even the most recent okra crop has to be burned, infected with Blight. As Professor Brand (Michael Caine) tells

M. Yates (*) Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4_11

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Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) early in the film, even corn will soon die out, leaving humans on Earth with no source of subsistence and, thereby, no way to survive. Interstellar offers a way out of this crisis state, though, through space colonization and the expansion of the frontier beyond planet Earth. Space colonization, or, more specifically, the fantasy of leaving Earth to escape planetary collapse and seek a new frontier for humans to inhabit, is embodied as a trope in numerous recent Hollywood films from WALL-E (2008) to Elysium (2013), as well as in popular television shows like Firefly (2002–2003), its film continuation Serenity (2005), and the Netflix revival of Lost in Space (2018–2021). And Interstellar (2014) is an apt example of this cinematic discourse of space colonization.1 As I will show in the course of this essay, the cinematic discourse of flight from Earth has a fundamental race dimension. Flight from Earth in Interstellar, as it is in some of these other films and TV shows, is more specifically a white flight from planet Earth fantasy. Though Interstellar offers a compelling and seemingly progressive visual representation of capitalism’s crisis state in the era of the end of cheap food, it does so through a call to recuperate white privilege, a system of power and oppression intimately articulated to capitalism and the construction of disposability for both human lives and extra-human nature. In particular, Interstellar frames middle-class white people, like the main character Cooper, as suffering the most in the era of the end of cheap food. This suffering prompts a team of explorers, including Cooper, to leave Earth to seek a new planet for humans to inhabit. What audiences see by the end of the film is that people, namely white people, have returned to civilization on board the Space Station Cooper (orbiting Saturn) as they wait for their new planet to be turned into a pristine Garden of Eden. In showing how a film like Interstellar reflects the spatial-historical politics of white flight in the post–World War II United States, I hope to make a larger point— that white supremacy and “the possessive investment in whiteness,” to borrow from George Lipsitz, are intimately articulated to the discursive functioning of capitalism’s world-system. I begin this chapter by examining Interstellar’s representation of capitalism’s crisis state in the era of the end of cheap food, and how Interstellar represents the dual manifestation of this crisis: ecological crisis and a crisis of work. I show how flight from planet Earth in Interstellar is fundamentally rooted in the desire to overcome the crisis of capitalism through the opening of a new frontier via space colonization and the revival of what

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Jason W. Moore describes as Cheap Nature strategies. The next section focuses on how the flight from planet Earth trope in Interstellar is specifically a white flight trope. I show how Interstellar reflects the discourses that justified white flight in the post–World War II United States. The chapter ends by looking at Interstellar’s future-oriented temporality, dominated by a notion of the future shaping the past. I show how the future-­ oriented temporality of Interstellar mirrors the future-oriented discourses favoured by a neoliberal financialized economy.

Representing the Crisis Capitalism is in a state of terminal crisis. As Moishe Postone writes, this contemporary crisis has a dual manifestation: ecological crisis and a crisis of work, or “the demise of laboring society” (2017: 49). I have previously written about this dual manifestation of capitalism’s crisis state using waste as a concept in which to expose capitalism’s fundamental logic of disposability for both the environment and human life (Yates 2011). Capitalism’s insatiable drive towards accumulating ever-greater amounts of monetary wealth leads to an increased quantity of waste, including pre-consumer, post-consumer, and production waste. It simultaneously produces the human-as-waste, an absolute surplus population, a population of the permanently unemployed, people who will never be formally employed as labour by capital, thereby expelled and excreted from the capitalist system of labour and wages (Yates 2011). Mike Davis writes: “This outcast proletariat—perhaps 1.5 billion people today, 2.5 billion by 2030—is the fastest growing and most novel social class on the planet” (2004: 11). Norbert Trenkle and Ernst Lohoff (2012) suggest that literally billions of people starve, excreted from the system of labour and wages as a result of capitalism’s structural logic geared towards perpetual economic growth and profitability. As I have argued elsewhere (Yates 2011), the increasing quantity of waste, in its various manifestations, in the contemporary moment points to a capitalist mode of production that is stalled in its drive towards capital accumulation. The levels of profitability that the system seeks for its own reproduction are very likely no longer achievable.2 Similarly, Jason Moore argues that we are living in a unique historical moment where the capitalist world-ecology is coming up against its own limits. Dating back to the longue durée of the sixteenth century, Moore writes, capitalism employed an accumulation strategy that resolved crises with successive frontier movements—new geographical spaces and forms

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of nature to control, extract, produce in the commodity form, and render profitable within the capitalist world-system. In other words, capitalism perpetually restructured itself and its way of organizing nature to overcome crises, what Moore identifies as Cheap Nature strategies. Moore writes: “The contradictions of capitalism have always been escapable, until now, because there were escape hatches: peasantries to be proletarianized, new oil fields to exploit, new forests to convert to cash crop agriculture” (2015: 280).3 These kinds of spatial-technical fixes, dependent upon new frontiers in which to extract profitability, are no longer effective in the contemporary moment. Instead of expanding capital accumulation, Cheap Nature strategies increasingly produce new limits to accumulation, what Moore calls negative value (in contrast to the surplus-value capitalist production attempts to extract and render in the form of monetary profit). Thus, “the accumulation of negative-value, immanent but latent from the origins of capitalism, is now issuing contradictions that can no longer be ‘fixed’ by technical, organizational, or imperial restructuring. The ongoing closure of frontiers limits the capacity of capital and states to attenuate the rising costs of production and geometrically rising volume of waste from the global determination of profitability” (Moore 2015: 276). For Moore, climate change is “our most expressive instance” of negative value (2015: 279). In particular, Moore points out climate change’s increasingly negative effects on agriculture. For example, increased global temperatures have increased droughts in  locations like California, the leading agricultural state in the United States, producing over one-third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruit and nuts, an industry valued at over forty-six billion dollars. Another stream of negative value is what Moore calls the superweed effect—the “tendency of extra-­ human natures to evolve more rapidly than the technological disciplines of capitalist agriculture” (2015: 283). The superweed effect can be seen in the way that weeds have evolved to survive powerful pesticides, like RoundUp, leading to capitalist agribusiness utilizing even more toxic chemicals like 2,4-D, one of the key ingredients in the notorious ‘Agent Orange’ of the Vietnam War (Moore 2015: 283). Furthermore, invasive weed species benefit from increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, which also causes climate change and increased global temperatures (that further negatively affects agricultural yield production). What negative value conceptually captures is the ever-increasing toxification and pollution of our planet as a result of capitalism’s drive towards ever-greater profitability. “The result today is a world in which every nook

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and cranny bears the impress of capital’s toxification: from heavy metals in Arctic glaciers and children’s blood, to the plastic ‘garbage patches’ in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2” (Moore 2015: 280). Most importantly, Moore argues, the toxification of the planet has become a self-imposed limitation on capitalism’s reproduction. With no more available frontiers, no more available Cheap Nature strategies, and ever-increasing amounts of environmental pollution, the capitalist world-system is suffocating in its own waste. We see this aspect of the crisis, the production of negative value, pertinently represented in Interstellar via a powerful representation of capitalism’s crisis state in the era of the end of cheap food.4 Though the cause of Blight and Blight’s destructive impact on agriculture is not fully explained, this aspect of the film, as Ellen Moore notes, “makes some claims to what is happening in the real world on several fronts” (2017: 144). Moore further writes: “In referencing drought, blight, the loss of soil fertility, and the resultant inability to grow crops, Interstellar taps into global concerns about the drastic loss of resources that threaten human life” (2017: 145). Tom Bawden points out that Interstellar aptly represents a 2014 United Nations report showing how agriculture has been negatively affected by both increased environmental pollution and climate change: Although soil degradation is nothing new, Interstellar is proving strangely prescient, as its release coincides with a new UN report showing the trend has reached alarming levels, with 7.7 square miles of agricultural land being lost every day because it has become too salty. Climate change is making the situation worse because warmer temperatures require more irrigation and increase the speed at which the water evaporates, the report warns. (2014: online)

The crisis represented in Interstellar threatens not only human subsistence but also human livelihood, and as such functions as a kind of representation of the crisis of work, or “the demise of laboring society” (Postone 2017: 49). In Interstellar’s social world, there are no more manufacturing or professional managerial jobs; these positions are supposedly no longer necessary. The only labour left is farming, and this labour is framed in the film as care work, feminized; work that is, thereby, devalued in contrast to the kind of labour that is valued but seemingly no longer exists. The crisis of work as represented in Interstellar reflects the current de-industrialized economy, marked by a decrease in manufacturing labour since the 1970s.5

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Alongside the demise of the manufacturing labour economy, workingand middle-class workers have seen a decline in their income since the 1973 economic crisis. Hamilton Carroll identifies a new form of identity politics associated with the crisis of work and economic decline since the late twentieth century, what he calls the white male injury discourse. According to Carroll, this discourse of white male injury relies on “the claim that white men, whose franchise on opportunity in the United States has putatively been revoked, are those most adversely affected by the social transformations of the post-civil rights era” (2011: 2). As Carroll points out, utilizing data from the U.S. Department of Labour, the median income for white men dropped between 1973 and 1992. However, income has also dropped for women and people of colour. Carroll shows that, even with declining income, white men still earn more than white women and black and Latinx folks (Carroll 2011: 4). While working- and middle-class incomes have fallen, the income of corporate executives and the aggregate wealth of the richest 20% of Americans have increased. The white male injury discourse often blames women and people of colour for the economic decline of men without recognizing that white men still have so much more advantage. Similarly, Michael Kimmel identifies this new form of identity politics as a kind of contemporary structure of feeling, what he calls aggrieved entitlement. Kimmel writes that American white men have traditionally (for a few centuries, in fact) either been privileged or at least thought of themselves as entitled to privilege. But, as Kimmel writes, we are living in “the end of the era of men’s entitlement, the era in which a young man could assume, without question, it was not only ‘a man’s world’ but a straight white man’s world” (2013: xiii–xiv). According to Kimmel, many white men feel angry as a result of “the end of the era of men’s entitlement” (2013: xiii). This anger leads to aggrieved entitlement, a sense that white men believe themselves entitled to benefits which seemingly no longer exist (Kimmel 2013: 18). Thus, nostalgia—the desire to return to an imagined past and, as Kimmel writes, “restore what they once had” (Kimmel 2013: 63; italics in original)—is an incredibly important part of aggrieved entitlement. We see the crisis of work, steeped in an affect of white male injury and aggrieved entitlement, in an important scene early in Interstellar. Cooper, sitting on the front porch having a beer with his father-in-law (John Lithgow), says: “It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are. Explorers, pioneers,

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not caretakers.” Cooper is an educated white man, an engineer, a former pilot, a character who outside the diegetic realm of the film would hold social power and privilege. In the world of Interstellar, however, Cooper is reduced to living in barren, dusty, dilapidated conditions, unable to fulfil his livelihood either as an engineer or as a pilot. Rather, Cooper is forced to endure agricultural labour, as feminized, caretaking labour. Most importantly, Cooper believes he is entitled to more. Such is the basis for Interstellar’s main narrative: Middle-class white men, like Cooper, suffer the most in the era of capitalist crisis marked by the disappearance of valued (masculine) labour and the production of negative value. This suffering must end by ending the crisis. Though capitalism’s crisis state is, in material reality, very likely terminal, Interstellar nonetheless offers a way out of this crisis state by positing space colonization as the solution. Flight from planet Earth in Interstellar is fundamentally rooted in the desire to overcome the crisis of capitalism through the opening of a new space frontier and the revival of what Moore describes as the Cheap Nature strategies that have in previous historical eras revived capital accumulation. In the course of positing frontier expansion, Interstellar also presumes renewed opportunity for a (re)investment in white privilege. As I will show in more detail in the next section, Interstellar draws on the discourses that justified white flight from the American city in the post–World War II era.

White Flight from Planet Earth Several critical reviews of Interstellar cite it as an example of a recent popular trope in Hollywood film, that of space colonization, or leaving Earth to escape ecological crisis and planetary collapse (Dickens 2015; Gittell 2014; Jones 2014; Kuiper 2016; Monbiot 2014; Moore 2017; Parikka 2017; Svoboda 2014a; Svoboda 2014b). It is important to note, as none of these reviews do, that the flight from planet Earth trope in Interstellar is specifically a white flight from planet Earth trope, and, as such, has important cultural and material consequences.6 We see this trope of white flight from Earth conjured in an important scene early in the film, in an exchange between Professor Brand and Cooper, who has just discovered the covert NASA facility. Professor Brand has been explaining to Cooper the dire situation regarding the world’s food supply. Cooper says: “Okay, now you need to tell me what your plan is to save the world.” Professor Brand responds: “We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to

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leave it.” By “we” Professor Brand implicitly means white people, especially as what we see at the end of Interstellar is that people, white people, have returned to civilization on board the Space Station Cooper, orbiting Saturn as they wait for their new planet to be turned into a pristine Garden of Eden. Of course, the Space Station Cooper that we see at the end of the film also looks just like white suburbia, replete with white kids playing baseball. Thus, this scene between Professor Brand and Cooper conveys the film’s fundamental thesis: White people are not meant to do the work to change a system that is in terminal crisis. Rather, white people are meant to leave the planet in the way that their antecedents left American cities in the post–World War II era. Thus, what we see ideologically with a film like Interstellar is that the discourses utilized to justify white flight in the post– World War II era are conjured to promote space colonization. Under other circumstances, this might be laughable; yet the disturbing actuality is that significant resources are being put forth by various government-­ sponsored and corporate agencies in an attempt to make space colonization, or white flight from planet Earth, a material reality. Suburbanization, dubbed ‘white flight’ by historians and sociologists because of the racial make-up of those leaving the city for the suburbs, began in the United States in the post–World War II era. Encouraged by racist and exclusionary policies promoted by government-sponsored agencies, like the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, millions of white Americans moved out of cities to the suburbs. As a result, white flight created dire social and material consequences. Steve Macek writes that one of the key consequences of white flight from the city is the decline of the economic health of major U.S. cities, and, by extension, the creation of a number of urban problems with which inner-city communities, extensively communities of colour, have been saddled. These issues include higher rates of unemployment, poverty, and crime (Macek 2006: 1) as well as a higher burden of environmental pollution (Bullard et  al. 2007; United Church of Christ 1987) than their suburban, often white, counterparts.7 Laura Pulido (2000)  shows that suburbanization allowed white folks to move away not only from non-white residents but also from the traditional industrial urban core with its associated environmental pollution. Suburbanization functioned to secure white residents’ access to cleaner environments, while communities of colour were pushed into neighbourhoods with a greater burden of environmental pollution.

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One aspect of environmental pollution that is often overlooked is the overexposure to unhealthy and fast foods in inner-city neighbourhoods. As Hilda Kurtz points out, “as in the case of environmental injustice qua exposure to environmental ‘bads’ more generally, racially disparate access to healthful food is mediated, foremost, by the long history of racial segregation in the United States” (2013: 251). Supermarkets and grocery stores typically followed white consumers to the suburbs in the post– World War II era, leaving behind central city food deserts, or as Kurtz aptly notes, nutrition deserts, noting the lack of access to nutritious food in particular. Kurtz writes that “the concomitant flight of supermarkets from central cities to the suburbs leaves predominantly non-white urban populations dependent on convenience stores, fast food outlets, and grocery stores of varying quality for their everyday food procurement” (255). The overabundant access to fast food and the limited access to affordable healthier foods have translated into a healthcare crisis for inner-city, mostly black and brown, residents, who typically have, as Anthony Hatch (2016)  points out, exceptionally higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity.8 In Interstellar, the desire to secure access to a cleaner and more nutritious environment through white flight invokes a contemporary troubling phenomenon that Andrew Szasz dubs ‘inverted quarantine.’ According to Szasz, traditional quarantine assumes that the environment is healthy overall; thus, it involves isolating discrete sources of risk to the otherwise healthy environment, for example, a diseased individual. However, when overall environmental conditions are no longer healthy, but rather contain risk, such as pollution and toxins that cannot be so easily isolated, as in the case of our current historical moment, that dyadic relationship of healthy overall environment/diseased individual becomes inverted. Individuals then feel that the only way they can protect themselves from the toxic environment is, as Szasz writes, “by isolating themselves from their disease-­ inducing surroundings, by erecting some sort of barrier or enclosure and withdrawing behind it or inside of it” (2007: 5). Szasz documents the way that Americans in the twenty-first century attempt to isolate themselves from environmental toxins by investing in a “personal commodity bubble,” through the purchase of bottled water, organic food, and other “green” or “natural” household products. In other words, inverted quarantine is an individualist, consumerist way of protecting oneself against environmental degradation. As Szasz points out, the ideology behind suburbanization is to get away from—for white people to isolate themselves

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from—the supposed social threats of the city. These social threats include fear of crime, often a code for fear of non-white racial Others. As Szasz argues, inverted quarantine often offers an imaginary refuge from environmental pollution. Most commodity products do not successfully protect people from environmental pollution. Yet, as Szasz further points out, the danger of investing in inverted quarantine as a solution to climate change and ecological crisis is a refusal to invest in the kinds of collective responses that might actually be an effective solution, like the kinds of collective strategies utilized by the 1970s environmental movement, which pushed the U.S. government towards greater regulation of environmental resources, such as the 1970 Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Unfortunately, suburbanization and the popularity of the inverted quarantine mentality have shifted American politics at the national scale towards conservatism marked by privatization and budget cuts to social programmes. And, unfortunately, the suburbs in the United States have a significant amount of political-voting power. We see how a film like Interstellar, which seems progressive on the surface, reinforces this political conservatism by addressing the environment through the logic of the capitalist world-system, steeped in individualism, consumerism, and white supremacy. George Monbiot writes that the trope of flight from planet Earth as it is reflected in Interstellar is steeped in political defeatism. I think Interstellar more aptly reflects the rise of a conservative, neoliberal politics favoured by middle-class white American suburbanites: disinvestment in social welfare, including the dismantling of environmental protections, and investment in the privatization of public services—precisely that which Szasz sees as the kind of politics at the centre of inverted quarantine. Though white flight is at the root of causing the poor conditions of inner-city, often black and brown, neighbourhoods, as Macek discusses, it is largely white suburban perceptions of the inner city that dominate the public discourse around those neighbourhoods (Macek 2006: 12). These are largely conservative discourses that function to blame communities of colour for the nightmarish conditions of their neighbourhoods (Macek 2006: 2). We see this blaming discourse perpetuated in popular news coverage of the city as well as in popular Hollywood films, what Macek describes as the cinema of suburban paranoia. This discourse is present in Interstellar via the naming of ‘blight’ as the cause of environmental devastation. On the one hand, ‘blight’ identifies the signs of infection in plants by pathogenic or parasitic organisms like fungi. On the other hand, as the blog site Hail to You (2014) points out, the use of the term “blight” in

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Interstellar to describe the cause of environmental devastation in the film also has racialized overtones, mirroring a discourse of urban decay used to justify both white flight from the city in the post–World War II era and gentrification and the displacing of lower-income residents and residents of colour from certain city neighbourhoods in the contemporary moment. In this way, in utilizing the language of ‘blight,’ Interstellar implicitly blames people of colour for ecological destruction and economic decline. The implicit blaming of people of colour in Interstellar also dovetails with the way the film reflects the white male injury discourse, which also often erroneously blames people of colour and women for economic decline. The language of ‘blight’ is coupled with the fact that there are only two characters of colour in the film, both black men in supporting roles. The first is the school principle (David Oyelowo) who meets with Cooper along with the teacher Ms. Hanley (Collette Wolfe) during a parent– teacher conference. In the scene, the principle is framed as blocking Cooper’s son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) from going to college to attain the middle-class education to which Cooper feels his son is entitled (i.e. aggrieved entitlement). The other black male character is Romilly (David Gyasi), one of the scientist-astronauts on the mission with Cooper to seek a new planet. Romilly ages twenty-three years in the several hours, or cinematic minutes, that Cooper, Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), and Doyle (Wes Bentley) are on Miller’s waterworld-style planet. Romilly’s aging is particularly significant juxtaposed to the end of the film when Cooper is still as young as he was at the beginning. By the end of the film, Cooper is seemingly forever young, virile, and masculine. By finding a new planet for humans to inhabit, Cooper has restored the seemingly infinite social virility of white masculinity. By contrast, Romilly represents the extinction of blackness, black people, and black culture. Romilly represents the implicit consequence of white flight from planet Earth: that, like the result of white flight from American cities, it will leave behind impoverished communities of colour—in both the rich overdeveloped world like the United States and the more impoverished global South—and that the people in these communities will be saddled with planetary collapse and likely human extinction. There is a theme throughout Interstellar of ‘saving’ future generations, of seeking a ‘home’ elsewhere in which to ‘save’ one’s kids, and this is a discourse that strongly mirrors the discourses used by middle-class white families, justifying white flight from the city in the post–World War II era.9

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As Jussi Parikka suggests, the film is “a twist on the familiar Spielbergian meditation on the crisis of the family system, seen in terms of the cosmic dimensions of the eco catastrophe and time-critical relativity theories” (2017: 140). But it is important to point out the race dimension of this familiar family narrative. The film posits civilization and the solution to capitalism’s terminal crisis in the form of the reunion of the white nuclear family—the reunion of (white) father and (white) daughter in the presence of many later (white) generations of Coopers—and the return of the masculine, father figure (Cooper) who functions as the heroic male agent to ‘save’ this family. Apparently, there is a twist at the end of the film. It turns out that it is really the daughter Murph (Jessica Chastain/Ellen Burstyn) that ‘saves’ humanity, that discovers how to get humans off Earth and to their new planet, with her father’s help, of course. Significantly, however, we do not really see this in the film. Rather, the film focuses on Cooper and his exploration as a heroic male agent. The audience is only told at the end of the film that the daughter is the actual saviour, that the Space Station Cooper is named after her, Murph, and not Cooper. Furthermore, by the end of the film, Murph (like Romilly) is old, sick, and dying, whereas Cooper is forever young, representing the eternal value of white masculinity. If there is a heroic female agent in Interstellar, it is more properly Dr. Amelia Brand. Dr. Brand is the chief scientist on the journey with Cooper in search of a new planet, and she discovers the new planet for human habitation by the end of the film. Yet, at the end of Interstellar, Dr. Brand’s agency is undermined by her alignment with the new post-planetary frontier. As ecofeminist scholars like Stacy Alaimo (2000)  and Kate Soper (1995)  point out, women have long been associated with nature, and nature has long been framed in feminine terms (e.g. Mother Earth). Carolyn Merchant (1996) notes that men, white men in particular, have long been framed as the heroic male agents that conquer and tame wild (female) nature. Interstellar ends with an invitation for Cooper, the heroic male agent, to rescue (and conquer) wild nature, both the newly discovered planet as well as Amelia Brand, to turn both into pristine, Edenic nature. Furthermore, Dr. Brand’s monologue in the middle of the film, on love being more powerful than gravity, a monologue that centres heterosexual love, further perpetuates the discourse in the film of saving humanity through civilization in the form of the white nuclear family. In showing how a film like Interstellar reflects the discourses that justified white flight in the post–World War II United States, I aim to show

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that white supremacy and ‘the possessive investment in whiteness,’ to borrow from George Lipsitz, are intimately articulated to the discursive functioning of capitalism’s world-system. As Jason W. Moore writes, European colonization was central to the previous accumulation strategies that opened new frontiers and rendered Nature cheap. Or, as Sharae Deckard writes, “the history of capital is itself, as Jason W. Moore has argued, ‘environmental history’ which must be understood in terms of the ecological regimes and revolutions which have perpetuated mass environmental changes on peripheral and colonial ecologies in order to extract raw materials and labour for the profit of the cores” (2012: 9). The bodies, labour-­ time, and technology of black and brown people all over the world have been and currently are treated as controllable, like nature, a natural resource that can be turned into a commodity for capital accumulation. Thus, people of colour have long been framed as somehow closer to nature alongside a dominant Euro-American notion of nature as that which is other than the human. If people of colour are more like nature, and nature is other than the human, then people of colour are other than human: this becomes the ideological basis for the disposable status of people of colour. By contrast, white people are framed as closer to culture, as the embodiment of civilization. In this way, nature becomes, as Noel Sturgeon (2009) writes, a tool of power to justify social hierarchies, including the socially constructed value and privilege attached to whiteness. As George Lipsitz argues, the possessive investment in whiteness is not just a cultural narrative but deeply connected to economic issues; it forms part of the “systematic efforts from colonial times to the present to create economic advantages” for white Euro-Americans (Lipsitz 2016: 98). As such, white flight and suburbanization in the post–World War II United States is an extension of the kinds of ideologies developed and implemented throughout European colonization. Central to the mission of European colonization—and the extraction of natural resources from peripheral places for the capitalist core, including the bodies, time, and technologies of people of colour—was the drive towards capital accumulation, expanding the frontier of the capitalist world-system for enhanced profitability. White flight and suburbanization serve a similar purpose, and, in particular, were part of the process of restoring profitability within the American capitalist system after the Great Depression. Many of the government-sponsored agencies that promoted white flight, like the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners’ Loan

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Corporation, were created as part of the New Deal designed to ameliorate economic crisis. In drawing parallels between Blight and the Dust Bowl, Interstellar points to this era of the New Deal, though in such a way as to erase the explicitly racist and exclusionary aspects of the New Deal. As Lipsitz points out, one of the key elements of the possessive investment in whiteness is the ability of white Euro-Americans to be ignorant about the kinds of policies and institutions that have, since the ending of slavery in the American South, continued to privilege white Euro-Americans at the expense of people and communities of colour. This often includes a forgetting of the fundamentally racist and exclusionary policies and institutions that created and perpetuated racial segregation via white flight from the city. Blight as represented in Interstellar is also reflective of recent conversations around “dust-bowlification” as an increasingly likely threat due to climate change. In this respect, Interstellar draws from interview footage of 1930s Dust Bowl survivors taken from Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan’s documentary The Dust Bowl, a film which tends towards reproducing what Hannah Holleman (2017) labels the traditional Dust Bowl narrative. In the traditional narrative of the Dust Bowl, the cause is often framed as erroneous agricultural and land practices that created soil erosion. As Holleman argues, this traditional narrative erases the central role of Euro-­ American imperialism, steeped in an ideology of white supremacy. This includes practices such as white settler colonialism, the seizure of indigenous land, and cash crop agriculture, including monocropping and exporting crops. These practices were happening not just in the U.S. Southern Plains, but across the world in the early twentieth century, with Euro-­ American imperialism causing global soil erosion and “dust-bowlification” on a global scale. As Holleman notes, Dust Bowls happened so frequently there were international scientific conferences to address the issue. Interstellar seemingly provides a solution for a future possible global climate change–driven Dust Bowl. Yet this solution is steeped in a recuperation of the kinds of imperialist practices and white supremacist ideologies that caused the 1930s global Dust Bowl. Because the film advocates for an overcoming of capitalism’s terminal crisis via frontier expansion and new Cheap Nature strategies, Interstellar’s proposal of white flight from planet Earth also reflects an ideological push to recuperate the economic advantages of white supremacy. The trope of flight from Earth has a disturbing actuality: significant resources are being put forth by various government-sponsored and

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corporate agencies in an attempt to make space colonization, specifically the settlement of Mars, a material reality. Rachel Rochester examines the rhetoric surrounding some of these proposed Mars missions by NASA, Mars One, and SpaceX. Rochester argues that the rhetoric surrounding these projects suggests “that humanity is poised to export the same model of settler colonization that has led to so many terrestrial diasporas” (2018). Rochester further writes: “The people involved with NASA, SpaceX, and Mars One clearly identify climate change and environmental degradation as a threat to Earth’s habitability, and they admit humanity’s complicity in such issues. Nevertheless, they have neglected to voice such truths in the conversation about interplanetary colonization, increasing the likelihood that the same patterns that are bringing about environmental calamity on Earth will be repeated if colonization plans come to fruition” (2018). In other words, the fundamental practices within the capitalist world-system that are the culprit behind the ecological crisis are embedded in the drive for space colonization, likely leading to continued environmental devastation on Earth as well as the eventual environmental destruction of Mars. As Rochester suggests, the rhetoric embedded in Mars settlement projects downplays the kinds of capitalist resource extraction and consumerist habits that must be employed to terraform and colonize the red planet. These projects also “express little concern about the ways in which their presence might damage preexisting ecosystemic relationships” (Rochester 2018). And, as Rochester implies, the push for space colonization by these agencies is rooted in the kinds of ideologies and material benefits that drove European colonization—the extraction of natural resources from the periphery for the purposes of profitability and accumulation within the capitalist core. These agencies are fundamentally engaged in an attempt to overcome the crisis of capitalism through the opening of a new frontier through interplanetary colonization and the revival of what Moore describes as Cheap Nature strategies. While significant funding and resources are put into realizing space colonization, the material lived reality of capitalism’s crisis state, rooted in extreme economic inequality and environmental pollution, is an ongoing reality for people around the globe. It is a dynamic that is well captured in Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word poem “Whitey on the Moon” (1970), which contrasts the millions of dollars invested in the Apollo mission with the inability of those in inner-city—typically black and brown—neighbourhoods to pay essential bills.10

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It is important to note a contradiction embedded within the rhetoric of these space colonization projects, as Rochester shows with Mars One: “In the narrative that Mars One constructs through its merchandising, Mars is a warm and fruitful planet replete with flora and fauna, while the Earth left behind is cold and barren. Despite Mars One’s misleading imagery, there will be no such environment waiting on Mars without major human intervention” (Rochester 2018). It is likely that the environmental and material protections afforded white folks by fleeing cities in the post–World War II era will not translate to space colonization and white flight from planet Earth. These projects are at least a decade or more away while the effects of climate change are here and now, and ongoing. The near future for middle-class white people looks more like the world depicted in the 1973 sci-fi-horror cult classic Soylent Green than the return to the post–World War II suburban utopia depicted at the end of Interstellar. Or, as Dipesh Chakrabarty notes with regard to climate change, “there are no lifeboats here for the rich and privileged” (2009: 221).11

Investing in the Future Jussi Parikka points out that an ‘end of history’ discourse converges with the popularity of the flight from Earth trope. In particular, Parikka considers the end of history discourse as the (neo)liberal world order refusing to address the end of natural history and the distinct possibility of the literal non-existence of the future via human extinction. This is precisely what we see in a film like Interstellar. Interstellar’s sense of temporality is dominated by the way the future can shape the past, or, more specifically, how the future can realize itself by shaping the present. We see this explicitly towards the end of the film when it becomes clear that Murph’s ‘ghost’ from the beginning of the film is actually her father Cooper from the future, trapped inside an elaborate tesseract created by a future human civilization to save humans of the past (or humans of the present within the social world of the film). As Cooper explains to the robot TARS: “Don’t you get it yet, TARS? They’re not beings. They’re us! What I’ve been doing for Murph, I’ve been doing for me. For all of us.” Thus, Interstellar presents a notion of the future acting on the present. Furthermore, Interstellar posits the notion that securing the economic and ecological future for humans is predicated on humans in the present investing in their future, namely saving future generations via space exploration. And, as I’ve argued earlier, this is also a recuperative strategy to

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retain the economic advantages of white privilege. Thus, investing in the future is an important theme in the film to avoid the ‘end of history.’ The future-oriented temporality of Interstellar also mirrors the future-­ oriented discourses favoured by a neoliberal financialized economy. Annie McClanahan shows that a dominant discourse of ‘investing in the future’ arose in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s structured by the emergence of financialization and the dominance of speculative financial instruments like securities and derivatives. As McClanahan writes, [t]he temporality imagined by the discourse of ‘investing in the future’ mirrors the temporality of financial instruments themselves, particularly derivatives. … Most derivatives are priced not with reference to the present, but to the (perceived) future. … The idea of a present price determined by the limitless possibilities of the future reveals the fantasy behind the phrase ‘investing in the future’: that the future depends not simply on an act of metaphorical investment, but on the investor’s confidence in that investment. (2013: 83–4)

Thus, a socio-economic structure based around derivatives and other future-oriented financial instruments pushes an ideological-temporal structure that values futurity over the present alongside the notion that, as long as we believe in the future, the future will be ours, that is, financially secure. In McClanahan’s words, “[t]he language of investing in the future, like the derivative itself, assumes a future at once deferred and near, a future whose endless profitability is seemingly secured by our faith in its magical possibility” (2013: 84). This is also what we see in Interstellar. There is a kind of magical faith that acting in the present, namely Cooper’s actions, will secure the future, that an investment in the future will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Interstellar posits the notion that by investing in the future, we can survive into that future. In this respect, Interstellar’s sense of futurity, investing in the future and a notion that the future can secure the present, mirrors the future-oriented temporality favoured by a neoliberal financialized economy. The neoliberal financialized economy is increasingly extending into the global food regime, including the financialization of agriculture through instruments like index insurance (which is not insurance but rather a derivative). The assumed goal of financialization is to mitigate climate change risk, such as the increasingly negative effects on agriculture that we witness at the beginning of Interstellar. Jennifer Clapp (2014) observes that “a

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growing number of studies have situated financialization within the context of food regimes, showing how new financial instruments are widely used by transnational agrifood corporations as yet another mode of accumulation that further solidifies their dominant role in the global food regime” (797). As Clapp points out, the increasing financialization of the global food system has a distancing effect, of which one of the major consequences is the obscuring of the social and ecological consequences of financial investment on food and agriculture. Clapp further notes that “financialization is widely seen to be a response to the exhaustion of the Fordist economic growth model, where financial capital has replaced productive capital in the quest for new profits” (799). In other words, the increasing financialization of the global food regime is another way of organizing nature to overcome the terminal crises of capitalism, a new kind of Cheap Nature strategy. Like the investment in futurity via space colonization posited by Interstellar, financial instruments like derivatives are in material reality likely nothing more than fictitious and illusory. Yet, as Clapp emphasizes, in aiming to overcome capitalism’s terminal crisis and mitigate climate risk, the financialization of food and agriculture likely perpetuates ongoing issues of ecological decline. Jussi Parikka also argues that “the ecocrisis is not just a present dilemma but a future that acts on the now” (2017: 139). In particular, Parikka argues that we must think in terms of “multiple historical and temporal directionalities” if we are to make sense of the contemporary eco-crisis; we must draw on the imaginary future and notions of the future past (2017: 140). While we do see “a future that acts on the now” in Interstellar, what we do not see is a future that diverges from the ideologies and structures associated with the capitalist world-system. What is also needed to address the eco-crisis and the terminal crisis of capitalism are “multiple historical and temporal directionalities” that represent different kinds of power structures and different systems of production than those articulated to the capitalist world-system. We also need an environmentalism of-the-here, an environmentalism that seeks sustainability in the places where humans actually inhabit. For the present and into the immediate future, that place is located here on planet Earth. This kind of environmentalism is expressed in Interstellar via the teacher Ms. Hanley during the parent–teacher conference with Cooper and the principal. During this meeting Ms. Hanley says: “And if we don’t want a repeat of the excess and wastefulness of the twentieth century, then we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it.” Though Ms. Hanley offers an important principle of sustainability, she is

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framed as a crazy conspiracy theorist, believing that the Apollo space mission to the moon was a hoax utilized by the U.S. government to encourage the Soviet Union to spend money until it bankrupted itself. Thus, the idea of seeking sustainability on Earth is brushed off in favour of the white flight from planet Earth fantasy, a possessive reinvestment in whiteness.

Conclusion Agnieszka Podruczna points out that the science fiction genre has an affinity for the conquest narrative and the colonial discourse of frontier expansion. Simultaneously, science fiction is free from the constraints of realist fiction, and through an emphasis on non-realism, or irrealism, can represent that which is abstract, like the slow and structural violence of capitalism and white supremacy.12 So much feminist, indigenous, and afro-futurist science fiction literature utilizes irrealism in interesting ways, centring the voices and stories of marginalized peoples—women and communities of colour—who often and disproportionately experience this slow and structural violence. As Rob Nixon writes of the power of literature, “[i]n a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses” (2011: 15). By contrast, Hollywood operates, as Michael Parenti writes, “within fixed ideological parameters,” parameters that are about both money-­ making and ideological control (2010: vii). Hollywood’s ideological control extends beyond the borders of the United States. Many Hollywood films, Interstellar included, are financially successful internationally as well as domestically.13 Thus, the kinds of ideologies and ways of seeing as represented in Interstellar are also represented in other popular Hollywood eco-themed films, and these ideologies and ways of seeing are perpetuated around the globe. As Noah Gittell asks, “[w]hy does Hollywood keep getting the environment wrong? Maybe it’s for the same reasons that politicians have been unable to fix it: Because the ways that climate change and other environmental crises can be addressed are not dramatic or awe-­ inspiring” (2014: online). Gittell’s question and answer echo what Rob Nixon calls slow violence, a concept that points to the way that environmental destruction happens slowly over the course of time. By contrast, the media tends to emphasize that which is explosive and spectacular, such as we see in Interstellar. As Nixon asks,

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[i]n an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-­ world? (2011: 3)

Or, as Sharae Deckard asks, “[h]ow to represent the seemingly unmappable, invisible complexity of world-economy and its effects on the planet, how to imagine alternatives to capitalist petro-modernity?” (2012: 5).  Similarly, Andrew Hageman asks, how do we visualize “an ecology without capital” (2013: 66)? One suggestion is a push for Hollywood to represent onscreen more literary narratives by feminist, indigenous, and postcolonial science fiction writers like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Judith Merril, and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose work pushes past the ideological boundaries of capitalist white supremacy. As Deckard writes of world-literature, “it is precisely because the social and environmental transformations produced within peripheries by the international division of labour are starker that the socio-ecological crises of the world-ecology might be more visible in peripheral and postcolonial literary forms, thus providing an interpretative horizon” (2012: 6). Similarly, Podruczna writes, “this decentralization of the Western modes of writing and the use of subversive counter-discourse in storytelling practice paves the way for the emergence of new narrative possibilities for postcolonial science fiction authors, which would enable them critically to examine and challenge the status quo” (2018: 51). What Deckard and Podruczna argue with regard to literature is applicable to thinking through the need for new narratives within cinema.

Notes 1. The trope of space colonization within science fiction literature is not new to the twenty-first century. As Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont (2009) write, this trope dates back to at least the 1940s, before space travel was a reality, and became a particularly popular science fiction literature theme in the 1950s. Though space colonization as cinematic narrative dates back to films like Forbidden Planet (1956) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), flight from planet Earth in response to planetary crises has become yet again a popular cinematic discourse in the twenty-first century.

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2. The goal for this particular chapter is not to outline the structural conditions for this crisis. That work has been thoroughly accomplished in other texts. See, for example, Moore (2015); Postone (2017). Rather, the goal of this chapter is to point out that the crisis exists in which to discuss how it is represented in American popular culture. 3. Jason W. Moore further writes: “Outrunning these contradictions was possible because there were geographical frontiers—not just continents, but bodily, subterranean, and atmospheric spaces—from which ‘free gifts’ could be extracted, and into which ‘free garbage’ could be deposited” (2015: 280). 4. According to Jason W. Moore (2015), the end of cheap food marks the end of strategies that reorganized and restructured capitalist production to achieve new forms of capital accumulation and profitability, strategies that rendered Nature, including food, cheap. Yet, we have reached a unique historical moment in which food can no longer be rendered Cheap. The end of Cheap food is marked by a system in which the production of food is evermore demanding. More labour-time is required to produce increasingly fewer calories, and this translates into the price of food being less and less cheap. In American agriculture today, producing one calorie of food requires at least fifteen calories of energy (Canning et al. 2010). To put it plainly, the production of food is evermore difficult, evermore expensive, and evermore work is required to produce increasingly less amounts of food. 5. Please note that the manufacturing sector itself is not disappearing, just jobs within this sector. This is likely a result of the closure of manufacturing facilities in the United States (often to be reopened in another, usually global South location), or labour replaced by technological advancements. 6. Ellen Moore (2017) comes closest in noting the whiteness at the end of the film. 7. See also Lipsitz (2016). 8. Similarly, McClintock (2011) shows how the history of racist housing policies, white flight from the city, and capital devaluation combined to create a food desert in Oakland, California’s flatlands, neighbourhoods that are disproportionately residents of colour. 9. See, for example, Johnson and Shapiro (2003). 10. See also Robinson (2018), an opinion piece regarding SpaceX in The Guardian. 11. Peter Dickens (2015) points out that perhaps human bodies are not meant to leave Earth, citing research that shows astronauts often suffer bone and muscle damage, and radiation from the Sun and elsewhere within our Solar System damages human cells and increases the likelihood of cancer.

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12. See also Niblett (2012) and Warwick Research Collective (2015) for a further discussion of how irrealist aesthetics within literature offer the ability to represent abstract structural violence imposed by the capitalist world-­ system on people and ecologies within the world’s periphery. 13. Even though Interstellar was initially talked about as a box office failure (e.g. see McClintock 2014), the film was actually quite financially successful worldwide, placing as the tenth highest grossing film of 2014. Interstellar’s domestic box office sales were $188 million, and the film was an international success grossing $487 million in other countries for a total of $677.5 million in worldwide sales (Box Office Mojo).

Works Cited “2014 Worldwide Grosses.” Box Office Mojo. 25 November 2014. Retrieved 29 June 2018. Alaimo, Stacy. 2000. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bawden, Tom. 2014. UN Report: Climate Change Has Permanently Ruined Farmland the Size of France. Independent, October 31. Bullard, Robert, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha, and Beverly Wright. 2007. Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, 1987–2007: A Report Prepared for the United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries. Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ. Canning, Patrick, Ainsley Charles, Sonya Huang, Karen R. Polenske, and Arnold Waters. 2010. Energy Use in the US Food System. United States Department of Agriculture. Carroll, Hamilton. 2011. Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222. Clapp, Jennifer. 2014. Financialization, Distance and Global Food Politics. The Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (5): 797–814. Davis, Mike. 2004. The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos. Social Text 22 (4): 9–15. Deckard, Sharae. 2012. Editorial. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. 16: 5–14. Dickens, Peter. 2015. Leaving the World Instead of Saving It. Capitalism Nature Socialism. 26 (4): 249–252. Gittell, Noah. 2014. Interstellar: Good Space Film, Bad Climate Change Parable. The Atlantic, November 15. Hageman, Andrew. 2013. Ecocinema and Ideology: Do Ecocritics Dream of a Clockwork Green? In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt. New York: Routledge.

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Hail to You. 2014. Interstellar’s ‘Blight’ as a Racial Metaphor for ‘Ethnic Third Worldization.’ November 16. Blog: https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/tag/ interstellar/. Hatch, Anthony Ryan. 2016. Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Holleman, Hannah. 2017. De-naturalizing Ecological Disaster: Colonialism, Racism, and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (1): 234–260. Interstellar. 2014. Christopher Nolan, Director. Paramount Pictures. Johnson, Heather Beth, and Thomas M. Shapiro. 2003. Good Neighborhoods, Good Schools: Race and the ‘Good Choices’ of White Families. In White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. Ashley M.  Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. New York: Routledge. Jones, Eileen. 2014. Reactionaries in Space. Jacobin, December 10. Kimmel, Michael. 2013. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation Books. Kuiper, Eric. 2016. Leaving Earth to Find Home. In Dreams, Doubts, and Dread: The Spiritual in Film, ed. Zachary Settle and Taylor Worley. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Kurtz, Hilda E. 2013. Linking Food Deserts and Racial Segregation: Challenges and Limitations. In Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies, Markets, ed. Rachel Slocum and Arun Saldanha. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Lipsitz, George. 2016. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. In White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg, 5th ed. New York: Worth Publishers. Macek, Steve. 2006. Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McClanahan, Annie. 2013. Investing in the Future: Late Capitalism’s End of History. Journal of Cultural Economy. 6 (1): 78–93. McClintock, Nathan. 2011. From Industrial Garden to Food Desert: Demarcated Devaluation in the Flatlands of Oakland, California. In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, ed. Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McClintock, Pamela. 2014. Final Box Office: ‘Interstellar’ Falls Short of $50M Launch. The Hollywood Reporter, November 10. Merchant, Carolyn. 1996. Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative. In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Monbiot, George. 2014. Interstellar: Magnificent Film, Insane Fantasy. The Guardian, November 11. Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso.

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Moore, Ellen. 2017. Landscape and the Environment in Hollywood Film. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Newell, Dianne, and Victoria Lamont. 2009. Daughter of Earth: Judith Merril and the Intersections of Gender, Science Fiction, and Frontier Mythology. Science Fiction Studies 36 (1): 48–66. Niblett, Michael. 2012. World-Economy, World-Ecology, World-Literature. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 16: 15–30. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parenti, Michael. 2010. Foreword. In Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy. Matthew Alford, Author. New York: Pluto Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2017. Planetary Goodbyes: Post-History and Future Memories of an Ecological Past. In Memory in Motion, ed. Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, and Eivind Røssaak. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Podruczna, Agnieszka. 2018. Mythology of the Space Frontier: Diaspora, Liminality, and the Practices of Remembrance in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber. In New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches, ed. Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendes, and Lucinda Newns. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Postone, Moishe. 2017. The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading. Continental Thought & Theory 1 (4): 38–54. Pulido, Laura. 2000. Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (1): 12–40. Robinson, Nathan. 2018. Why Elon Musk’s Space X Launch is Utterly Depressing. The Guardian, February 7. Rochester, Rachel. 2018. Speculative Diasporas: Hari Kunzru’s Historical Consciousness, the Rhetoric of Interplanetary Colonization, and the Locus-­ Colonial Novel. In New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches, ed. Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendes, and Lucinda Newns. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Soper, Kate. 1995. What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Sturgeon, Noel. 2009. Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Svoboda, Michael. 2014a. Interstellar: Looking for the Future in All the Wrong Spaces. Yale Climate Connections, November 12. ———. 2014b. What Do We Learn from Cli-Fi Films? Hollywood Still Stuck in Holocene. Yale Climate Connections, November 11. Szasz, Andrew. 2007. Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Index1

A Acevedo, Rafael, 209, 211n9 Al otro lado del muro hay carne fresca, 209, 211n9 Exquisito cadáver, 209, 211n9 Adams, Carol J., 35 Adamson, Alan H., 77 Adventure fiction, 23, 25, 34 Agribusiness, 197, 207 Agribusiness (agri-business), 127 Agriculture, 3, 5, 13, 37, 73, 75, 77–80, 84–88, 89n1, 97–99, 101, 106, 107, 120, 123, 128, 133, 134, 143, 159n3, 165, 172, 174, 183, 186, 187n6, 200, 205, 235, 238, 239, 248, 251, 252, 255n4 Agriculture Act (UK, 1947), 84 AKEL (Progressive Party of the Working People), 103, 104

Alaimo, Stacy, 246 Albion Country Band, 85 Allfrey, Phyllis Shand, 46 Amaya Amador, Ramón, 164 Prisión verde, 164 Anglo-Saxon ritual, 70, 73, 85, 89n5 Anti-colonialism, 100, 103, 106, 109, 111, 112 Apocalypse, 193, 194, 207, 208 Arınç, Cihat, 102 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 163–186 The Eyes of the Interred, 167, 174, 180, 181 The Green Pope, 167, 172, 174–177, 181, 182, 184 Nobel lecture, 165, 169 Strong Wind, 167–169, 172–174, 176–178, 181, 182, 185 Atlantic, 216, 218, 219, 231, 232n3 Aunt Jemima, 59

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Campbell et al. (eds.), Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76155-4

261

262 

INDEX

B Barret, Rafael, 142 Lo que son los yerbales, 142 Bartolovich, Crystal, 11 Bawden, Tom, 239 Beckman, Ericka, 170, 199 Belaval, Emilio, 195, 199–203, 205, 209, 210n5 Cuentos para fomentar el turismo, 199, 200 Belich, James, 23, 25 Benjamin, Walter, 166, 184 Bennet, Louise, 46 Berbice rebellion (1763), 79 Bernstein, Henry, 98, 105 Black British writing, 45, 46, 54 Blackwood, Algernon, 67, 78 Blake, William, 59 Blight, 235, 239, 244, 245, 248 Bloom, Valerie, 46 Brathwaite, Kamau, 67, 73, 74 Breeze, Jean ‘Binta, 46 Brett, Christophers, 89n2 Brinklow, Laurie, 216, 217, 226 British Nationality Act (1981), 45, 55 British Nationality Act (1948), 55 Brown, Nicholas, 221 Burdett, Carolyn, 32, 33 C Campbell, Elizabeth, 75, 76 Canada, 216, 219, 222, 223 Cannibalism, 32, 207 Capitalism, 28, 39, 40, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 59, 96, 98, 101, 132, 133, 143, 158, 165, 166, 169–171, 174, 178, 179, 186, 187n3, 187n4, 194–196, 198, 204, 206, 217, 218, 220, 224, 229, 235–254

Caribbean, 43–47, 49–52, 54, 56, 57, 65–89 Carroll, Hamilton, 240 Carruth, Allison, 8–10, 195, 208 Casanova-Vizcaíno, Sandra, 194, 195, 211n8 Cazzola, Matilde, 75 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 164 “Bananas,” 164 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 250 Chaloemtiarana, Thak, 119, 120 Charman, Caitlin, 217, 226 Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 4 Cheap nature, 143, 144, 149, 150, 158, 237–239, 241, 248, 249, 252 Clapp, Jennifer, 251, 252 Clare, John, 66 Cod/cod frontier, 215–232 Coffee, 193, 196, 197, 199–206, 211n7 Cohen, Margaret, 24 Collins, Dolly, 85 Collins, Shirley, 85 Colonialism, 65, 67, 69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 80 Colonization, 236, 241, 242, 247, 249, 250, 252, 254n1 Comaroff, Jean, 206 Comaroff, John L., 206 Commodity, 99, 101, 105, 112 Commodity frontier, 143, 164, 166, 187n3 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 84 Commons, 66, 69–72, 75, 78, 85, 87, 88, 89n2, 89n4, 89n6 Communism/communist, 117, 130–134, 135n1, 136n9 Cotton, 145, 146 Crosby, Alfred, 143 Crummey, Michael, 215–232 Galore, 216

 INDEX 

“Learning the Price of Fish,”, 216 “Rust,” 215 Sweetland, 215–232 Cullather, Nick, 121, 127 Cyprus, 95–112 Cyprus is an Island (1946), 96–100, 102, 104–106, 108, 112 D Dallas, Robert C., 76 Daly, Nicholas, 24, 28 Davis, Mike, 237 Dawes, Kwame, 49 De Barros, Juanita, 59, 60 Deane, Bradley, 34 Debt, 150–152 Deckard, Sharae, 176–178, 247, 254 Deforestation, 178 Delocalization, 194–196, 210 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 68 Dickens, Peter, 241, 255n11 Discommoning, 66, 73, 88, 89n6 Dow Chemical, 2 Drought, 118, 125–130 Dust Bowl, 235, 248 Dust-bowlification, 248 E Ecological crisis, 236, 237, 241, 244, 249 Eerie, 67, 78–80 Elysium, 236 Enclosure, 66, 67, 69–72, 75, 84, 87, 88, 89n1 England, 65–89 Environmentalism, 252 Export commodity, 142–146, 158 Extraction, 142–144, 150 Extraction zone, 143, 150–153, 158, 159n3

263

F Fairport Convention, 85 Fallas, Carlos Luis, 164 Mamita Yunai, 164 Federici, Silvia, 48, 51 Felice Brothers “Lion,” 2 “Take this Bread,” 2 Figueroa, Ramón A., 200, 201 Firefly, 236 Fisher, Mark, 67, 78, 79 Fish/fishing/fisheries, 215–223, 225–227, 229–232, 232n1, 232n3 Fleming, Leonor, 142 Food regimes, 2, 4, 5, 8, 13, 15, 16, 97, 98, 107, 112, 118, 120, 135n2, 194–199, 204–206, 208, 209, 219, 226 Food riots, 10, 11 Foodways, 217–222, 226–228, 230 Forests (forestry), 105–108, 112 Fossil fuels, 196 French, Jennifer, 148, 151, 153, 154, 156, 159n2 Friedmann, Harriet, 4, 5, 97, 107, 127, 135n2, 135n4, 226, 228 Fryer, Peter, 55 G Gaika, 71–73 Galeano, Eduardo, 163, 165, 187n6 Ganjanapan, Anan, 121, 133, 136n11 García Márquez, Gabriel, 164 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 164 Gender, 43, 48, 51 Generación del treinta, 195, 200, 209 Gittell, Noah, 241, 253 Global warming, 10 Goat, 106, 107 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 144, 159n3

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INDEX

Goodison, Lorna, 46 Gothic, 119, 164, 177, 179, 193–210 Great Depression, 247 Green Revolution, 117, 121, 127, 128, 164, 165, 171, 175, 187n3, 197 Green, Martin, 40, 41n1 Gregory, James, 32, 33 Guaraní, 141, 142, 144, 150–152, 155, 156, 158 Guevara, José, 141 Guyana, 45, 51, 77, 78, 83, 84

Interstellar, 235–254 Irrealism, 119, 130–134, 167–174, 217

H Hageman, Andrew, 254 Haggard, H. Rider, 21–27 Allan Quatermain, 23, 30, 34–36, 39, 40 King Solomon’s Mines, 21, 23, 24, 26, 30, 34–36, 39, 40 She, 23, 25, 26, 28–33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41n4 Hall, Stuart, 45, 72, 73 Harris, Sarah, E., 106–108 Hartman, Saidiya, 43, 44, 47, 48, 59 Hatch, Anthony Ryan, 243 Hideki, Hiramatsu, 122, 123 Higgler, 44 Hill, Christopher, 71 Holland, Robert, 103 Holleman, Hannah, 248 Holt Giménez, Eric, 196, 197, 208 Hopkinson, Nalo, 67, 82 Hunger, 194, 196–198, 200, 207

K Katsourides, Yiannos, 100, 104, 108 Keene, Ralph, 95, 96, 99–102, 104, 106, 107, 109 Keyser, Catherine, 9 Kimmel, Michael, 240 King, Sidney (Eusi Kaywana), 80 Kinoti, Kathambi, 51 Kipling, Rudyard, 151 Korbjitti, Chart, 118, 119, 131, 132, 134, 135n5 A Baker’s Dozen, 118, 131 Kurtz, Hilda E., 243

I Imperialism, 67, 89, 164, 195–197, 199, 202, 210 Indiana, Rita, 67 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 88

J Jamaica, 3, 68, 73–75, 88 James, M. R., 67, 78, 81, 82 Jameson, Fredric, 124 Jesuits, 141, 144, 146, 156 Jíbaro, 200, 201, 203 Johnson, Hume N., 44

L Labour, 141–144, 147, 149–153, 155–158, 159n5, 164, 167–174, 180, 181, 183, 187n3 Labour rebellions, 100 Labour-time, 170, 183 Laguerre, Enrique A., 211n7 Lamming, George, 3 Lee, Laurie, 95–112 “Small notebook on Cyprus,” 99–100, 109 (with Ralph Keene) We Made a Film in Cyprus, 96, 99, 109

 INDEX 

Lee Brien, Donna, 8, 13 LeMenager, Stephanie, 228 Lindsay, Jack, 69 Linebaugh, Peter, 66, 70, 75, 76 Linhares, Temístocles, 143, 144, 154 Lipsitz, George, 236, 247, 248 Logging, 147, 148, 150 Lohoff, Ernst, 237 Loichot, Valérie, 195, 210n3 Loizos, Peter, 103, 104 London, 45, 54, 55 Lopez, Jotacé, 195, 204–206, 209, 211n8 Arboretum, 195, 204 Lost in Space, 236 Lost world fiction, 34, 39 Lovecraft, H. P., 67, 81, 82 Löwy, Michael, 185 Lugo de Marichal, Flavia, 210n6 Lyra, Carmen, 164, 186n2 Bananos y hombres, 164 Lyric poetry, 46, 49 M Mabey, Richard, 88 Macdonald, Graeme, 217, 218 Macek, Steve, 242, 244 Machen, Arthur, 67 Magical realism, 164 Magus, Simon, 32 Maroons, 73, 75, 76 Marquardt, Steve, 172, 173, 180 Marson, Una, 46 Martínez, Julio Tomás, 199, 204 El genio del ingenio, 199 Marx, Karl, 52, 168, 170, 176, 180, 186–187n3, 187n4, 202 Masculinity, 21, 26, 34, 35 Matless, David, 84 McCalman, Iain, 74, 75 McClanahan, Annie, 251

265

McClintock, Nathan, 255n8 McKay, George, 84 McKittrick, Katherine, 50 McMichael, Philip, 4, 5, 11, 97, 98, 121, 226–228 McTair, Roger, 67 “Just a Lark,” 67, 69 Meat, 21–27 Meat-eating (carnivory), 22, 24, 25, 28, 30–35, 38–40 Mensú, 142–144, 146–153, 155–158, 159n5 Merchant, Carolyn, 246 Mies, Maria, 110 Miéville, China, 67, 81 Miller, John, 34 Mills, Mary Beth, 128, 130, 136n11 Mintz, Sidney W., 3, 47, 53 Mittelholzer, Edgar, 78, 79, 81–83 My Bones and My Flute, 78 Shadows Move Among Them, 78 Modernity, 26, 32, 40 Modernization, 5, 118, 120, 122, 126, 130 Monbiot, George, 241, 244 Monoculture, 3, 6, 13, 14, 44, 45, 65, 68, 69, 77, 79, 84, 87, 149, 152, 154–159, 165, 168, 169, 178, 180, 181, 196, 200 Monsanto, 197, 204–209 Moore, D. C., 71 Common, 71 Moore, Jason, W., 2, 4, 5, 10, 15, 25, 39, 40, 120, 128, 143, 144, 159n3, 165, 166, 170–172, 174, 176, 180, 185, 186, 186n3, 187n4, 197, 205, 217–219, 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 237–239, 247, 249, 255n3, 255n4

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INDEX

N Nationalism, 111 Naylor, Simon, 26, 28 Necrophilia, 143, 149, 152 Neeson, J. M., 69, 89n4 Negative value, 166, 174–181, 185, 186n3, 238, 239, 241 Neoliberalism, 197, 198, 218, 226 Neruda, Pablo, 164 Canto General, 164 Newfoundland, 215–219, 221–223, 226–229, 232n2, 232n4 Niblett, Michael, 120, 166, 217, 218, 230 Nichols, Grace, 43–60 I Is A Long Memoried Woman, 43, 45, 48–54 The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, 54, 55 Nixon, Rob, 253 Nolan, Christopher, 257 O Oil, 217–223, 225, 226, 228–230, 232n3 Olusoga, David, 46, 55 Ordiz, Inés, 194, 195, 211n8 Outports, 215–217, 219–224, 226, 228–232, 232n1 P Pagán Vélez, Alexandra, 195, 204, 206–209 horrorReal, 195, 204, 206, 208 Parenti, Michael, 253 Parikka, Jussi, 241, 246, 250, 252 Patel, Raj, 208 Peasant/peasantry, 95–112, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 133, 135n1, 135n2

Perren, Richard, 22, 23 Pesticide, 84–87, 165, 166, 171, 185, 196 Petromodernity, 220, 226 Phi ka, 130–134 Philip, Marlene Nourbese, 45 Phumisak, Jit, 123 Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, 8, 9, 194 Plantation, 3, 6, 7, 12–14, 43–60, 66–70, 72–84, 87, 88, 89n3, 141–159, 164–166, 168–172, 174, 177–179, 181, 182, 185, 187n6, 194, 199, 201, 202, 210 Platt, Martin B, 119, 123, 125, 126, 135n5 Plot, 6, 7, 44, 47, 68–70, 73, 74, 79, 81–83, 88, 119, 165, 176, 184, 186, 187n6, 200, 204, 215, 217, 223 Podruczna, Agnieszka, 253, 254 Postone, Moishe, 237, 239, 255n2 Privatization, 69, 71, 75 Pulido, Laura, 242 Q Quiroga, Horacio, 141–159 “El cultivo de la yerba mate,” 143, 147–149 “El oro vegetal,” 143, 145, 147, 149 “Los Mensú,” 143, 157 R Race, 43, 45, 48, 54, 55, 235–254 Racism, 54, 55 Rae, Caroline, 217, 224 Ramey, Lauri, 46 Realism/realist, 31, 118, 119, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 132, 134, 136n13, 216

 INDEX 

Reid, Julia, 29, 41n4 Revolution, 117–134, 218, 219 Rice, 117–134 Richards, Thomas, 28 Rickword, Edgell, 69 Rivera, Angel A, 193, 209 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 141–159 Chico-Coá, 142 El fiscal, 154 Hijo de hombre, 142, 143, 153, 154, 156 Rochester, Rachel, 249, 250 Rodney, Walter, 77, 89n6 Rodríguez, Ana Patricia, 167, 186n2 Rodríguez Alcalá, Hugo, 153 Rogers, Charlotte, 150 Rosenman, Ellen, 69 Royle, Nicholas, 31 Rudkin, David, 85, 86, 88 Afore Night Come, 85–87 Penda’s Fen, 88 White Lady, 86–88 S Saktina, 118, 120–127, 130, 134 Salt, H.S., 33, 37 Samuelson, Meg, 56, 60 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 201–203 Saowaphong, Seni, 118, 120–125 “Breeding Stock,” 118, 127, 128 “Dark Glasses,” 118, 129 Ghosts, 118, 120–125 “The Gold-Legged Frog,” 118, 126 Wanlaya’s Love, 125 Sarlo, Beatriz, 145 Science fiction, 253, 254, 254n1 Sci-fi, 195, 200, 204–209, 211n10 Scott, James, 121 Scott-Heron, Gil, 249 Senior, Olive, 46, 65, 88, 89, 164 “The Knot Garden,” 88

267

“Meditation on Yellow,” 164 “Seeing the Light,” 65 Serenity, 236 Severis, Rita, 104 Shahani, Gitanjali G., 8, 10, 60 Shapiro, Stephen, 6, 67, 166, 178 Sheller, Mimi, 3, 52–54 Shoard, Marion, 84, 88 Slavery, 43–51, 53, 56–60, 67, 72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 83 Smallwood, Stephanie, 56 Smith, Clark Ashton, 67 Socially necessary labour-time, 186n3 Soil, 194, 196 Soil degradation, 10 Soluri, John, 167, 169, 172, 173 Soylent Green, 250 Spence, Thomas, 74–76 Spillers, Hortense J., 56–58 Srinawk, Khamsing, 118, 123, 125–131, 134, 135n5 The Politician and Other Stories, 118, 125–130 Stearn, Michelle, 47 Stuart, Andrea, 52 Stubbs, Jonathan, 108, 112 Sturgeon, Noel, 247 Suburbanization, 242–244, 247 Sugar, 45, 48–55, 65, 66, 68, 72, 76, 77, 79, 83, 164, 165, 193, 194, 196–204, 210, 211n7 Sunlight Soap, 58, 59 Superweed effect, 238 Surrealism, 184 Szasz, Andrew, 243, 244 T Taussig, Michael, 168, 169 Thailand, 117–122, 124, 125, 128, 130, 134, 135n1, 135n3, 135n6, 136n13

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INDEX

Totality, 143, 157, 158 Toxic/toxicity/toxification, 165–174, 176, 180, 181, 185, 186, 187n3, 188n7 Trenkle, Norbert, 237 U Underdevelopment, 128, 133, 135n6 United Fruit Company (UFCO), 164 United States, 236–238, 240, 242–248, 251, 253, 255n5 V Varnava, Andrekos, 98, 102 Vegetarianism, 32, 33 W WALL-E, 236 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 4, 6 Waltham Blacks, 70, 71 Warwick Research Collective (WReC), 5, 6, 120, 175, 195, 218, 256n12 Waste, 237–239 Water scarcity, 200 Wedderburn, Robert, 74–76 Weird, 65–89 Weis, Tony, 68, 84 White flight, 235–254

White privilege, 236, 241, 251 Williams, Raymond, 7 Woods, Rebecca, 39 World-culture, 2–16 World-ecology, 25, 39, 40, 119, 120, 130, 158, 165, 186n3, 197, 218–220 World-economy, 4, 6, 13, 84 World-food-system, 2–16, 43–60, 65–89, 96, 97, 112, 135n2, 193–210 World literature, 2–16, 120, 195, 210n4 World system, 4–6, 10, 11, 24, 41n1, 84, 119, 120, 168, 187n4, 195, 210n4, 217, 236, 238, 239, 244, 247, 249, 252, 256n12 World War II (WWII), 96, 120, 122, 123, 125, 135n4 Wynter, Andrew, 37, 38 Wynter, Sylvia, 44, 68, 82, 165, 166, 182 Y Yeats, W.B., 153 Yerba mate, 141–159 Young, Rob, 85 Z Zombieland (dir. Ruben Fleischer), 193