11 - Postcolonial Tastes

Summary

Matters of cultivation, cuisine, and alimentary carnality constitute the very marrow of the material, aesthetic, and ethical cultures of empire and of postcoloniality; No history of modern empire can be thought without passing through the mouth, or through the question of consumption in general. This chapter showcases the alimentary longings, primarily but not solely for spices, sugar, and tea, that drove colonial expansion across the world, and the transformation of metropolitan palates and meals that resulted from this expansion. It examines the dialectic between metropolitan appetite and the production of deprivation in the colony, focusing in particular on slave hunger in plantations and on recurrent famine as one of the features of colonial rule and the market-driven order it institutes. It underlines the significance of hunger as a still resonant form of anti-imperial protest. Above all, it parses the ways in which postcolonial writers mobilize an ecology of alimentation to speak to experiences of colonialism, decolonisation, postcoloniality, and late capitalist globalisation.