Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar

Apparently innocuous, sugar is a substance bringing with it a profound disquiet, not least because of its links with the histories of slavery in the New World. This meticulously researched new book explores the ways in which the commodity has been represented in a series of literary texts ranging from the mid-1760s, when the transatlantic slave trade was at its height, to the postcolonial era, in which sugar is revisited and re-imagined by a variety of expatriate black Caribbean writers, including Grace Nichols, David Dabydeen, Caryl Phillips and Austin Clarke. What are the relationships between white and black saccharographies and how, in particular, do black writers exploit and revise the white tradition? To what extent can the production of sugar itself provide a language for conceptualizing literary production? Do male and female writers portray sugar differently and in what ways? As it addresses these questions, Slaves to Sweetness offers the most comprehensive account to date of the historical transformations which sugar's image has undergone, constituting a rich resource for scholars in Slavery, Caribbean, Black Atlantic, Postcolonial and Literary Studies.