The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism

Keith Sandiford’s The Cultural Politics of Sugar is a comparative study of six colonial texts from the West Indies dating from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. The focal point of the work is a term the author borrows from Richard Ligon’s 1657 History of Barbadoes, “sweete [sic] negotiation,” which describes the evolution of the economies of creolization and slavery and their relationship to sugar production in the Caribbean. At the heart of this negotiating process is a series of oscillating discursive strategies that Sandiford carefully brings to the surface, exemplifies, and expounds upon in each of the included texts.

Though the study is divided into extensively detailed chapter analyses, Sandiford successfully creates a textual reverberation among the texts in question, which affords the reader an all-encompassing view of the multiple discourses manifested. In other words, the texts are discussed individually but never in isolation from each other. This practice facilitates a qualified understanding of the critical terminology used, the issues presented, and the rhetorical devices employed by the writers of the respective accounts. Sandiford succeeds in tracing the development of these devices within their historical context as they relate to notions of identity, empire, desire, and power. In this way, the individual authors not only reveal cultural, racial, and economic agendas, but also personal ones.

The first chapter looks at the History of Barbadoes as a plan that articulates Ligon’s desire for a construction of a Creole class or community in Barbados. In his text, the term “sweete negotiation” refers to both a colonial and personal endeavor: while creolization develops as part of a dynamic and continual negotiation with the sugar culture, Ligon negotiates within the private sphere in order to reestablish dominion over his own threatened security as a refugee from his native Great Britain. Sugar and its production in this text are directly related to issues of desire, social formation, and migration as well as the slave corpus, all of which are encoded and serve pragmatic, idealist, or dialectical purposes.

Chapter two examines The Natural and Moral History of the Caribbean Islands (1666), Charles de Rochefort’s civilizing enterprise, as the lone narrative that incorporates an authentic Carib voice—but with the sole purpose of illustrating the necessity for French intervention in order to promote morality and sociability on the island. Rochefort’s “negotiating away the presence of one set of narrative objects in exchange for another” (53) is linked to the idea of collusion, whereby a “mythicized cultural union” between the French and the Indians attempts to minimize indigenous Otherness. This term, as Sandiford uses it, epitomizes the negotiating “power-play” (47) that weaves through the selected texts.

The third chapter considers the ongoing negotiations in Grainger’s 1764 georgic poem, “The Sugar Cane,” which fluctuate “between the desire for truth in representing the world of natural objects and the desire to exchange these natural constituents for economic and cultural value” (70). The poem, whose mythic construction sings the praises of sugar, is an allegory that encodes desire. Vìs-a-vís the fictional characters of Montano, Theana and Junio, Sandiford illustrates how Grainger attempts to enlighten his reader but simultaneously how the economies of sugar and slavery disrupt desire.

The fourth chapter probes Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality, written between 1774 and 1776. Schaw’s diary is not only of interest because of her status as the sole female writer included in Sandiford’s examination, but also because she “relegates sugar, slaves and creolization to values far subordinate to those ascribed them by the other authors of the study” (89). Like Rochefort, she sees the identity and empire of the colonizer (Scottish, in this case) as the conferrer of moral and social value on colonial life. But unlike Rochefort, she assigns slaves a marginal, if not non-existent, space on the page, opting to concentrate particularly on issues related to family and ethnicity in the social sphere of whites. Sandiford succinctly encapsulates Schaw’s writing as “a revisionist project whose objective is to reaffirm the interests and idealize the values of a colonial ruling class at a crucial moment in the history of the sugar plantation economies” (103). Though Schaw’s journal was not written with the intent to publish, its literary interest lies in the ethnic superiority of the Scots over the natives it purports.

Chapter five deals with William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, with Remarks Upon the Cultivation of the Sugar-Cane (1790) and its commentaries on the slave and sugar economies in Jamaica in the late eighteenth century. Though on the surface it appears that Beckford upholds an anti-slavery attitude, he actually works within a carefully constructed pro-slavery framework by affirming the African presence in Jamaica as a historical inevitability. Beckford uses painting and the picturesque as tools to underline sugar’s powerful and aesthetic powers, which create “a narrative myth of struggle, survival and cultural progress” (141) and ultimately function as a persuasion tactic to stimulate colonial passage to the island.

The last chapter of Sandiford’s study also centers on Jamaica: M.G. Lewis’s Journal of a West-India Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (published 1834). Here, Lewis finds himself caught up in the Romantic tendencies of the period, struggling “to mediate the disparate roles of slave-master, liberal aesthete and romantic idealist” (151). This text, the latest in terms of composition and publication, stands in contrast to the others in that the voice emerges from the Creole margin in order to critique Eurocentric propensity. In addition, slaves, not sugar, become his primary focus, and this priority inversion transforms Lewis’s own identity and consciousness. Though the text is laced with avant-garde undertones, the sublimity of Romanticism denies the text any possible reformatory function: “The Journal becomes the site on which Lewis’s revolutionary energies are displaced; those energies that could not be expressed in palpable historical action are thereby sublimated in a distinctive tendency of the romantic consciousness to privatize an aestheticized experience” (174).

Overall, Sandiford’s text is a fascinating study of colonial narratives, slavery in the Caribbean and processes of negotiation that define certain discourses. The theoretical underpinnings of the study are well developed and could be easily transferred and applied to other colonial texts that attempt to negotiate culture and power through raw materials or means of production. Though Sandiford’s style does not lend itself to a quick read, the time investment produces an enormous pay-off. His findings are solid, well researched and suggestive, which, at the very least, leaves a sweet aftertaste in the mouth of a patient and thorough reader.