Bradley’s paper takes manioc (cassava, yuca) as a prism through which to interpret tensions between the colonial plantation’s devaluation of life and configurations of the living sustained by Indigenous, African, and Afro-Caribbean cosmologies. Considered a gift from a supreme creator by some first peoples of the Americas, manioc was transported from Brazil to Central Africa to provision captives over the Middle Passage, and became a pillar of plantation subsistence in France’s sugar-producing colonies. Yet from the earliest moments of European incursion in the Caribbean, those with knowledge of the plant’s biochemical and morphological traits—toxic cyanogenic compounds, rhizomatous reproduction—employed it to evade and undermine conquest, capture, and commodification. Unearthing visual and textual traces of cultivation and transformation in natural histories, botanical archives, and plantation records, this paper centers sensory encounters between humans and plants deemed subordinate to the production of commodity monocultures. From the flour refineries of Martinique to the mountain refuges of fugitives in Saint-Domingue, Bradley theorizse how a starch storage organ’s materiality shaped ways of being human beyond the logics of colonial Man. By foregrounding forms of relationality that resisted plantation extraction, Bradley traces decolonial genealogies of opposition to “colonial inhabitation”. The paper also reflects on how attunement to subsistence plant life compels a confrontation with the artificial, instrumental creation of categories of “nature” and “race” while amplifying grounded, resistant modes of mutuality.
Gutiérrez Flores explores an understudied aspect of the cultural history of chocolate: its association with Blackness. From Spain’s Conguitos, and Mexico’s Negritos, to Colombia’s besos de negra and Belgium’s violently disturbing chocolate hands, the association of chocolate with Blackness is a metaphor of global scale in popular culture, almost as pervasive as the consumption of chocolate itself. Taking on a trans-historical angle and examining literary texts, visual culture and historical records, my paper asks: How did chocolate become a racial signifier of Blackness? To what extent can we trace the antecedents of this association to the early modern world? How did the involvement of African and Afro-descendants in the chocolate trade shape this metaphor? And, crucially, how did their participation as food-makers unsettle early modern narratives of racialization? Building upon recent work on the representation of Black subjects in baroque literary culture (Jones, Ndiaye), I argue that Blackness was imagined as a consumable commodity through a metaphorical link conflating skin with cacao. Ultimately, this presentation seeks to understand the role of food in shaping racial imaginaries.
Sánchez Prado studies role of maíz criollo (Mesoamerican heirloom corn) in Mexican resistance to U.S. imperialism. Existing bibliography has focused on social mobilization against agrobusiness (Erica Simmons, Lauren Baker), the metabolics of NAFTA capitalism and neoliberalism (Alyshia Gálvez, Gerardo Otero) and the deconstruction of the biotechonology/heirloom binary (Gabriela Méndez-Cota). Building on these, his discussion of maíz criollo seeks a theoretical intersection between the intimate co-evolution of Mesoamerican peoples with maize and the aesthetics materiality of heirloom corn in neoliberalism. Informed by the idea of the Baroque ethos as mediation of capitalism (Bolívar Echeverría) and the materialist practices of neoliberalism from below (Verónica Gago), the essay studies the biocultural forms of life tied to maize, both historically and in the present, as well as the ways in which material practices of trade, cuisine and gastronomy offer fraught spaces of resistance to agricultural imperialism. Discussion is centered on literary works by the poet Armando Alanís Pulido and the novelist Francesca Gargallo.