Jennifer P. Nesbitt (Penn State York)
Rum is not just any intoxicant: it is the one most prominently associated with the international slave trade and the colonization of the Caribbean Basin. In literature, rum’s historical role and its psychosocial effects have rendered it a potent symbol for the vexed psychological, social, and economic legacy of colonization. Insights from commodity chain analysis generate new ways to track and reflect on latent connections among literary texts often considered geographically and topically distant from each other. For example, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1954 novel The Flint Anchor appears to be a British family saga, but the protagonist blames the family’s downfall in Caribbean rum. How does this use of rum in “British literature” square with the way rum appears to wreck the paradisal childhood depicted in Joseph Zobel’s Black Shack Alley (La rue cases-nègres, 1974), which is set in the cane-fields? How do these assertions of rum’s effects underscore Michelle Cliff’s discussion of tourism in No Telephone to Heaven (1987) or the analysis of rum marketing in Janwillem van de Wetering’s detective novel Tumbleweed (Buitelkruis, 1976)? By attending to the ways writers located in various literary fields represent rum, we develop conversations about the force of “post” colonial ideology in framing, limiting, or discounting interpretations. Telling rum (hi)stories together rather than apart creolizes literary interpretation, allowing readers to piece together narratives of colonialism that breach academic divisions of literature.
In Caribbean literatures, rum is simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible: it’s the Caribbean, one might argue, what other alcohol would there be? This apparently transparent bit of set dressing, however, has a long back story, and I argue that insisting that this back story be read into scenes containing rum—in whatever literary work they occur—opens alternative, more inclusive, readings of the ways colonial ideologies have plotted, and continue to plot, the stories we tell each other.
In Caribbean literatures, rum is simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible: it’s the Caribbean, one might argue, what other alcohol would there be? This apparently transparent bit of set dressing, however, has a long back story, and I argue that insisting that this back story be read into scenes containing rum—in whatever literary work they occur—opens alternative, more inclusive, readings of the ways colonial ideologies have plotted, and continue to plot, the stories we tell each other.
