The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (review)

The Cultural Politics of Sugar explores the relation between literary and sugar production in French and British writing of the long eighteenth century. Literary Critic Keith Sandiford offers his notion of “sweete negotiation,” a phrase he borrows from the Roundhead author Richard Ligon, as the characteristic rhetoric by which colonial engagement in the Caribbean was discussed. The introduction to the work states Sandiford’s claim to locate “an earlier onset” of Creole identity (21). In the works of Ligon, Charles de Rochefort, James Grainger, Janet Schaw, William Beckford, and Matthew “Monk” Lewis, Sandiford uncovers a recurring and unsurprising complacency about the profit-driven violence of sugar cultivation. The epic poem “The Sugar Cane,” by the mid-eighteenth century botanist and would-be planter Grainger, is an illustrative case of merged literary and colonial ambitions, against which the career of Lewis, Parliamentary reformer and heir to two West Indian plantations, can be opposed. Sandiford concludes with Lewis as the “consummate subject” of colonial identity epitomizing negotiation (177) because his actual efforts to improve slave life did not actually end it.

The strength of this study is its formal, historical, and geographical breadth. The archipelagic reach of these writers encompasses Barbados, St. Christopher (St. Kitts), Antigua, and Jamaica, and extends from seventeenth century France and Britain to the abolition and sugar boycott movements of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These authors’ experiences are refracted through English, Scottish, and French nationality, and appear in a variety of literary forms, including travel narratives, histories, and instructional treatises. Sandiford studiously situates the texts within the authors’ literary and social ambition, such as is explicit in the self-congratulatory title of Schaw’s memoir of her visit to St. Christopher, Journal of a Lady of Quality . He maps the constant cultural relays between colony and metropole in which such distinctions were visible. Schaw, for example, who was a product of the heady Edinburgh intellectual climate, intriguingly saw no relation between her fanciful comparisons of the Caribbean islands to the Scottish Highlands, whose picturesqueness resulted from the acts of enclosure conducted by England to consolidate dominion in Scotland. Nor does Schaw see the irony in her perception of the starving Highland immigrants, then aboard her ship in hopes of finding employment in the slaveholding islands, as Negroes. Sandiford provides a valuable service in uncovering these writers. These authors detail the industry that enriches the Bertram family in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, a novel that Edward Said famously indicted for neglecting to describe the circumstances of the Bertrams’ Antiguan fortune ( Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf, 1993). This difference between Austen’s canonical status and these authors’ relative anonymity begs the question as why the literary ambitions of these West Indian writers failed.

The Cultural Politics of Sugar is both amateurish and tendentious. Sandiford uses a jargon-laden style whose excessive preparatory commentary invariably takes longer than the ideas it promises deserve (e.g., “In pursuit of its design for a culture study, this book will deploy the complex negotium of Ligon’s early conception as a theoretical instrument with which to derive a collective cultural meaning; which might serve as a foundational and diachronic principle of these six texts” 5). Similarly, his unoriginal approach and superficial engagement with texts is evident in Sandiford’s tendency to quote well-known secondary texts, and discuss his consultation of the Dictionary of National Biography, while rarely excerpting the relatively unknown authors of whom he owes a reading. The conventions of writing about the Caribbean that Sandiford recognizes are also under-theorized. Although he notes recurring topics and approaches among his writers, Sandiford fails to consider their writing as subject to the same elements the works represent. Sandiford is justified, for example, in noting that the plantation is a complex system of land and labor that is aptly represented in a blend of the literary traditions of georgic and topographical description, but he also overlooks the eighteenth century culture of rationalization upon which plantations depended...