2017 Margaret Church MFS Memorial Prize

The Editors, in consultation with the members of the Purdue Advisory Board, are pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 Margaret Church Memorial Prize for the best essay to appear in MFS. The Church Prize was established in 1984 in memory of Dr. Church, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University and a longtime editor of this journal.

The winner for 2017 is Catherine Keyser, author of “Candy Boys and Chocolate Factories: Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry,” which appeared in volume 63, issue 3 (pages 403-28).

Keyser’s erudite reading of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory blends textual scholarship with critical race studies, as well as a historicized sense of the global processes of chocolate production. Keyser discovers in an early manuscript, “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy,” that Dahl conceives of Charlie as black. Subsequent drafts find the Oompa-Loompas to be African pygmies whose cuteness seems to justify their forced labor and, ultimately, white supremacy. Keyser uses these earlier drafts to shed light on the published novel, suggesting that there are parallels between racialized labor and childhood vulnerability that gesture to the hidden child labor within the chocolate industry.

Professor Keyser received $300 and a certificate, a copy of which appears here.