Literature’s Bitter, Bitter Commodity
from Part III - Applications
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2025
Sugar as an industrial commodity has featured in colonial as well as postcolonial literary texts. On the one hand, it stimulates desire and, on the other, it induces terror and abjection. Its status as an object of desire hinges on colonial modes of surplus accumulation as celebrated by its literary apologists. It serves as the muse of plantation capital precisely because its global demand generates revenue for those invested in the expropriating instruments of Empire. The imagination of the postcolonial writer, in contrast, represents sugar as an exceptionally bitter commodity. For it speaks to a harrowing history of abduction, deceit, transportation, drudgery, degradation, murder, insanity, rape and penury. It denatures nature, ecologically, and dehumanizes humans, physically as well as psychically. It gives birth to a grotesque and unnerving disorder. This chapters discusses literary texts from Oceania and the Caribbean that revolve around sugar—a commodity implicated in slavery and indentured servitude.
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