Virtual
The Barnard Center for Research on Women presents a book salon with Kim F. Hall, in conversation with Patricia A. Matthew, Debapriya Sarkar, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and Jennifer Morgan, moderated by Tapiwa Gambura.
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim F. Hall’s forthcoming book The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025) centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure. Hall explores how the unique emphasis the English placed on confections as a marker of status and national identity in the seventeenth century offers a framework for grappling with changing notions of race, gender, labor, and domesticity that shaped early colonization. Drawing from a wide range of early Anglo-Caribbean texts—from cookbooks and banquet menus to economic poetry, to maps and treatises on plantation labor and health—Hall uncovers colonial discourses deployed across representations of Caribbean colonization and slavery. Working across the fields of Early Modern, Critical Race, and Food Studies, Hall offers us the language of plantation aesthetics in order to expose the violence ingrained in sugar that is made to disappear through the pleasure derived from whiteness, purity, and perfection.
This event is free, open to the public, and will stream online on BCRW’s YouTube page. ASL interpretation and live transcription will be provided. Get tickets HERE.
