Cacao and cascadura: Energetic consumption and production in world-ecological literature

Abstract

This article compares literary mediations of the world-historical movement of cacao frontiers across the American hemisphere, and contrasts the imagination of food as resource and resistance in literature from Pablo Antonio Cuadra in Nicaragua, Samuel Selvon in Trinidad, Jorge Amado in Brazil and Merle Collins in Grenada. Cacao is considered both in terms of the energy required for its production, and as a high-calorie source of energetic consumption itself. The article’s aims are twofold: to survey key aesthetic and thematic concerns of the “literature of cacao”, particularly its tendency towards irrealism when mediating frontier violence; and, to explore how literary critiques of cacao extractivism are counterposed to representations of vernacular foodways and social reproduction. The article concludes that the aesthetics of provision foods are symbolically freighted, represented as “resourceful” modes of agriculture that repudiate the undervaluing of human and extra-human work in plantation monoculture.

Keywords:

• Latin America
• Caribbean
• world literature
• literature of cacao
• irrealism
• comparative literary studies
• world-ecology
• foodways
• plantation