This 2000 study examines the work of six influential authors of the colonial West Indies whose central metaphor is sugar.

In a neoliberal era, when the ideology of the free market governs community development as much as international trade, a conflict between capital and tradition is inevitable. Issues such as the value ascribed to honour and social prestige are difficult to negotiate with economic opportunity. Using the example of a 'traditional' Nepalese market town, Katharine Neilson Rankin explores how economic liberalization has blended with local cultures of value. Utilizing the ethnographic method of anthropology and the comparative and normative thrust of geography, Rankin undertakes a critique of neoliberal approaches to development. She demonstrates how market-led development does not expand opportunity, but rather deepens existing injustice and inequality, which is further exacerbated by planners – eager to implement market-led approaches – relying on naively idealistic notions of 'social capital' to expand poor people's access to the market. The Cultural Politics of Markets makes a clear case for a strategic merger between anthropological and planning perspectives in thinking about the issue of market transformation.

A study of the importance of debates about obeah, and state suppression of it, for Caribbean struggles about freedom and citizenship.

This book explores the articulation of white creole identity in Barbados during the age of abolitionism.

The Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Identity examines the social, cultural, and political processes that shape the experience of taste. The book positions flavor as involving all the senses, and describes the multiple ways in which taste becomes tied to local, translocal, glocal, and cosmopolitan politics of identity. Global case studies are included from Japan, China, India, Belize, Chile, Guatemala, the United States, France, Italy, Poland and Spain. Chapters examine local responses to industrialized food and the heritage industry, and look at how professional culinary practice has become foundational for local identities. The book also discusses the unfolding construction of “local taste” in the context of sociocultural developments, and addresses how cultural political divides are created between meat consumption and vegetarianism, innovation and tradition, heritage and social class, popular food and authenticity, and street and restaurant food. In addition, contributors discuss how different food products-such as kimchi, quinoa, and Soylent-have entered the international market of industrial and heritage foods, connecting different places and shaping taste and political identities.

This book considers mass media and contemporary cultural trends to examine masculinity at a point of unprecedented change. While sexual and gender politics have always been fraught, the long unexamined privilege associated with masculinity is now subject to intense scrutiny marked by a host of complex factors. As past markers of masculine norms have been challenged on cultural, social, and economic fronts, men occupy public space ever aware that how they interact with others is questioned and questionable. What does manhood mean? Who is included in its dominant formations? What performances signify membership in the club? How are men reading this contemporary moment and to what extent does cultural literacy inform, maintain, or challenge normative male identities and subsequent performances? This work examines such questions through language and symbolic meaning, and challenges its readers to critically examine what men know and how they understand and embody gender and sexuality in a post-millennial society. Gender, Sexuality, and the Cultural Politics of Men’s Identity in the New Millennium: Literacies of Masculinity crosses academic disciplines and will be highly relevant in composition/rhetoric, gender studies, masculinity studies, and cross-curricular courses that take up popular/contemporary culture as well as gender, sexuality, race, and class. It has been designed with both undergraduate and graduate students in mind.

Much of the writing on the post-9/11 period in the United States has focused on the role of "official" Government rhetoric about 9/11. Those who have focused on the news media have suggested that they played a key role in (re)defining the nation, allowing the citizenry to come to terms with 9/11, in providing ‘official’ understandings and interpretations of the event, and setting the terms for a geo-political-military response (the war on terror). However, strikingly absent from post-9/11 writing has been discussion on the role of sport in this moment. This text provides the first, book-length account, of the ways in which the sport media, in conjunction with a number of interested parties – sporting, state, corporate, philanthropic and military – operated with a seeming collective affinity to conjure up nation, to define nation and its citizenry, and, to demonize others. Through analysis of a variety of cultural products – film, children’s baseball, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, reality television – the book reveals how, in the post-9/11 moment, the sporting popular operated as a powerful and highly visible pedagogic weapon in the armory of the Bush Administration, operating to define ways of being American and thus occlude other ways of being.

Feminism and Empire establishes the foundational impact that Britain's position as leading imperial power had on the origins of modern western feminism. Based on extensive new research, this study exposes the intimate links between debates on the 'woman question' and the constitution of 'colonial discourse' in order to highlight the centrality of empire to white middle-class women's activism in Britain. The book begins by exploring the relationship between the construction of new knowledge about colonised others and the framing of debates on the 'woman question' among advocates of women's rights and their evangelical opponents. Moving on to examine white middle-class women's activism on imperial issues in Britain, topics include the anti-slavery boycott of Caribbean sugar, the campaign against widow-burning in colonial India, and women’s role in the foreign missionary movement prior to direct employment by the major missionary societies. Finally, Clare Midgley highlights how the organised feminist movement which emerged in the late 1850s linked promotion of female emigration to Britain's white settler colonies to a new ideal of independent English womanhood. This original work throws fascinating new light on the roots of later 'imperial feminism' and contemporary debates concerning women's rights in an era of globalisation and neo-imperialism.

The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.

Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica is among the first Slavery Studies books - and the first in Art History - to juxtapose temperate and tropical slavery. Charmaine A. Nelson explores the central role of geography and its racialized representation as landscape art in imperial conquest. One could easily assume that nineteenth-century Montreal and Jamaica were worlds apart, but through her astute examination of marine landscape art, the author re-connects these two significant British island colonies, sites of colonial ports with profound economic and military value. Through an analysis of prints, illustrated travel books, and maps, the author exposes the fallacy of their disconnection, arguing instead that the separation of these colonies was a retroactive fabrication designed in part to rid Canada of its deeply colonial history as an integral part of Britain's global trading network which enriched the motherland through extensive trade in crops produced by enslaved workers on tropical plantations. The first study to explore James Hakewill's Jamaican landscapes and William Clark's Antiguan genre studies in depth, it also examines the Montreal landscapes of artists including Thomas Davies, Robert Sproule, George Heriot and James Duncan. Breaking new ground, Nelson reveals how gender and race mediated the aesthetic and scientific access of such - mainly white, male - artists. She analyzes this moment of deep political crisis for British slave owners (between the end of the slave trade in 1807 and complete abolition in 1833) who employed visual culture to imagine spaces free of conflict and to alleviate their pervasive anxiety about slave resistance. Nelson explores how vision and cartographic knowledge translated into authority, which allowed colonizers to 'civilize' the terrains of the so-called New World, while belying the oppression of slavery and indigenous displacement.